This is kinda linked to the Cultural Lit Movie quiz. Can you remember something someone has been unaware of that just made your jaw drop?
I recall a receptionist at work—an intelligent, 20-something, native New Yorker—who said, “who’s that?” when Andy Warhol and Marlene Dietrich died. How can someone NEVER HAVE HEARD OF Andy Warhol or Marlene Dietrich?! I mean, I don’t like opera, but I know who Maria Callas was! I don’t like baseball, but I’ve heard of Babe Ruth!
Ronald Reagan had never heard of R. Buckminster Fuller, and he was president. (Reagan was, that is. Fuller wasn’t president. But, you knew that, right?)
<P ALIGN=“CENTER”> Tris </P> <HR>
The ancient Chinese proverb says, “Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.” I have never understood why these options are considered mutually exclusive.
My boss was going to Paris for the first time and asked me for some suggestions on what to see. He didn’t know what Versailles was. My tip about the Treaty of Versailles did not help. Oh well.
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
I work with a 30 year old lady who is about as sharp as a dull marble. She didn’t realize that there were cosmonauts and astronauts both aboard the Mir at the same time before it was abandoned (that we were cooperating with the Ruskies, in other words). When the supply shuttle poked a hole in it a couple years ago, she didn’t understand why Americans were concerned about it.
When my wife and I first started dating in high school, she didn’t know what Woodstock was. Granted, her parents house was pretty sheltered from the scary evils of the world, but that caught me completely off guard.
She initially thought I was referencing the Woodstock of Peanuts fame.
Have you voted for your favorite, huggable Mullinator today?
After exiting the DC Metro at the Smithsonian, two teenage girls asked me where the mall was. I explained that The Mall was the large grassy area between the museums, not a shopping mall. :rolleyes:
Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone - a father, a brother, a God - and asks, “Why am I here? What was I meant to be?”
Add another intelligent (I like to think so), 20-something (23 to be exact) who never heard of Marlene Dietrich. I know who Andy Warhol is. I just don’t get his comedy, though
I was driving down the Grand Concourse and pointed out Poe house, situated in a small green area, to a passenger in my car.
The passenger asked “Edgar Allen Poe used to live in the middle of a park?”
My (ex) sister-in-law thought the astronauts still splashed down in the ocean from the space shuttle; we live in Florida and from time-to-time, there is a sonic boom when the shuttle lands but she had no idea what that “loud noise was.”
OK, Stevie, I’m not even gonna touch that crack about Andy Warhol’s comedy. But if you wanna find out about the great Marlene, log onto http://www.marlene.com/ and knock yerself out.
When I was in law school, my roommate (also a law student) came home one day in 1994 and said she was confused about all this stuff in the news about the election for president of South Africa, because how could there be just one president for all of the south part of Africa?
When I explained that South Africa isn’t like “north Africa” but is the name of a country, she asked me what the big deal was about the election. I said that it was the first election in which black people were allowed to vote. She wanted to know who’d been voting up until then, if not black people.
This woman had no clue that South Africa was controlled by the white minority (or, for that matter, that there were white people living there). She’d never heard the term “apartheid.” I was stunned.
