Don’t know why,but I giggled at this.
As for me I thought satellites were saddle-ites and spent many nights looking for a saddle to go floating by in the sky.
Wow, that’s sheltered. :eek:
Oh, another one.
We had this cute little inflatable mini-pool (whatever they’re called) standing in the back yard. And this one time, for whatever reason, I threw some mud into it and alas, the crystal-clear water turned muddy and ugly and dark.
Wee little nervous lad that I was, I kinda panicked, thought “iiiiiiiiih, no no no no no, I’d better find an antidote ASAP!”, and so went frantically running round the yard… Picking only the very prettiest, whitest, cleanest little flowers I could find.
After having collected a handful, I ran back to the pool and with trembling hands threw them all in there, hoping against hope that the pretty, pretty little flowers would somehow magically transform the dark, corrupted water back into its clear, pure, original state in… 3… 2… 1… But no. Nothing. NOTHING.
Rather than witnessing the miracle of the water clearing right up, I had to stand there and watch as the pretty, pretty little flowers helplessly drowned, one by one, in the muddy, watery deep…
It was over. It was all over. And there was nothing I could do to ever make it right again.
That s-shock… Ah… I-I don’t think I ever r-recovered! :eek:
When I was about 7 or 8 I lived in a rental house, in a row of rental houses. In the driveway there was a street light. It was timed to come on in the evening. Naturally it would start dim and slowly brighten up.
One night I came out, stood beneath it, and willed it to light up. After a minute or two of concentrating it came on. Then I willed it to be brighter. I had powers! I controlled the light! 
There were some nights where I would come out and it was already on. Did that make me question my “powers”? Hell no. I just decided to come out earlier the next night and use my powers to turn on the street light. :smack:
Now on one side of the driveway were the houses, and on the other was fence blocking off the owner’s property. There was a few inches of grass in front of the fence. At night I would stand near the fence and take tiny pebbles and throw them into the air. I didn’t hear them come back down so I assumed that God caught them.
After a while there came a time where I heard a rock hit the ground. I figured that if I threw it towards the yard, then if it landed in the grass I wouldn’t be able to hear it. And if I couldn’t hear it then it meant it never actually fell back down because God caught it :dubious:. Yeah, I was trying to keep my illusion alive with twisted logic. But it did no good. I could hear the rocks landing in the grass.
Finally I had to admit to myself that God never caught those rocks and they all landed in the grass where I couldn’t hear them.
The little boy up the road was a year older than me. I (female) happened to see him naked and realised he was differently formed. I concluded mine would grow bigger to be like his as I got older.
I was in middle school when I was told that Vietnam (the war) was also a country.
I’m not sure when I realised that it wasn’t Saudia Rabia.
This one had me laughing hard enough to wake the kids!
So many of these are reminding me of the craziness of my childhood beliefs. It makes me wonder what is lurking in my kids’ minds.
I believed that marriage caused pregnancy. It never occurred to me that you could get pregnant without being married or that you could do anything to keep from getting pregnant if you were married.
Electric Warrior, I am also a native of North Virginia. Washington DC is so totally its capital
I had a similar belief. Almost the same, except only pepper cancelled out salt. If you put too much pepper on something, you were boned and the dish was ruined. But if you salted something too much, all you had to do was add pepper and it would be ok. It never was ok, of course. I had to choke down a fair amount of over-seasoned food because, hey I was a kid and didn’t know what I was doing and in my house you ate what was in front of you or you went hungry.
But I think that is what gave me my taste for spicy foods, so it turned out all right.
And I’m sure I mentioned this before, but one of the craziest beliefs I had as a child was that the mascot/monster on the the front of the short lived Bigg Mixx brand cereal was real and would come stalking through my tiny little town after midnight looking for cartons of milk to steal. Because what else would a cereal monster crave, but ice cold milk?
I got another one. I had at one point a hatred for ants, having at one point stepped in a pile of fire ants and gotten bitten. Needless to say, totally sucked. That was around 6 or 7. Afterwards I wanted to kill the little buggers and fervently believed that the right mix of spices and herbs would make an effective ant poison. So I would spend hours in the kitchen mixing (and wasting) everything in my mother’s spice rack, patiently testing every mixture on the ant piles out in the yard. Nothing ever worked of course, but I was sure some did. Cayenne pepper and ginger were, to me, the most efficacious ingredients.
