Up until this moment, I believed it. I thought it was supported by statistics.
I would think that in those days, the average Joe couldn’t afford very much. Didn’t it take a month or more for a ship to bring it from the West Indies?
I recently met someone who believed that Donald Trump would make a good president.
No, really.
Me, too. 
My grandmother was one of the most sensible people I’ve ever known, and believed this too. It wasn’t really an issue, though, since there weren’t any babies or cats in the house. I think she found cats creepy in general.
I’ve always assumed the myth might have got started by someone seeing a cat sniffing the milk odor around a baby’s mouth and getting freaked out.
The Master speaks. Myth, yes, but still probably not a good idea to let a cat cuddle up to an infant.
In selecting a jury for a capital case (one in which the death penalty may be sought by prosecutors) the prosecution is permitted to ask prospective members of the jury if they could vote for the death penalty, assuming the prosecution provided sufficient aggravating factors for the crime. In other words, the prosecution is allowed to strike, for cause, any potential jury member who has an objection to the death penalty and could not vote to apply it, period.
A jury selected this way is said to be “death qualified,” and, frankly, a bad blow for the defense, since such juries are thought to be generally more pro-prosecution.
Nope, the Master has spoken, and it is not true.
As someone with a master’s degree in astronomy, I know that it couldn’t work. The tidal forces involved are so tiny, they can’t possibly cause any kind of effect. The difference between the tidal forces at new or full moon and the moon at other phases is even tinier than that. If tidal forces were involved, we’d expect to see a difference between when the moon is at perigee versus apogee- we don’t.
With street lighting, I really doubt that more people are out and about at night during the full moon than would be otherwise. Most people couldn’t even tell you without Googling what phase the moon is in right now, nor could they tell you when a full moon rises and sets.
A co-worker once asked how long it took to form a diamond, having just gotten a big one in an engagement ring. I said it depended on temperature and pressure and so forth, but getting on for millions of years for it to occur naturally.
Another co-worker spun around, narrowed her eyes, and said, “that is NOT TRUE! The earth is only 5,000 years old! You need to do your research.”
I get that there are Biblical literalists and such all over, but this chick was more of a New Age type. I figured she’d have different moronic beliefs.
If it were true, wouldn’t have less to do with the astrophysics of moon’s effect on tides and people, and more to do with the psychology of people e.g. expecting they should act like idiots during a full moon?
But even that doesn’t work, since most people aren’t aware of it when there is a full moon. If you asked a bunch of random people when the last full moon was, or when the next one will be, I’d bet that most of them wouldn’t know unless they Googled it.
Yes and no … to be honest, medieval and renaissance foods for the upper crust were all about the conspicuous consumption. I could wander through my copy of Cariadoc’s Miscellany or the books on the Medieval and Rennaisance Food page and pull all sorts of recipes that have almost nothing in the way of sugar or honey in them. Yes there is a class of banquet food that is served ‘endoree’ or glazed with sugar, but as I said, they are for banquets and not something that the common person would eat with any amount of frequency.
No, sugarcane was present in India and Persia, which was the medieval source for sugar other than honey. It was still fairly expensive, which is why it was part of the whole conspicuous consumption deal. It was also used as a spice rather than a sweetener - honey was frequently the common sweetening agent.
Yup, sorry for not explaining it. Though in a few cases I would volunteer to pull the switch as well.
I wouldn’t think that awareness would be necessary, though. But again I am not suggesting that it is true, just that if it were true, it is not necessarily related to the tides. The most likely explanation is confirmation bias among the hospital staff.
Thanks for the explanation. I thought maybe it was disqualified with a lithp.
I met a woman in her 50’s recently (an employee of a notions store my wife frequents) who is convinced that a major rock band member is in love with her and has been for years, only he won’t admit to their love publicly because his life is in danger from his present wife, who is murderously jealous. This woman attends all the band’s appearances that she can afford to go to, including one recently in the UK…and yet she is so impoverished that she lives in a trailer without running hot water. When asked as to how she knows this rock band player loves her, she replies that she can see him looking at her in the crowd. She admits they have met only momentarily and the pair have never had a private moment together, but this does not stop her from thinking that the man really is in love with her. Because of this, she refuses to make herself available to meet any other men and lives alone, almost a hermit apart from work.
Seems like some sort of obsessive delusion to me.
I find this belief pretty shocking
Dear lord, I have a friend who believes;
COP = constable on partrol
Golf = gentlemen only, ladies forbidden
fuck = fornication under consent of king
and probably a dozen more of these type of fake word origins.
I think I have written about this before on the Dope, but for your entertainment I will repeat it.
I was never really given the “Birds and Bees” talk, but like any other guy who didn’t have it, I learned how one gets a girl pregnant in the boys’ bathroom.
Here’s where the lack of the rest of it caused a lot of angst for me: Until someone informed me otherwise, I thought that once you got a girl pregnant, you HAD to keep doing it, or else she might deliver just a leg or an arm.
It pains me to admit it, but there you go. Are any of you shocked? 
Quasi
My cousin told me she thought babies were made via smooshing belly buttons together, and that the belly buttons were a conduit for … something. Because when she saw other girls pretending their dolls were “doing it” they basically rubbed the two dolls’ midsections together.
Then again, kids pick up all sorts of weird ideas about the birds & the bees. (Rant about importance of sex ed goes here.)
I know a disturbing number of older women (50s and 60s … well, knowing them they’re lying) who believein Food Combining. Samples include:
- no fruits on an empty stomach, nor immediately after a meal (:dubious:)
- don’t eat meat and potatoes at the same meal, and wait 3 hours after eating a grain-based meal before you have a protein meal.
- do not drink cool or cold water with your meal, and avoid all water for at least 15 minutes before you eat or 1 hour after a meal (… *or? not and *… ?)
One of them gave me so much shit at some get-together because she saw me with strawberries and cold cuts on my plate. :rolleyes:
I actually thought this until highschool when my stepfather explained it. 
I work with a guy just like this. He’s not unintelligent, but he buys every right wing anti-Obama email list point ever (supposedly they built a 8 bajillion dollar tunnel from the Mumbai airport to his hotel so he wouldn’t be vulnerable to terrorist attack, then cancelled the trip after the tunnel had been built, all on our dollar! And when he went… I forget somewhere, he took 8 aircraft carrier groups as his personal taxi! Oh Obama, you and your crazy spending! :rolleyes: )
Anywho, he believes the craziest health nuttiness I have ever heard. Apple seeds cure cancer…all cancer, but big Pharma doesn’t want you to know because they can’t make money off of it. Also they can cure cancer in Germany right now but the U.S. won’t approve it, not sure why.
He’s 72 or so and twice divorced with no life except work (which he is a millionaire and only works for the human contact), I’m pretty sure his belief of such nonsense reassures him he won’t die alone soon or something.