When I was growing up, I convinced my neice that DumDum lollipops grew on the fig tree in our backyard. I had a pocketfull of them and went out earlier and threw some on the ground and saved some more in my pocket. It was mid-spring and the fig tree was already beginning to have fruit. So I took my 4 year old neice outside and told her that this was a lollipop tree. She didn’t believe me so I palmed a lollipop and “magically” pulled it off the tree. She was amazed and started talking how she would eat all the lollipops and took some off the ground. I even convinced her that the wrappers on the lollipops were the leaves. Also, I told her that if anyone told her that lollipops didn’t grow on trees that they were lying to her becuase they didn’t want her to eat them all and then go to the dentist. I told her it was “our secret.” hehehehe. The next year when she was in kindergarten, she told her class she knew that lollipops grew on trees and had proof because her unlce showed her. The teacher of course told her that wasn’t true which she responded, “That is what my unlce told me you’d say.”
I laughed and laughed later about that. Unfortunately I didn’t know that one lie may have had something to do with all the other lies she started telling later. Sigh!
My father is the king of these. He consistantly tries to tell me lies, and he’s still pretty danm good at it.
He’d make everything up from why planes fly to why the ice makes popping sounds on the frozen lake (the fish are blowing bubbles/farting, and they hit the ice and make that noise.) WhenI was 5, I realised in one second, that he was lying to me. I asked why your pinky nail grows faster than the rest of your nails. Dad’s answer? “Because it’s shorter, so the nail juice can get to the nail faster.” And the seed of doubt was planted.
A little persistance goes a long way. Announcing:
“I go on guilt trips a couple of time a year. Mom books them for me.” A custom made Wally .sig!
This reminds me of that Steve Martin bit when he talks about teaching a kid different words for everything. Replace “chair” with “banana” and always call it that in front of the kid. By the time he’s really talking, it’ll come out, “Cat tool banana plant I.” And he’ll think he’s really making sense.
Heheheheh, these are wonderful. Keep them coming. Cat tool banana I. hehehehe
That reminds me more of my friend Liz whom I went to college with. She was great. (Incidently, she still promises to be artificially inseminated by me.) Oh, she was going to have two kids. One would have a normal name like Rachel or something and the other would be named “Specimen B”. She said she would keep Speciman B in a box and feed it underneath a door flap until Specimen B was 18 and she would set it free. Rachel on the other hand would constantly be loved on and treated with compassion except she would teach Rachel her own language with many many meanings for a single word. Pippilippi was my favourite word that she said she would use. It meant different things depending on where the inflection was. I love Liz for more than her sense of humour, but it was the start of all our fun times.
When I was in grade seven or so, I convinced a friend of mine that I had a pet koala that lived in my closet and swung on my hangers. She wanted to see a picture, so I showed her one of a five year old me, holding a kitten in a blanket. Then, when she wanted to come over and see it I just stuck a stuffed koala in there and laughed like hell when she figured it out.
I still can’t believe she thought I was serious.
–I’ll scan the picture when I get home.
“Organs gross me out. That’s organs, not orgasms.”
-the wallster
I worked in an office a few years ago where we convinced a naive coworker that Phyllis Povah was the biggest star of the 1930s and '40s.
It started when I recognized her photo in a calendar still from “The Women” and Jim (naive coworker) said, “Oh, you’re making that up! There is no such person!” Phyllis Povah was actually a minor character actress, but I said, appalled, “You don’t know PHYLLIS POVAH!? She was the biggest star in Hollywood!”
I got everyone in the office to do a longterm brainwashing. “There’s a Phyllis Povah film festival in the Village!” someone would enthuse. Two weeks later, someone else: “I’m thinking of getting a Phyllis Povah hairdo.” And so on and so on. This could only have worked in the pre-Internet days. I wonder if he’s ever caught on?
Sounds like Vietnamese (and other Asian languages). Dr. Boyfriend once tried to teach me a word that describes a type of woman’s dress, and when I repeated it back, I inflected the last part of the word, since, of course, I was asking a question. Alas, the inflection on the last part of the word rather than the first part turned “shirt” into “scrotum.”
Mr. Cynical - I don’t know where you could get it…it was on one of his videos from when he did stand-up, but I really have no idea which one.
I’ve always wanted to try that little experiment, but nobody’s ever given me a kid to try it on!