I used to think that if I stood to the side of the television screen I would be able to see into the ‘room’ on television as if the screen was a window. I also tried to be above or below the screen to look down or up ladies dresses.
From a similar thread:
I thought that since you could make a color TV go black and white by turning a knob, you could do the opposite with a black and white TV. My friends had color TVs and we only had a black and white one, and I got soooo frustrated trying to make it happen that I ended up scribbling on the screen with magic markers while the program was on, attempting to colorize it.
Also I found that if I pressed the sides of my eyeballs gently, I could get mild double vision. I thought that this was a way to make the TV go 3D.
At the age of 12 my sister asked me if we flew straight up from the UK whether we’d arrive in America. Turns out she knew the earth was a sphere, but thought we were on the inside if it.
At school we were always told: “Never cross the street near a parked car.” But why?! Nobody ever told me why. I honestly thought it was something to do with etiquette, until I was old enough to ride in the front seat and observe a driver’s PoV.
I thought there were three sexes: boy, girl and boy-girl.
There was this kid in my kindergarten class. She dressed like a girl, but looked like a boy, plus her name was Paula, clearly indicating both genders. She was clearly a boy-girl.
I also thought that each and every one of the centerlines on the highway represented one mile.
One time I had my hand out the window as my dad was driving, slapping some tall grasses or something that were close to the car. I decided to grab one. I nearly broke my damn arm because it didn’t occur to me that it was rooted and not going to come loose.
Damn. I was one stupid kid!
Man, Freud would have a field day with you.
With a wii controller and some IR bulbs you can now experience your first misconception. There are examples of the second online that don’t even require you to alter your perspective but I won’t link to those.
One of my childhood misconceptions occurred in 1980, after my first hands-on experience with computer programming on my school’s TRS-80 Model I. As far as I knew all computers used BASIC, and I knew arcade games were essentially computers, so I figured if I could sneak the Model I’s keyboard out of the school and into an arcade, I could plug into the back of a Pac-man machine, hit the BREAK key and LIST the source code. Maybe even edit it to change the maze, give myself all the top scores or make it play for free.
I must have revealed this plan to my dad (an IBM tech) at some point because shortly thereafter he bought a computer for the house and started teaching me assembly language. I assume he did this to open my eyes to the wider world of programming rather than to facilitate my takedown of Namco.
I used to think that venetian blinds only worked in one direction. If you pointed the concave side outside then they’d catch all of the light in the little trough and it’d be dark. But if you flipped them over and pointed the convex side out, then the light would just slide in.
I also did not know what I was supposed to do the first time I got an erection. I thought I just really, really had to pee, but no matter how long I waited nothing happened. My parents were a little weirded out to find me in the bathroom, naked from the waist down, screaming “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” at my schlong.
I used to thinkabout that being “penalized” had something to do with hurting your penis. Exactly what was done to one’s penis, I dunno, but that’s what I thought until about age 12…
Joe
You’d be surprised how many grown adults don’t actually know that.
I had the opposite misconception. I was crushed when my Mom took me to Ohio for the first time and everybody was still speaking English.
You were just ahead of your time, dear.
Someone told me when I was a little kid that chocolate milk came from black cows, and I believed that for years.
I can remember putting several boxes of cereal in my mother’s shopping cart and her telling me to put them back as that would be too expensive to buy all of them. I was shocked, as I never realized you had to pay for things in grocery stores - you just picked what you wanted and went home.
Count me as another one who didn’t get the concept of foreign languages in other countries - I thought everyone spoke English all the time, but only spoke those other languages on holidays or special occasions.
When I was about 8, I read an old copy of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and it stated that if you picked a gerbil up by it’s tail, it’s eyes would fall out. I mentioned this to a friend when I was about 12 and they said, “Gerbils don’t have tails.”
Perhaps my parents should have given me the middle name of “gullible”.