My lack of knowledge regarding sports is the subject of much mirth at work. They call me The Boy in the Plastic Bubble because I miss almost all references. A few years ago, my coworkers were astonished that I didn’t know our local team was in the World Series. (I didn’t even know it was happening). So my title was upgraded to The Boy in the Titanium Sphere. :rolleyes:
When people (or the news) talk about sports, I just hear the “wonka-wonk” sound that adults make in the Charlie Brown cartoons. I’ve really really tried to develop an interest and follow along, but the concept of being entertained by watching other people play with a ball completely eludes me.
The other day a co-worker was describing a nervous trip into the boonies, and I asked “Were you hearing banjo music?”. Blank stares. They’d never heard of the movie “Deliverance”.
This isn’t really the topic, but the roommate should have said whom, and the use of “we” when referring to actions taken by the government (or revolutionaries, many generations before this roommate) is actually more than a trivial error. If you can’t mentally separate yourself from the ruling class, won’t you always fall into line?
I’m getting a little agitated at reading most of these displays of ignorance, no matter the topic. Of course, some are more serious than others, which brings me to this…
Back in the fall, I was watching the very funny film In the Loop. The lady with whom I was watching the film was 32, intelligent, well-educated, etc. There’s a bit of dialogue that goes like this, in which two young foreign-policy apparatchiks, one from the US and one from the UK, are antagonistically discussing a memo:
US: We thought about using the font the SS used, but that had negative connotations.
UK: Heavy metal?
US: No, the SS.
She asked to re-watch that scene, two more times. She still didn’t get it. She didn’t know who the SS were, nor that sinister-looking fonts were sometimes used by heavy metal bands.
Similarly, at one point I mentioned the obvious implications of the scenes in Fight Club in which the characters use human fat (from liposuction) to make soap. She didn’t know the Nazis had done that.
Maybe it’s worse when people can’t be bothered to metaphorically clean up their own yard. I had a middle-school teacher in the mid-1990s who, while usually good at what he did, remarked that in American history, he was really only particularly ashamed (though maybe I’m getting his words wrong; that would make a big difference) of slavery and the Trail of Tears.
I had to learn, on my own, about so much more, like, say, the destruction of Cambodia, engineered by Henry “anything that flies on anything that moves” Kissinger, who once said that he couldn’t spend the holidays with his relatives because they had been turned into soap.
::Raises hand:: I’m one of those people. I get Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, et al confused and was somewhat unaware of their place in pop culture until about six year ago. I didn’t know what “freebird” was until four years ago. (I’m 30, so it’s not like I was alive when it was first produced.) Apparently this part of music history completely missed me, as I’m familiar with other aspects of late 1960s and 1970s music in addition to other eras before and after the time period when the above bands were popular.
Not someone I met personally, but in 1999, my sister worked for a few months with a 20 year old from Appalachia who had never heard of Michael Jackson.
I dislike watching sports intensely - about the only sport I will watch is the equestrian parts of the Olympics. I was an athlete when young before my body trashed out and I would much rather play the sport than watch the sport.
And as for gamers - many MMORPG players specialize in one MMORPG at a time. Platform players [Nintendo etc] tend to play multiple games. PC offline gamers can play multiple games. Most MMORPG players play one game because when you load in a raid schedule and guild required events there really is not much time left over to do more than one game at that level of intensity though you can dabble at Minecraft or something less involved at the same time.
[Afterlife, one of the top Everquest 1 guilds had literally a 4 hour per day/8+ hours on weekends guild schedule. If you couldn’t dedicate that type of time, you didn’t get into the guild.]
Nor have I. I am deaf to much of pop culture. I don’t watch sitcoms or other TV (except certain sports). But I never thought LOTR was pop culture–I think it is more high culture. I watched each of the movies twice when they came out and recently watched all three again, in anticipation of the Hobbit. I am also a great fan of Harry Potter.
My friends and I play Who Am I whenever we have to wait for something. We’ve been doing it for years, so it gets fairly out there: Deep Blue, the constellation Orion, that sort of thing. One time a friend had a new girlfriend, so to be nice we start off with easy ones. We give her Justin Bieber. She’d never heard of him, which is fair enough and honestly only earns you points. And she grew up in Africa (different countries), maybe he isn’t famous there?
So the next one we discuss who we can give her that she will 100% know. A historical figure… who does everyone know…? Julius Caesar. - Never heard of him. She. Had. Never. Heard. Of. Julius. Caesar.
Well, we just stopped playing then. I didn’t even know what to say… Never heard of Julius Caesar…
(She was a biologist, could hold an intelligent conversation. She said she only learned about African history at school, and I just couldn’t bring myself to point out to her that that should probably include Julius Caesar.)
I’ve taught high school for 15+ years, and in a class of about 30 eleventh graders there will usually be only one or two who know who Neil Armstrong is.
Hell, I married a guy who hasn’t seen any of the Star Wars movies, or any of the Indiana Jones movies. Or the LoTR trilogy for that matter. They just aren’t the sort of movies he’s interested in. I did persuade him to sit through a few scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and he humoured me, but only for a few scenes. Just not interested in that sort of thing and honestly, I don’t think it’s that big a deal, since everyone has different interests.
Now, someone not knowing about the Holocaust, or the SS or something that is such a big deal on a global scale would shock me. Or something that had a big impact on their local area. Or a big gap missing from their surroundings (like not knowing a state in your own country for example). But something for a genre they aren’t interested in? Nope, not surprising at all.