I told a really weird lie once, and I have no idea why I did it. I told my best friend and her family that I was from Germany. I was about 6 years old when I told them that. I elaborated with all sorts of information…bits and pieces of the landscape I remembered, toys and mementos of our time there, bits and pieces of the German language (some of which I knew from a little song I had learned in preschool, some of which I just made up). I guess I was convincing, because they believed me for years. When we were in about third or fourth grade, it came out…my friend said something in front of my mom. I guess I was just a really imaginative kid (I prefer to think of myself as that instead of dishonest )
My dad told me a lot of these when I was a kid. When my sister was born, I was disppointed that she wasn’t a boy. My dad told me that he had a friend who “raised babies.” He said I could trade in my sister with no problem.
Well, he must have forgotten what he told me. A few weeks later, we went to the friend’s house. The guy answered the door, and I said, “Hi, can I come see the little brothers?” I was dead set on trading her in for a boy.
It took quite a bit of explanation before they convinced me that I couldn’t trade my sister in for a boy. I was really upset.
After that, my dad toned down his stories.
Also, I almost had my husband believing that my dad’s hair had stopped growing. I told him that my dad hadn’t had a haircut in three years, because of some kind of follicle problem. He didn’t believe me at first, but I think he was starting to. He would sit and try to study the back of my dad’s head. Then one day, my dad came in and announced that he was late from work because he had stopped for a haircut. Mr. Jeannie looked at me and said, “I knew it!” I told my dad what I had told Mr. Jeannie. He thought it was pretty funny and felt bad that he had spoiled the joke.
Homepage: www.idreamofjeannie.com
Occupation:Wish granting
Location: I’m still stuck in this damn bottle in Cocoa Beach, Fla.
Interests: Getting Major Nelson in trouble, getting Major Nelson out of trouble
–Custom profile courtesy of UncleBeer
I never hate myself in the morning. I sleep till noon.
–Custom sig line courtesy of Wally
I’ve been known to be good with accents. I once had a group of women at a frat party convinced I was from Texas. I think I also had them convinced I was straight. They were fascinated…
When I was in the Boy Scouts, there was a younger scout that some of us took on a “snipe hunt.” Well, instead of the typical payoff (leave them in the woods until they wander back to camp), things took a delighfully devilish turn.
Turns out the kid was convinced he had seen a snipe. We had told him it was a furry little critter, and he swore up and down he saw one.
Not to pass up a good chance to milk something for all it was worth, we went through elaborations that went on for the next 5 or 6 camping trips. How there were different species (the reddish ones are the meanest, but the brown ones are good eatin!), different tactics for hunting, etc…
Once, the kid told us that he had gotten bitten by one (showing us a scratch form a pricker-bush).
The whole thing collapsed one camping trip when the kid’s dad came along. When the kid told his dad he was going on a snipe hunt, the dad gets really stern and says “Son. What the Hell are you talking about?” Kid proceeds to explain. “Son. Come here for a second and let me tell you something.”
That was the end of that. But we did get to see the kid’s face get really, really red.
I know this isn’t that funny, but it’s all I’ve got:
Some lady called me up asking if I was interested in having my kitchen cabinets redone. The conversation went like this:
[sales pitch… yadda yadda yadda]
HER: … does that sound like something you’d be interested in, sir?
ME: I’m afraid I’m not interested. You see, I don’t have a kitchen.
HER (taken aback): You don’t have a kitchen?
ME: Nope. Waste of money and space, so I ripped everything out and put in a pool table instead. If I want to cook, well, I’ve got a big yard and some woods behind it, so I just go outside and build myself a fire. Best part is, I don’t need to go to the store that much anymore. Did you know that you can bring down a squirrel with a pellet gun?
HER: [long pause] Have a good evening, sir. click
TMR If you believed in yourself, and tore enough holes
in your pants, there was always a mist-filled alley
right around the corner.
Also, when I was in Kindergarten, around Christmas time we were supposed to make placemats out of construction paper that were to be laminated for all our immediate family members. Well, one other kid and me had very large families. I had to make placemats for 7 people (myself, my four sisters, and my parents). Anyway, if we didn’t finish in the alotted time over the two weeks or so that we had to do it we were forced to stay in during recess to do it. I told my teacher that we didn’t celebrate Christmas because we were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I still remember that parent teacher conference. (Incidently, this was the psycho teacher that also forced me to write with my right hand… we talked about this in GQ.) She was a fundamentalist woman in a public, country school. I remember her asking my mother if we were Devil-Worshipping Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was creepy at the time but funny now.
