I was at Niagara Falls once and I told my friend that over a thousand litres flow over the falls every second. He thought that was an interesting fact, even though I had meant it as a humourously egregious underestimate. (It’s more like 2.4 million litres per second.)
It might be even better to remark how much more spectacular the falls would be in the southern hemisphere where the flow would be in the other direction. 
I was walking across a parking lot one day and heard a man complaining about how windy it was. I pointed up to the mountains and said maybe it wouldn’t be so windy if they shut off those damn fans. He just stared at me for a minute and went back to load his groceries into his car.
There were windmills on top of the mountains.
Maybe this qualifies as a woosh, or it could be a reverse-woosh, but here goes.
In 1979 I had a part-time job at a discount department store, and also helped a buddy put on what people called “disco” events. (Yes, I admit that, even now!)
My buddy showed up at my work one day to ask about my availability for an out of town gig the upcoming Saturday. I happened to be helping a co-worker stock some items when the buddy showed up. (Now this co-worker was attractive in an outstanding way, and as dumb as a sack of wet kittens.)
The buddy asked about the gig. I said I could manage it. He then asked co-worker if she would like to go and help. Her innocently-intended reply astonished both of us: "I’m supposed to work, but if you’ll get me off, I’ll come."
Neither of us said anything to her after that. Not for a very long time.
I told the secretary at work I was leaving early because my mom was having back surgery. She asked why and I said “It was my fault, I stepped on a crack.”
She looked at me with a look of pity and said “Oh, you must feel awful.”
Visited Africa several decades ago, and brought back some great pictures, including one of a “sausage tree.” Shortly after the trip we were showing the pics to a family friend and had her almost convinced that these were real sausages in the tree, and that that was where sausages came from. She had known all her life that sausage was made from animals, but this was back in the 1980s before Photoshop was any kind of thing, and here was this genuine, incontrovertible photo of a tree that was loaded with sausages. She struggled mightily to reconcile these two things - and we struggled to maintain straight faces for as long as we could.
Around this same time, clear plastic bottles for beverages were a new thing, and my parents had bought a gallon jug of wine in a plastic bottle. The plastic was tinted green so it looked like an ordinary glass wine jug, but you could of course deform it by squeezing it with your hands or fingers…and so we told this woman that it was made of “soft glass.” She was amazed by it, until it finally occurred to her that it was ordinary goddam plastic.
I’m from Alaska, which has always made me a bit of an oddity. I used to tell guys in the military that my family had a pet moose that we would ride. They always called bullshit, but I had (still have) a photo to ‘prove’ it, with me, my brother and my stepfather sitting on its back. After that I could convince them of pretty much anything, such as the family in the next igloo using a polar bear instead of dogs to pull their sled. It was a career-long whoosh for me.
I told a friend that catnip, when rolled up in cigarette papers, made you high, just like it did for cats. She was a little skeptical, so we rolled one and lit it. I was able to get her to convince herself that it worked.
My wife and I visited a friend in Seattle during one of their rare snowstorms. After the storm, all three of us went out and built a snowman.
As we were building it, our friend asked, “Do you think this is how professional ice carvers get started?”
My wife replied with, “No, I think they start with a chainsaw.”
My wife & I were watching Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. The plot progressed to the point where people were running around challenging each other to duels and fainting and generally carrying on.
Wife: They sure are getting pretty excited about stuff that doesn’t matter.
Me: That’s the name of the play.
Not long ago I had a cow-orker semi-convinced that you should change the air in your vehicle’s tires about every 10,000 miles.
She actually called her husband right then and asked him. His response: “He’s messing with you”.
mmm
When I was in fourth or fifth grade, we were studying the moon. Our teacher asked why the flag they left on the moon was standing straight out instead of hanging down. I raised my hand, was called on, and replied, “It’s from the breeze of the Earth whizzing by.”
She shot me a pitying look, said no and moved on.
Say, is that a literal whoosh?
There’s the corn muffin story.
And one time when I got wooshed: I was 19, in college, having dinner with a couple guys who’d known each other for most of their lives. One was describing to the other some piece of furniture and the term naugahyde came up. I’d never heard of naugahyde before, so I straight asked, “What’s that?” I guess they didn’t think I was that stupid and that I was just being a smartass, but I’d also obliged them to explain. Chris: “Uh, you know, skin from naugas? Nauga hide?” Blank stare. One of them, my roommate, knew my looks well enough by then to know they had me good. Brian: “Wait, you’re from Mossland” (what they called Western Washington, we were now in the much drier Eastern Washington), looks over at Chris, “They don’t have Naugas over there.”
They went on to educate me about the nauga’s preferred habitat (the Touchet beds to the east of the Columbia River–surely I had seen their burrows when driving through there?). And come to think of it I had seen some largish burrows there alongside the highway. It went on. They talked about various nauga hunts they’d been on, how some uncle or other was particularly adept at tracking & bagging them, and so on. Maybe 5 minutes and then the conversation meandered off to something else. I never called bullshit and was just thankful these two guys were kind enough to school me on naugas.
Years later the three of us were on a fishing/camping/drinking trip on the Columbia. We passed through a section of Touchet beds, saw the burrows, and I remarked I’d still never seen a nauga and maybe they would show me how to get them? A good laugh ensued. Not because I’d been totally fooled for YEARS about the existence of these mythical creatures, but because they’d always believed I’d never actually fallen for it and had gotten the better of THEM by failing their yarn at the outset. That was about 30 years ago. They still bring it up.
For reference, Washington is divided into two pretty distinct climates and cultures. In a nutshell.
Actually, you need to change out your winter air for summer air in the spring and then vice versa in the fall.
Back in the 80’s I was installing a hard drive for a customer and had to format it once that was done. Fairly time consuming considering drive speeds at the time.
Client asks why they don’t ship the drives pre-formatted.
I responded that the drives weigh less unformatted.
Client was happy with that response and I didn’t think I could correct myself without upsetting him.
Speaking of which, in programming class in the 80s we had IBM PCs that had a “turbo” button for regulating cpu speed. A substitute asked what the turbo button was for and I said “you press that when you want to run Turbo Pascal.” She didn’t disbelieve me and I didn’t correct her since I figured she would not teach computer science every day.
Yeah, I figured it had to be fairly recently (compared to the original release of Naugahide) because at the time the “nauga” wasn’t an obscure joke but the main marketing campaign of the product. (Note the appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.) They were sold in the 1960s and they are sold now (but probably not 30 years ago.) So basically there are whole new levels of whoosh you were unaware of and–given that your friends probably didn’t know about this either, they were self-whooshing.
I see birthday presents…
You HAVE to do this.
A new player joined my World of Warcraft guild and revealed that he was in high school.
ME: I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you any more. I don’t talk to teenagers over the internet. The judge was quite clear about that.
HIM: Oh, sorry to hear that.
ME: 