Years being- three. Other than things like the beetle and the odd Volvo, most detroit iron didnt last much more than three to five. In our local paper, there was an article about a man whose odometer clicked over to 100,000!
Sheee-it. 2 of the 3 Nissan pickups I’ve owned had over 200K on their odometers when I traded them in for a newer model. Not “Detroit iron” I’ll grant you. Nobody thought that was exceptional.
I had a BMW 2002 built in '75. It took leaded gas and I had no trouble finding it into the '80s. But I read about what the lead was doing to the air, and just stopped using it (a Bimmer forum suggested you could try using a high octane instead).
So my car was partly responsible for creepy actors taking off their co-star’s pants.
I started watching the show Baskets on Hulu recently. It took me until the final episode of Season 1 before I realized the twin brothers, both played by Zach Galifianakis, are named Chip and Dale, like the Disney cartoon chipmunks.
Jeez, I just heard Backfield in Motion. It was just a football term that I never thought about even for a second, obviously.
No, not rapey. He took her home so she wasn’t raped by someone. He considerately took her clothes off to make her more comfortable rather than putting her in bed in her tight, nice dress and shoes and whatnot. Then, because he has no ill intentions, he lies down next to her because it’s his bed and he wants to sleep.
No, what’s rapey is “Switch” from 1992, where Ellen Barkin plays a womanizer who is murdered and sent back to Earth by God as a woman. In that movie, Jimmy Smits is the guy’s best friend, but doesn’t know about the switch. So she gets drunk, he takes her home and strips her and puts her to bed, and does have sex with her. And the outcome? She gets pregnant and has the baby. And it’s just like “oh that was rude” not “I’m calling the cops you Rapey McRapeface Bastard”.
Try “Revenge of the Nerds” (1984), where the aforementioned nerds flip the tables on the jocks that normally pick on them. And the big gimmick is they trick the cheerleaders into thinking they are the jocks and have sex with them. And that’s “Ha Ha the Nerds win!”
The '70s was sort of a weird cultural period where free love hippie ideas were mixing with women’s lib and sexual revolution to explore ideas about what was acceptable sexually. There was also the idea of “boys being boys” about sexual aggression with “Porky’s” and the like. This rolled into the '80s and such fun premises as “Weird Science”, where the nerds program a supercomputer and create “the perfect woman” for their personal sex slave. Except she doesn’t comply.
I remember old (say, 1960s and earlier) TV shows and movies where undressing the woman and putting her in bed wasn’t unusual. It really creeped me out.
I think it’s also a reflection of patriarchy, where men are supposed to take care of the women. So taking them home and taking off their clothes and putting them safely to bed is just being a proper man taking care of a woman in need.
After many years of hearing/ singing along with Billy Joel’s Allentown, I just noticed in the closing verse the contrast of the lines about keeping a man down and the narrator, who won’t be getting up
“… Well I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down
But I won’t be getting up today . . .”
I just realized yesterday that the CNN program Morning Joe isn’t just called that because that’s the host’s name, but rather it’s a play on the slang term for coffee. 
I was listening to the radio adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth for the 1950s series X Minus Oneand I caught that the title of one of Rhysling’s songs was “Death Song of a Woods Colt”, which I immediately recognized as one of the works Jubal Harshaw composes in Stranger in a Strange Land. I somehow missed it in my readings of GHoE and previous times I’d listened to this recording. I ought to have caught it long ago – I read SiaSL before I read GHoE, but somehow it never registered.
It suggests a connection between SiaSL and Heinlein’s “Future History” SiaSK already seems to be connected with the Heinlein Juvenile Red Planet, and the juveniles sometimes appear to be connected to the Future History and sometimes not.
Or it could simply be a coincidence that both works feature a poem with the same title.
I never heard “Wood’s Colt” outside this connection. Apparently it directly refers to a horse born of parents not intentionally mated, who met “in the woods”, as it were. By extension, it can also refer to an out-of-wedlock human child. It’s sort of an Ozarkism. The dramatization makes Rhysling an Ozark native.
Some of the juvies are definitely Future History, and some are not. For instance, Space Cadet is absolutely, definitely, in the same continuity as “The Long Watch”, because John Ezra Dalquist, protagonist of the short story, is one of the Four who are always included in any roll call of the Patrol.
Then again, some of the Future History stories are definitely not part of the Future History. “We Also Walk Dogs”, despite being published in The Past through Tomorrow, clearly doesn’t fit with the others: If it were, the gravtech would have been invented by Libby, and the company would have been owned by Harriman.
Not really an “obvious” thing (unless you live in Chicago), but I always assumed the Jackson Park Express was just a fictional bus route Weird Al made up for his song of the same name. But while planning my upcoming trip to Chicago, I just learned that that’s a real bus in that city. It’s one of the possible buses I could use to get to the Museum of Science and Industry, which is located in… Jackson Park.
More than two decades after the first Harry Potter book was published, I realized that “Hogwarts” is “warthogs” with the syllables (almost) switched.
There is (or was) a bus route in Seattle named “Jackson Park, Express”.
Early in “This Is Spinal Tap,” they are read a review of one of their albums which includes,
“The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.”
It wasn’t until much later that I realized just how spot-on this review was.
I found out today that David Gilmour was instrumental (ha!) in the early career of Kate Bush - paying for the 16-year-old to record her demo tape, then pushing it to her eventual label, EMI.
The Wikipedia entry for Hogwarts offers several other possible sources, but it could be that several things unconsciously caused Rowling to use the name.
on the PBS kids’ cartoon Arthur, the kids were all obsessed with a fantasy book series about magic that was taught at a school named :“Pigblisters”
Here’s one going old-school. The story of Cain and Abel isn’t about two individuals. It’s about the expanding boundaries of civilization marginalizing nomadic peoples. As written by a nomadic people.