Embers.
Confused me for a second, too, as I don’t normally think of embers as “red things.” They’re just the small, smoldering bits of (orange) fire.
Gotcha. I thought it was a reference to something they put in the fire to get it roaring.
In a restaurant and overheard a woman at the next table explaining the difference between shepherd’s pie and steak pie, “the sheep are the females and the goats are the males.”
I assumed it was road flares. They’ll get a fire going.
I’ve got two to contribute to this thread.
I was working in an office, had my own office that adjoined the main reception area where two other employees shared space. If my door was open, I could overhear their conversations.
The receptionist, a known dummy, was chatting with the office manager. The office manager was expressing her frustration at the difficulties she was experiencing to obtain a social security number for her son, who had been born in England. The receptionist responded with sympathy: “Oh, I know just what you mean. I went through the same thing with my son. He was born in Hawaii.” The silence that ensued in response made me glad I was out of sight of the receptionist, I was laughing so hard.
Another time, a close friend brought friends of hers (a mother and her son) to visit our place. I always kept chickens, and they were often prolific layers. I gave away a lot of eggs. I offered a dozen each to my friend and her friend. Her friend demurred, graciously saying, “Oh. No thanks. We only eat eggs that don’t come from chickens.”
Until the day arrived that I stopped keeping chickens and giving my friend eggs, my friend would ask, “These don’t come from chickens, do they?” It never got old.
I’ve read and re-read your post a few times. Am I missing something? What’s stupid about that conversation? That a couple of random teenagers didn’t randomly know what happened to a moderately popular band a decade before?
I took it as @Shoeless thought the teens thought Lynyrd and Skynyrd were the two principals. Like Hall and Oates or the Captain and Tenille.
I just took it as people who didn’t know much about Lynyrd Skynyrd. If that conversation happened between two teenaged guys today, it’d be no more remarkable than teenaged me, in 1980, not knowing how Glenn Miller died. But as @Shoeless relates it, ~35 years ago, one might expect the information about the plane crash which killed half the group would be more well-known.
To the best of my recollection, I don’t think teenaged me in the mid-80s knew anything about Lynyrd Skynyrd beyond being vaguely aware of them as a 60s-70s-ish Southern rock group. If I had been involved in a conversation about them at the time, apparently it would have been a very stupid one.
The plane crash is news to me. (I was born in '83.) It reminded me immediately of the time I was in Home Depot wearing a Green Day shirt from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The youthful cashier said, “I like your shirt. Who is Green Day? Are they like one of those new European bands?”
Not that I was ever cool to begin with, but definitely one of my first “holy crap, I’m old” moments.
I knew a few of their songs growing up, but I didn’t know diddly about how big their band was or about the crash. I was born in '62.
I shared this in another thread, and it wasn’t exactly overheard since it was a guy interviewed on the news. It was Florida in the summer during a record heat wave, and he was explaining how it was even worse for him because he was a roofer and he worked closer to the sun than the rest of us…
I’m 25 years older than you are.
Who is/was Green Day?
Punk / alt-rock band, primarily popular in the '90s and early '00s, though they are still around today. It’s possible that you’ve heard one or two of their songs – if so, it’d most likely have been “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” or “Holiday.”
Or “Basket Case.” Or “Longview.” Or “Welcome to Paradise.” The vast majority of Millennials know Green Day. Whether they liked them or not, they were everywhere in the early 90s and then had a resurgence in 2004. One of my favorite bands, hence the t-shirt. (My other Hall of Fame shirt was Rush. That would have really blown her mind! But hell, I’d never heard of Rush until I was 23.)
Young woman sitting behind me on BART in San Francisco: “I went to an astrologer last week for a personality test, and it was like hella accurate.” Really, the more memorable thing about that conversation wasn’t the fact that she believed in astrology, but that she managed to use the word “hella” in literally every sentence. (Not that using slang like hella is stupid, that was the astrology).
Overheard at my old job, commenting on the company’s annual charitable giving campaign: “Charitable giving? I already pay taxes. Why should I give to charity, too?”
Couple sitting behind me on an Amtrak train as we passed an oil refinery in Martinez, CA:
Man: “I wonder what that place is?”
Woman: “It looks like an oil refinery.”
Man: “No, not in California.”
(Yes, there really are oil refineries in California, despite the stereotypes you may have heard about the state)
They also guest starred on both King of the Hill and The Simpsons, which to my mind seems to be the pinnacle of stardom.
I grew up in SoCal and you could see oil well donkey pumps scattered here and there in my hometown. Many of them are still nodding today.
We may have a winner here.