These are hilarious! The only one I can think of right now wasn’t mine-- I was a daycamp counselor a few years ago, and during a little unit on architecture, we had the kids build structures out of toothpicks and mini marshmallows. In order to keep the kids from eating the marshmallows rather than build with them, one of the other counselors said that they were “craft marshmallows” and that they were poisonous. HA! The kids’ eyes got really wide, and although it was clear that a lot of the older kids didn’t buy it, none of them were quite willing to eat any to prove they were OK.
Oh wait! When I was little, my sister told me that the filling in Fig Newtons was made of ground-up worms, and that the little whitish specks (bits of seed, I presume) were their eyeballs. I couldn’t eat Newtons for years after that, even when I knew it really was fig!
“It says, I choo-choo-choose you. And it’s got a picture of a train.”
– Ralph Wiggum
When I was five or six years old, my old brother told me that an itch is caused by nerves getting wrinkly, and when you scratch it, it straightens out. The thing is, I never questioned this, so I believed it unitl I was 18.
I have this friend, Laura, whose dad told her when she was a kid that Daylight Savings Time was created so it would be darker and scarier on Halloween. She believed it until she was 16. If you knew her, you’d think it was really cute, but when I tell people the story, everyone thinks it’s kinda weird.
"A man can’t turn tail and run just because a little personal risk is involved. What did Shakespeare say? “Cowards die a thousand deaths, the brave man… only 500”?
Oh, I forgot to add that the reason that I told that teacher we were Jehovah’s Witnesses was so I could go out and play during recess. It seemed clear when I sent it the first time, but looking back on it makes me think differently.
Alright, I’ll admit it. While I posted one of my dad’s stories, I am quite the liar, too.
[ul][li]Have OFTEN faked accents. My best friend in high school and I pretended we were British tourists for the entire day. I was from Manchester, she was from London, but had moved to Manchester with her family when she was 12…the backstory was amazing. I made up SO much stuff about England that day. I supopse that means I’m contributing to ignorance, and therefore in conflict with Cecil. feh.[/li][li]My older sister and I conviced my younger sister when she was 7 that younger sister’s mother was a zucchini in the garden, and that she (Hope, younger sister) had been a zucchini, too, until a fairy came and turned her into a baby. The last, most sadistic florish came when one of us (I honestly don’t remember, probably me. I was mean) told Hope that we then made bread out of her mother. She was in tears. She thinks it’s a hoot now-a-days, though.[/li][li]I get stupid IMs from people on AOL all the time. Unless I know who they are, I ignore them. One day, I was bored and feeling conversational. This guy IMed me, and asked me all these questions about Vermont. Then he asked what I looked like. I told him I was tall, thin, and hairy as a monkey. He expressed confusion. I explained that in Vermont, excessive body hair was a sign of beauty, because it kept the person from freezing to death. He doubted this story. I got indignant: “Who the hell are you to say that my customs are strange? Do YOU cut down a perfectly good tree to plant in your LIVINGroom at Christmas? God, I’d think you’d want a live woman instead of a popscile,” etc. He apologized, and said that he didn’t mean to offend “my culture.” Then continued along the usual IM slimeball path. I quickly typed “oops. Time to braid the arm-hair.” and signed off. I wonder if he still thinks New Englanders are “hairy as monkeys.”[/ul][/li]
There are others, but I don’t want you guys to think I’m pathological or anything…
A little persistance goes a long way. Announcing:
“I go on guilt trips a couple of time a year. Mom books them for me.” A custom made Wally .sig!
Me and some friends convinced a girl at college that a kiwi fruit was a type of animal. She overheard us saying it had hair and it went from there. We also used her to ask her if she was lactating currently and she had no idea what it meant. God this sounds sadistic but she was actually very bright she just had thes odd areas of ignorance, like soemkind of selective blindness. I told another girl at university that memories are patterns made from dead brain cells which had her going until it was spiked by my biologist flatmate who I hadn’t realised was in the next room. He also prevented me from sleeping with her by refusing to go to bed (different occasion) but hey, he was a mate. I recently told a couple of friends of mine that bumblebees never eat, they are gven all the food they need for their limited lifespan at htemoment of their birth and now I’m not sure if thats true or not. Help me!
Oh and my brother always has false titles on his driving licence. He finds “Mister” so unimaginative. When he explained to a colleague at work that a “Mujahadin” (unsure of spelling) was an Islamic holy warrior she asked “Oh so are you one of them?”. “Yes. Yes I am” was his reply. She was convinced.
OK, it wasn’t me, but my brother convinced a girl he had a silent X in his name, as in “Stexve”. So when people called him by his name, Steve, he would turn to her and say, “See, you don’t hear the X, but it’s there.”
“It’s not death I fear so much as leaving something so beautiful as life.”
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