Old Shame/Real Life

• Jay Leno occasionally invokes this on his actor guests. All in good fun, of course.
  • Jay has his own Old Shame, Collision Course, a buddy cop movie he did with Pat Morita in the 1980s that he's described as being "a horrible movie".
• The Daily Mail would rather forget the fact that it used to be Oswald Mosley's mouthpiece, but its critics aren't going to let it forget the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" in a hurry.
  • Another British newspaper, the now left wing Daily Mirror, also supported the Blackshirt movement for a time in the mid 1930s before switching to its current idealogy.
• The BBC used to show, among other programmes, the hugely racist Black and White Minstrel Show. Up until the 1970s. Needless to say, the corporation regrets its attitudes now.
• Jimmy Wales, owner and co-creator of That Other Wiki, originally made money on the Internet with a site for what he calls "glamour photography", now downplayed for obvious reasons.
• The Germans hate the Third Reich more than anyone on the planet. They will not tolerate the Swastika being used for anything other than a dead serious historical documentary. Or by a Jain, as it was their symbol first--and considering they take nonviolence to a rather insane level (the most devout ones don't eat yogurt since it involves eating live bacteria), most German authorities have agreed to let them be.
• Karl Marx wrote about how one form of capitalist economy was the "Asiatic mode of production," where slave-lords (nobles, kings, etc.) use violence to coerce workers into giving them labour. After Josef Stalin realized that this perfectly described the Soviet Union, he called a meeting of Marxist intellectuals to Leningrad in 1931, which was a cover justification for him censoring all of Marx's works to remove any mention of the AMP.
  • Marx in general was quite a Russophobe, mentioning in passing that no Russian could ever become a railroad engineer, which is why his unabridged works weren't generally available in the Soviet libraries.
• <blink>. Lou Montulli <blink>tag issued an apology for accidentally creating the beast, which was left in as an Easter Egg that everybody loved to use. While Opera's the only browser outside the Netscape line to implement the tag, CSS would introduce a standardized alternative - with the caveat that browsers didn't actually have to implement it (most just quietly throw it away); another web standard requires an option to disable blinking (which Firefox buries in about:config).
  • Among old-time hackers, there's only one accepted use for the blink tag: Schrodinger's Cat is <blink>NOT</blink> dead.
• Remember Alabama Governor George Wallace? Remember how he overtly barred black students from entering a previously all-white school until the President himself sent federal marshals to enforce integration? Wallace wasn't too proud of that in later years:

Wallace: I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over.

• Hotelier Ian Schrager, doesn't like talking about his time as co-owner of Studio 54, which was so infamous it landed him and partner Steve Rubell in jail.
  • In fact in the 1998 film '54', a highly fictionalized version of the story of the club, Rubell (played by Mike Myers) is a major character, but Schrager is never seen or mentioned at all.
• With all the inevitable misfires you get in the automobile industry, it's rare that a company would consider one particular model an Old Shame: The Cimarron is that for General Motors and its Cadillac line. In 1982, GM basically took their mid-sized J-Car line (which included the Chevy Cavalier, Buick Skyhawk, Oldsmobile Firenza and Pontiac Sunbird as well as the Opel Ascona, Vauxhall Cavalier, Holden Camira and Isuzu Aska) and tried to make a luxury car out of it. The result was an ugly , underpowered mess. They also sold it at nearly double the price of any of the rest of its J-Car siblings - despite looking or driving nothing like a Cadillac. The bad rep Cadillac got from the fiasco nearly sank the entire line. According to legend, Cadillac Product Director John Howell had a picture of the Cimarron on a wall with the caption, "Lest we forget." For comparison: This is an '82 Cimarron. This is an '82 Eldorado 2-door, the next smallest Caddy offered.
• During President Reagan's first term as governor of California, he passed an abortion bill, which he never quite forgave himself for over the rest of his staunchly-conservative life.
• The Nobel committee tries to gloss over the fact that they gave the award for Medicine to António Egas Moniz in 1949. They frequently invoke Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness when mentioning he won for discovering "the therapeutic value of leucotomy." To translate: He invented the lobotomy.
  • He also invented one of the world's first brain imaging techniques so that is usually highlighted instead.
  • Made worse by the fact that it was his primary motive – his lack of a Nobel Prize had become a source of anxiety to him as his career and years had advanced. After he read the paper on the effects of damage to various parts of the frontal lobes, and realised that it would be possible to duplicate some of these effects deliberately, one of the first thoughts to hit him was "This could get me my Nobel!" He had some specimen brains sent up to his office immediately, so that he could start working out the best way to slice them up.
• British Prime Minister, David Cameron, apparently feels this way about his support for Section 28 (a rampantly homophobic policy introduced by the Thatcher government). He's since apologised for the harm it caused.
• The United Kingdom media and government both see their treatment of Alan Turing, a scientist that played a big part in the Second World War that was then subjected to all manner of treatments after being outed as homosexual, leading to his suicide, as this.
• The United States looks back with shame for the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII. In fact they paid $20,000 in reparations to all survivors and their descendants in 1988.
• The Atlanta Spirit Group considers the Atlanta Thrashers (now the second incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets) an embarrassment, removing all references to the team, including the team's lone divisional championship banner and a mural from when the team hosted the 2008 All-Star Game, from Philips Arena. The team wouldn't have been a joke if the group operated the team properly.
• In a more general example, E-Mail addresses. Many of us on the Internet started using it at young ages (it's getting more accentuated over time), where we thought it would be cool to fool around with random words, references to favourite series/movies and/or vulgarity. Then, flashfoward some years, doing a college or job application, if you didn't bother to change to a less immature one while the efforts needed wouldn't be too much, then it's too late.
• Despite it being one of the best selling cars ever produced and near universally beloved by gearheads, Volkswagen doesn't seem too proud of the Beetle, particularly the original Type 1 model. Probably because the car's inception can be traced back to Adolf Hitler.