I really like the TV Lessons I've Learned thread. But I'm constantly reminded of relevant, useful information I learned from watching tv. And not stuff like learning the alphbet from Sesame Street or current events from the news. But rather things you learned while watching non educational or informative shows.

I remember there was an episode of Who's The Boss where Tony was telling Billy (that little boy with the weird voice who lived there for a while) to put his scarf in his jacket sleeve so he doesn't lose it when he takes them off. 15 years later, I've started wearing a scarf, and I do that every time I take it off. It actually is a pretty good tip.

Similarly, when I got my first full time job, I started depositing 10% of my paychecks into a savings account, like Ross and Monica's Dad had told them on Friends. I don't do that anymore because I'm poor, but at the time, and had saved like $1500.

Also, when I was about 10, I remember learning about the Hypotenuse of a right triangle from a McDonalds commercial. Since then my math knowledge is obviously far beyond that, but at the time it really impressed my teacher.

So what things have you learned?

I learned my parts of speech and how a bill becomes a law every Saturday morning.

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get your adverbs here!!!

I learned from a throwaway line on The West Wing that Sweden has a 99% literacy rate.

Okay this is a true story, I was driving my parents stick shift up a huge grade in California, and the car kept slowing down something terrible and I started to freak out, and then this old Bugs Bunny cartoon came to mind (I have no idea why) and I remember the chracter yelling that if he shifted down to a lower gear the car would go faster. (Truck in the cartoon) but I figured why not, I tried it and it worked!
Weird.

Honestly, until college I had learned most of my religious mythology from the X-Files. I learned the story of Lazarus from the episode Hollywood A.D. South Park also can teach you a bit about religions - I've lived in Utah my whole life, surrounded by Mormons, so the Mormon episode didn't actually teach me anything, but it was a really succinct (and fairly accurate) summary of the religion.

I'm in law school now and although I wouldn't say that Law and Order has really taught me anything concrete, it certainly has taught me to look out for loopholes and technicalities.

Thanks to Lisa Simpson, I learnt about schaudenfreude, sour grapes, dodecahedrons, and I will NEVER mispronounce the word 'foliage'.

Sounds silly, but I learned A LOT about sex from MTV's Loveline (not the radio show). Some of it good (contraceptives, STDs, HIV), some of it bad: a 10 year old doesn't need to know that semen has no protein so the bodybuilder is not saving saving money on protein shakes by eating his own semen after masturbating. (Put that under a spoiler, because it's rather disgusting.)

Mr. Belding taught me that "principal" in the head-of-the-school sense is spelled with "pal" at the end.

Grey's Anatomy taught me that it is possible to remove an entire hemisphere of a small child's brain without causing permanent impairment. I'm not sure how useful this was to me, but it does appear to be correct.

One of the CSI-ish shows taught me that glasses-wearing people always remove their glasses before they commit suicide by jumping from high places. Good to know.

When I was in middle school, I learned the definitions of 'puerile,' 'obtuse' (non-mathematical) and a couple of other words from episodes of "Mad About You."

I cannot recount the number of things I learned from "Bill Nye the Science Guy". Sooo much stuff, most of which stays with me pretty well - everything from surface tension, to the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system, to the difference between centripedal and centrifugal forces. Great show.

According to "CSI", smiling suppresses the gag reflex. I'm not positive this is true, but I have used it in situations where I really didn't want to be gagging, and it seemed to work.

I'm already learning from this thread!



Marge: Look at this lovely foilage!
Lisa: I think it's pronounced FOLIAGE...

I forget Marge's retort to that, but I remember it was funny.

I also learned, from "The Simpsons", that in Australia the toilet flushes counterclockwise.

Quasi related on a health note: I learned from Desperate Housewives that there really is such a thing as a wandering spleen.

I think it was something about not having to be a "nuke-you-lar" scientist to know how to pronouce foilage.


Except in the American embassy, where they've installed a device that will make water swirl the correct, American way.

Topic? I had never heard that Thanksgiving song that everyone sings before The West Wing taught it to me. And CSI features all sorts of medical conditions I had never heard of (Chimeraism?)

Thanks to Blackadder I'll never forget the name of Sir Francis Drake's ship: The Golden (Be)Hind".

Marge: That's what I said! "Foilage!"

I learned from Kim Possible (Hey, it was late at night, and I was flipping through the channels) that the elderly population is growing 10% every year.

Also from the foilage episode of the Simpsons is the way to tell the difference between cider and juice:

"If it's clear and yella, you got juice there fella."
If it's tangy and brown, you're in cider town."

ETA: The song from the Valentine's episode also helps you remember the forgotten presidents:

"We are the mediocre presidents,
You won't find our faces on dollars or on cents,
There's Taylor, there's Tyler
There's Fillmore and there's Hayes
There's William Henry Harrison
(I died in thirty days!)"

Of course, there's a couple more forgotten presidents, but I don't remember who they are.

This could explain why grimacing looks so much like smiling.

I remember being the only one in my geology class who knew how an audiotape worked. I AMAZED the dude sitting across from me. Little did he know I got the information from a half-remembered episode of Beakman's World. Forget Bill Nye, Beakman was da bomb!

