I actually said one myself many years ago near Halifax, NS: we were in a souvenir shop and I was looking at a postcard. I couldn’t tell what the drawing was and I said, “What is that, a volcano?” Turned out to be a bad drawing of the burning ammunition ship that exploded in Halifax Harbour in 1917. :smack:
That reminds me of a humorous phrase, as used to promote this English B&B:
I’m not sure whether or not they are aware that this has become a euphemism for sexual congress… 
So I was in a Walmart in Portland Oregon just before Thanksgiving. They had a display of Smithfield salt cured smoked hams in the center of the aisle. I was looking at them and wondering if one would fit in my luggage when two ladies in their 50 walked up.
The gist of the conversation was that they could not and would not believe that these hams were in fact edible as they were not refrigerated. I tried to explain that this was how meat was preserved before refrigerators but they refused to believe me.
I was renting a DVD from a Redbox in the local supermarket; the Redbox is right next to a Coinstar change machine. This woman was running her change through the Coinstar machine and it dumped out a non-standard coin. She picked it up, looked at it, and said to her friend, “It says “2 Euro cents”. It must be a Mexican coin.”
I’ve posted this before, but I have yet to stop being amused by it.
A woman was looking at a picture of two elderly women, which was titled “Helen Keller and her friend Polly Thompson.”
The woman remarked “Ooh, that’s a good one. But why is there two of her? Oh, I get it. In one she’s not wearing her glasses.”
And make sweet chili. (Skyline) ::shudder:: I had a chili dog at a Reds game and was all: What on earth?
Along the lines of the quesadilla, I once had to explain to a waiter (and apparently a bartender) in St. Maarten what a Cosmopolitan was. I even had to draw a picture showing the proportion of the ingredients.
(To be fair, I once had to do that in the USA too, and when the bartender went to shake the shaker she almost forgot to hold her hand over the top glass of the shaker - the whole drink, and the glass, would’ve splattered against the back wall. First day?)
I once used one of those machines for a tub of pennies, took the voucher it spits out to the cashier and she asked with a straight face if it was ok if she gave it to me in quarters because she was out of dollar bills…I declined and she had to go fetch some from another register.:smack:
If you’re gonna quote him, quote him right:
I thought huffs cost more to ride in than a bus.
Had one just yesterday- I needed to buy some live food for some unexpected new critters (baby axolotyls, they’ll only eat it if it wriggles), and went to an aquarium shop; asked the guy there if they sold live food, and he replied that yep, of course they did- it’s just over here.
Then led me to the freezer.
I told him that… um… I needed live food, and he confusedly told me ‘it is live, it’s just frozen’…
Maybe they sold tardigrades, I didn’t check.
Standing in line at the grocery:
Cahsier: “How many of those did you get? 20?”
Customer: “No, I got 5 and 10 and 5 and 10”
Cashier: “So that’s um…”
Customer: “Um…”
Me: “It’s 30.”
Them: “Oh thank you.”
No, they’re correct. It’s just that Christmas is on the wrong day.
At least she didn’t try to give it to you in pennies.
One of my teenaged niece Elle’s friends (let’s call her Moira) apparently failed to notice the same guy was constantly at my sister’s house and showing up to Elle’s school events (he’s Elle’s step-dad). One day Elle mentioned her step-dad.
“When’d your mom get married?”
“Sixth grade.”
Moira turned to my sister and said, “I didn’t know you got married in sixth grade!”
“Yep. Elle was is sixth grade when we got married.”
There was a look of slow realization. “Oh. When Elle was in sixth grade.”
Considering how much mother-son breeding is done by professional breeders (admittedly more when trying to establish a new breed), you’ll find a lot of us are more ‘meh’ about this. Still, you’re not wrong. There are risks, and not much payoff. Cats are still to be had for free.
Russians would be the exception.
For a Hollywood film, that level of ahistoricity is pretty normal. Just not so much for major 20th Century figures that aren’t supposed lost princesses–no, wait, pretty normal.
Not all of them.
Not overheard by me, but on the same topic of not realizing the size of the country, my grandmother (living in Moncton, New Brunswick, on Canada’s East coast) boarded a couple of British pilot trainees during WW2. They announced one day that they had a long 4-day weekend pass coming up and thought they would take the train to the West coast to see a bit of the country. She gently broke it to them that it was about 3,600 miles to Vancouver, and just the trip out would take longer than their 4-day pass would allow.
I was in the Dollar Tree just before Christmas. Mind you, there are signs all over the store that proclaim, “Everything in the store is a dollar”. I was picking up earbuds as cheap stocking stuffers for my neighbor. Guy comes up to me and asks me, “How much are these?” I looked at him and told him that they were a dollar, just like everything else in the store, unless it was marked 2/$1 (like candy). He stared at me like I was from another planet and asked if there was a price scanner. I told him to go to the register and ask…
I was wearing street clothes, mind you, and was not a store employee…
I always respond, “A dollar two ninety eight.”
Did she not know how far it was, or not know that it was a bad idea? When I did Americorps*Vista we had a project lined up for us by our worthless leader. She knew that the service project was in a town over 5 hours away and that we wouldn’t be allowed to spend the night (if you don’t know, the position is stipend based - set at the poverty level for a single person - and Vistas aren’t allowed to work another job, so paying out of pocket wasn’t possible) or take the next day off but signed us up for it anyway. Hey, she wasn’t the one who had to spend twice as long driving as helping renovate a park, so why not?