I still instinctively hear “I drink your milkshake!” in Borat’s voice (“I drrrreenk your meelkshake!”) because I assumed the first time I saw it that it was a line from Borat.
I’m not sure if you’re joking, but that joke is from an incident in 1940, and was a common schtick in Youngman’s routine maybe 70 years ago. So no, that’s not the most salient cultural reference for most people.
I’m sure a poll of Dopers would show Henny Youngman is more recognizable than Borat here. But that’s because the Dope is a very skewed sample, not because Randall is wrong.
There is also Monthy Python’s wife swapping sketch.
- I was here on saturday getting married to a blond girl and I’d like to change please, I would like to get married to this one instead, please.
I, also, have never seen Bordt, and never intend to, and my first referent was also “Please, take my wife”. I’ve never actually seen the comedy bit that came from, either, but I’ve seen countless parodies.
Same, and i know who Borat is, and didn’t even recognize the name of the comedian. (And thought it was attributed to someone else, who had a show locally about 5 years ago.) That saying was a meme for decades.
“Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We’re putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out.”
It’s a legit point that all “common sense” experience of ordinary humans is at the bottom of a gravity well and the bottom of an atmosphere. With occasional forays into the top of a water column.
All of which are very rare and unusual circumstances in the universe at large. Which leads to all sorts of failures of intuition about that larger universe. That’s where nice folks like @Chronos earn their crust teaching kids all the ways their intuition is wrong.
Imagine how much fun it would be correcting intuition if we lived on a body that rotated fast enough that Coriolis effects would affect ordinary daily life.
Like to throw a baseball from one base to the next you had to aim well left or right. Depending on the orientation of the baseline to the direction of planetary rotation. So each of the 4 possible base-to-next-base throws needed different offsets left or right. Cross-diamond throws would be different yet again. As would be all the offsets needed in ballparks at different latitudes. Or at the same latitude but different orientation to the cardinal directions. Decent bet pro parks would be standardized so e.g. the pitcher’s mound to home plate line is due East to take Coriolis out of pitching at least.
We’re already used to having to aim up to account for gravity, but at least that’s uniform (enough) in intensity and direction worldwide.
The only thing more contorted than Coriolis-infested baseball would be the flerther’s attempts to reconcile Coriolis’ actual behavior to how it’d work on their discworld model.
One big one is that we live in an environment dominated by friction. As a result we intuitively measure “how hard to get to” in terms of distance. In space “how hard to get to” is dominated by delta-V, velocity change. Something a million kilometers away in space can be easier to get to than the miniscule distance between the Earth’s surface and low Earth orbit.
Like any of the fictional settings aboard large rotating space habitats.
For some reason, although I certainly never saw the Borat movie (and am certainly old enough to be familiar with the Henny Youngman bit), I had exactly the reaction that Randall anticipated - I heard “my wife” in Borat’s voice.