I learned from a rerun of CSI that if you shoot someone and don't clean up the blood and water is allowed to mingle with the blood, spores of some kind will grow. If you have a compromised immune system, it'll kill you. Just thought I'd share.

On a more macabre note, CSI taught me that if I'm ever attacked I should scratch the murderer/rapist/whatever like there's no tomorrow, so that lots of nice evidence collects under my nails that will help to catch the bastard.

All I really needed to know about math I learned from Square One TV.

And Vicar of Dibley introduced me to the tradition of having pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. (Who knew?!)

I learned from Lifetime's show What Would You Do? that if a person points a gun at you, you're supposed to run in the opposite direction in a zig-zag pattern - odds are, the person with the gun is not a pro and it'd be difficult to hit you.

I've never actually had to deliver a baby, but I've seen it done enough times on TV that I'm fairly confident that if I absolutely had to, I could.

They made a point of this on Hawaii Five-O as well.
Drat aged myself.

I also learned that you can substitute apple sauce for sugar in cookies.

I learned you could substitute it for oil.

ETA:For and from are not the same thing.

I learned how to seperate eggs from Little House on the Prairie.

Another helpful Simpsons moment:

Leaves of three, let it be.
Leaves of four, eat some more!

Came in very handy when I went hiking last weekend. That and the poison oak warnings taped up everywhere with a flat surface.

BWAH! That episode was highly educational for me as well.
IIRC, it's called "serpentine" when you do that. I didn't learn it from any particular TV show; I actually picked it up from watching TV with my dad. Whenever someone on TV was being chased he'd say "Serpentine! Serpentine!"
Who would've guessed that I could actually pick up something useful from the unholy combination of TV and my dad's weirdness?

I see your dad was a big fan of the movie "The In-Laws."

I, myself, got an extra credit point by correctly telling my 7-th grade science teacher that a calorie is a unit of heat. Go, Mr. Wizard! "Mr. Wizard IS a great scientist."

Whereas the entirety of my religious education came from Davey and Goliath.

I learned just last week on Survivor that if I pour even cholera-laden water through a few layers of cloth, I probably won't die. Of course, I also learned from this season's Survivor that my grandmother was right: A Good Foundation Garment is Always Worth the Money.

Me too VersesBatman! I think of it every morning as I make breakfast.

Did Perceval teach you?

You know it!!

I also have learned a lot about animals from watching Zoboomafoo with my kids, including that I should call them creatures and not animals.

Everything I know about American politics, I learnt from The West Wing.

Most of the stuff I know about medicine, I picked up from ER.

Everything I know about the legal process I picked up from Rumpole, Kavanaugh QC, Murder One or This Life.

Fortunately I never have to do anything relating to the law, US politics, or medicine. Otherwise things would go very wrong.

Thought of another one. My party trick is that I know all the U.S. state capitals. Friends think I am either a big dork or an idiot savant (one is true), but the real reason is Wacko's song from Animaniacs. What a great show.

I can't believe no one has mentioned learning about the atom from Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati!

I never knew what a loose meat sandwich was until Rosanne.

I learned a great variety of science-y things from MacGyver. The one that I remember really saving my bacon was being able to explain why sodium metal in water explodes. On a 10th grade chemistry test. Thanks, Mac!

Ducktales was a great cartoon for teaching general knowledge - heck the whole episode on inflation inspired me to major in economics. There was also the epi where Scrooge bought the coal mine and then brought some elephants in to make diamonds. Up until then I had no idea diamonds came from coal.

I learned CPR from Baywatch. (Well in theory...I've never had to try it!)

My obsession with House helped teach me many things, including the definition of lupus ("in simple terms, the body becomes allergic to itself"), that wilson's disease can be indentified by copper colored rings around the pupil, and everybody lies :P

And all this is totally useful for my bio class, so I'm doing really well in it :)

Edited for spelling mistakes

I learned that too, but from Ghostwriter

Don't forget every country in the world! It's slightly outdated, but it's still probably 95% accurate.

And the presidents of the US! George Washington was the first you see, he once chopped down a cherry tree; president number two would be John Adams and then number three...
Wacko taught us many, many things.

I can perform the Countries of the World verbatim. I was always terrible at history and geography in school, so I'd always impress my teachers by doing that and get some extra credit.

I can still remember all of the music videos (and consequent math terminology) from Square One.

And thanks to my dad being creative, the tv show Roseanne helped me (to this day) remember how to spell the word embarrass. According to my dad (who loved the show), "Think of em. Then thing of Roseanne Barr. Finally, think of her... prominent posterior. Put it together? Em-barr-ass." Fifteen years later, that's how I remember how to spell it.

Hee. We did! And it's next Tuesday, by the way. Get your lemons out!

I learned pretty much everything I know about high school in the US from BtVS, Mean Girls and Popular. Suffice to say, I'm glad I never went to school in the US.

That's how I learned the states!
The song that is in alphabetical order, even to this day I can sing all 50 :o
Alabama and Alaska Arizona Arkansas

The episode of Family Ties where Mallory was on a quiz show taught me that SCUBA stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Of course, I have to ignore the follow up: "and who invented it?" "Magellan!"

I've learned lots from West Wing. And I always think of it when I see those commercials for ethanol, but damned if I can remember what was bad about it.

It was Boy Meets World that taught me that one, about the scuba I mean.