Have you ever learned something that corrected what you thought since you were a kid? It's a total mindblow and you have to laugh because you took that thing to be true for years and years and all of a sudden it's totally different. There should be a name for that. Like retrognosticamendation or something.

For me, this wasn't really a retrognosticamendation, but I did learn something I didn't know the reason for. The whole way that a subscription channel like HBO works, is by renting, or leasing, the rights to movies for a period of time. I suspect that in some cases they buy a movie outright and can show it over and over, which is why you have the same crap running for years on the crappy Showtime channels.

This is their whole business model, but I didn't get it until now. Makes perfect sense, you subscribe and pay a monthly fee, they take that money and buy the rights to shows (or create them) and play them for you.

But I didn't get that for, what maybe 25 years of HBO being around.

Another example of a retrognosticamendation would be that I thought the word "melee" was pronounced "meee-leee". Being a hardcore D&D player, I thought I knew what was up and what a melee was, and what constituted melee weapons. But the whole time I was saying it wrong --- it's actually pronounced "may-lay".

25 years and I've been saying it wrong, thinking I'm an expert on melee weapons, and melee's ensuing and jumping into a melee. Meee-leee. Ha!!!

But it's another example of thinking one thing for eons, and suddenly you see it in a whole new light. You have to change your way of thinking, pronounce things differently. Adapt, change your thought process a bit.

Granted, doing this for just a word like melee is almost insignificant, but apply it to something like the aspect of God, religion in general, politics, American history. You can see how some people get stuck in a thought pattern and don't want to break out of it.

You think history is one thing for 30+ years and then are presented with something else, an alternate reality. For instance (and I'm just throwing this out there) let's say that 3-headed aliens fly in on hovercycles and say they'be been watching us for years and finally thought they'd drop in and have a beer with us.

Many of us could cope with it - I like to think I could. But what if one of those aliens told you our reality is only one tiny slice of reality; there are many more dimensions than this and that our existence is merely just a thought, and then he/she/it proceeds to manipulate your brain like a Rubik's Cube, causing you to peek into 11 dimensions at once. You see infinity, and that planets are atoms, that time really -is- relative, that your Grandma is your son, all in the space of a fraction of a second. Then he releases your mind back to 3D reality and tosses you a Beck's, chuckling and telling you it's ok and hey check out the TV, the 'Sixers are ahead.

Could you handle it? Not sure if I could. I'm curious as to what people's reactions would be. How many would just go nuts? I think a big percentage would try to kill said alien. Perhaps that's what's wrong with humanity - when presented with something so alien from our thought processes, our instinct is to destroy that thing.

Perhaps that instinct isn't a bad thing, maybe it was there to ensure our survival. But then again maybe it's time to evolve past that.

"Melee". Heh. That's a funny word.