These threads are always funny and what better way is there to kill some time at work? “Working,” you say. You know what? That’s clearly a bad idea for a litany of reasons that I simply don’t have the time to go into right now.
A year or so ago, I was taking one of those generic history classes that all history professor loathe teaching: a survey class covering everything from amoebas to the Clinton administration.
Somewhere around Mesopotamia, the professor was lecturing about their domestication of various animals. While comparing and contrasting Mesopotamian animal domestication to that of the Aztecs (or Mayans. Hell, I can’t remember), I see a hand shoot up a few chairs down from where I was sitting.
It just so happened that the question asker was a very sweet, nice girl- very pretty, too. Model pretty, actually. I remember her telling me that her goal in life was to be a kindergarten teacher, so she was trying to finish up her degree and get her certification. I do believe she was actually a senior and this is one of the last classes she had to take. Go her! Until she opened her mouth, that is. . .
She then continued to argue that chickens didn’t exist in any fashion before Mesopotamia and that they invented chickens out of thin air.
I felt bad for the girl, because the entire class was laughing at her, but goddamn. I do not want her teaching my children.
What’s so stupid about that? I made chicken just the other night.
Many many many years ago, my friend and I met this guy about our age. We started talking about music, and the topic soon turned to Black Sabbath. The album Vol IV starts with a song that has a little guitar riff, then silence for a few beats. During the silence, Ozzie can be heard saying “yeah”, a bit low in the mix. This guy we met insisted that Ozzie didn’t say “yeah”, he said “sack.”
Huh? Why on earth would he say sack?
“Because he’s insane. You know that song Am I Going Insane? He wrote that because he’s insane. Insane people say sack.”
Couldn’t argue with the logic, really. Didn’t want to anyway.
Not from thin air, no. You sew fairy wings to a platypus, trim the beak back, then attach penguin feet. The hardest part is animating all these dead body parts once they’re attached. I’ve no idea how the Meezopotgeraniums managed to get the electricty way back then, but I’m pretty sure that’s what inspired Mary Shelley’s novel. (It was originally entitled “Frankenchicken”.)
I should really know better than to engage my father-in-law in conversations that don’t revolve around the weather, his vacation home or gardening, but somehow we got into “Political Correctness”, “Why Black People Are Dumb For Wanting to be Called African-Americans” and “Why America is the Only Country With Intolerance” discussions where somehow he simultaneously tried to argue that there is no racism in the US, only Politically Correct people trying to make us believe there is racism. Or something. It reminded me of the War on Christmas debate, only he’s quite clear that there is a War on Christmas, because the man behind the counter at the Jewish deli wished him Happy Holidays last week.
Somewhere along the line, he explained to me the etymology of “nigger” and why it isn’t such a bad word after all. Because, you see, it’s derived from the word niggardly, which means “cheap”. B’wuh? No amount of argument could convince him that A.) the two words have unrelated origins and B.) naming a race of people (if there is such a thing as race) after an attribute like “cheap” is insulting, anyway!
I suddenly found a pressing need to go wash dishes in the other room before he brought up The War or the Presidential Race. My husband, not so wise, later told me that his father informed him Barack Obama is a militant Muslim, because his middle name is Hussein, and he was raised and went to a Taliban run school in the Middle East.
And my husband wonders why I drink at family gatherings…
Telling a friend at lunch about my brother-in-law being transgender and becoming my sister-in-law…I had already told the other two friends there. This third person, who lives in her own little world, said, “That’s what all gay men are. They all want to be women.”
Huh?
Luckily one of my other friends told her that it is a totally separate thing. She was surprised.
You would be surprised how prevelent this belief is. A girl in my senior seminar Political Science class believes what you said and no amount of pointing out the facts would sway her. She’s not a dumb girl at all- very smart, very thoughtful, etc. But she said he needs to answer to the fact that he’s a militant Muslim who went to Al Qaeda school.
OK, maybe not stupid, but an odd thing I overheard at dinner Monday night. A young woman to her female friend: Every time I give head the back of my thighs hurt for a few days - how do I stop that?
Although I have never been in her position, I was disappointed not to hear the answer.
My father-in-law is convinced that one of his inlaws who is female-to-male transgendered, and married to a woman (who was born in that body), was actually a lesbian with a “female personality” before the transition but decided to transition to live a “normal life” of heterosexuality, marriage, etc. Stranger yet, he thinks homosexuality is unnatural but doesn’t feel that way about transgender changes in cases like that because they’re getting married to a person of the opposite-of-the-new sex afterwards, etc. Seriously, he thinks that homosexual people should get sex changes so they can be “normal.”
A while back I was taking a college biology class, and we were on the subject of detritus feeders. The professor was giving examples, and a girl exclaims “I know one! Bears!”
Hm?
Turns out her brother is a hunter and tells her that the reason to play dead when one comes across a bear, is so that it will leave you alone.
Because it knows that you are alive.
You play dead to let the bear know that you are alive. Then it won’t eat you.
Of course this was repeated back to her, because surely she misspoke. But she reiterated the above statement.
This is the same girl who insisted that some vegetable (she couldn’t remember which one) cured cancer. She saw this in a book by this really, really smart guy. It was all about natural cures that “they” don’t want us to know about.
I kind of pissily stated that Kevin Trudeau was a known fraud and she shouldn’t believe such crap. She said the things in his books had to be true because her father spend over $100 on them.
She planned on becoming a dentist. My dental hygiene got a helluva lot better after that class.
