Ha! Clearly you have not been to my school.
I nominate everyone in this thread who willfully ignored the fact that not having heard of an author is not “willful ignorance”. 
[QUOTE=Ro Carter]
I’m not sure how I managed to hold the laughter in, but eventually the story came out: She thought earthworms lived in mud clods in the sky, then fell to earth with the rain.
[/QUOTE]
Hell, I used to think blood was found inside rocks when I was young. You fall, you smack your arm on a rock, the rock breaks and you get blood all over you.
Course, it was well before 10th grade when I learned the truth.
[QUOTE=Dante]
I nominate everyone in this thread who willfully ignored the fact that not having heard of an author is not “willful ignorance”. 
[/QUOTE]
Hey - we were just being polite here… this ain’t the Pit. 
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
– Albert Einstein
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits
– Albert Einstein
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
– Frank Zappa
There are more fools in the world than there are people.
– Heinrich Heine
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
– Robert Heinlein
[QUOTE=Dante]
I nominate everyone in this thread who willfully ignored the fact that not having heard of an author is not “willful ignorance”.
[/QUOTE]
Post #120.
[QUOTE=MissGypsy]
One of my sisters, a summa cum laude college graduate, swears that smoking cigarettes while pregnant actually strengthens the baby’s lungs.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, that’s how I improve my health. I eat a lot of chocolate and fat to narrow my arteries. This way I make my heart work harder, thus strenghtening it.
[QUOTE=FairyChatMom]
Gee, Skald, does your sis not believe in cars, TV, computers, and air conditioners? I don’t think any of those are in the Bible either.
I don’t know if this qualifies as willful or just an overglurged brain, but I know an individual who seems to think that there’s a direct connection between death and birth - if one person dies, another has to be born. I’m not sure how she reconciles the increasing world population…
[/QUOTE]
That is similar to a friend of mine who jokes that, “since matter cannot be created or destroyed” any weight that one person loses by dieting is gained by someone else. She maintains that her two sexy neighbours owe their svelte figures to her bravely refusing to diet.
[QUOTE=don’t ask]
That is similar to a friend of mine who jokes that, “since matter cannot be created or destroyed” any weight that one person loses by dieting is gained by someone else. She maintains that her two sexy neighbours owe their svelte figures to her bravely refusing to diet.
[/QUOTE]
Is she joking or serious?
[QUOTE=Throatwarbler Mangrove]
Good god! Prunes are dried plums!! :eek:
For some reason up until now I’ve always thought prunes were the same as dates. Not that it matters, since I despise all of them.
[/QUOTE]
Well, prunes are a type of plum, and usually they’re dried for eating. You can eat fresh prunes, though (my mom has a prune tree, and we eat them fresh), and you can’t make dried prunes out of any old kind of plum. Now they’re calling prunes “dried plums” as a marketing tactic, so it’s totally confused.
[QUOTE=dangermom]
..Now they’re calling prunes “dried plums” as a marketing tactic, so it’s totally confused.
[/QUOTE]
I notice they’re not mentioning how you should only eat a few of them, otherwise “regular” will take on a whole new meaning for you.
[QUOTE=fishbicycle]
I notice they’re not mentioning how you should only eat a few of them, otherwise “regular” will take on a whole new meaning for you.
[/QUOTE]
Oooh yeah… Now, I love me some prunes, right up to the point where I ate an entire jar of them in one sitting. Lemme tell ya, there was a whole lot more sitting to be done that night… :smack:
Anyways, what takes the cake for me is my grandmother. She’s quite possibly one of the most ignorant people I know. One day, one of my nieces was walking through the room, shuffling her feet. Grandmother gets all in a huff and tells her to not do that, “because colored people walk like that!”
:dubious:
Gotta love that ol’ fashioned casual Southern racism…
[QUOTE=Only Human]
Yeah, that’s how I improve my health. I eat a lot of chocolate and fat to narrow my arteries. This way I make my heart work harder, thus strenghtening it.
[/QUOTE]
I put my brain cells through a grueling Darwinian struggle every day by drinking a bottle of vodka. Those ones that are left, they’re, like, super-duper cells, and so I’m really clever, and stuff.
[QUOTE=ignis_glaciesque]
Anyways, what takes the cake for me is my grandmother. She’s quite possibly one of the most ignorant people I know. One day, one of my nieces was walking through the room, shuffling her feet. Grandmother gets all in a huff and tells her to not do that, “because colored people walk like that!”
:dubious:
Gotta love that ol’ fashioned casual Southern racism…
[/QUOTE]
I remember once being corrected in my pronunciation of New Orleans because “that’s how colored people pronounce it”.
The funny thing is, now I can’t recall if it was because I was saying New Or-leenz or New Or-lee-uns (the other of which I was told was the “correct” pronunciation).
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
A friend told me about a conversation she had with some guy she worked with. She has a degree in history, specializing in Roman and Greek. A group of them were talking about something, and this guy said ‘Well you know that the Roman empire fell because they were all gay’. My friend started naming all the real reasons that the Roman empire fell, and asked for evidence of the gay thing. This guy responded with ‘Oh so because you have a degree in this you think you know something about it?’
[/QUOTE]
Let this stand as a testament to the debt Western culture owes to Ancient Rome. After all, if an undereducated bigoted fool thinks he knows more about it than somebody with a degree in the subject, then the heritage of Rome must still be very current in our present day civilization.
[QUOTE=jjimm]
A friend of mine didn’t believe in binocular vision. This came to light when I overheard her telling someone that it didn’t matter if you lost an eye, because you’d still see the world in the same way, and only lose about 20% of the horizontal span. When I said you’d lose 3D, she told me I was talking crap, and there was no difference. She absolutely refuted the difference. When I pursued the subject, it became clear she had no idea what 3D vision was.
I got out an encyclopedia to show her diagrams, but before I could present them to her, she got upset and told me I was talking shit, and that I always picked on her by correcting her (which was true - she did talk a hell of a lot of bullshit, sadly).
The weird thing: she was a stage designer. No idea how she managed. Or maybe her designs all looked a little flat.
[/QUOTE]
This reminds me of a particular technical drawing class at school. We were creating 3d drawings using vanashing points on the left and right of the page. One girl failed to understand that as things get further away they will appear smaller, and that walls tops and bottoms converge if viewed at an angle. The teacher resorted to tracing the outlines of real buildings on a piece of acetate held against the classroom window. The girl couldn’t understand how the lines on the acetate converged when the building outside clearly had parallel top and bottoms.
perception is weird
[QUOTE=tdn]
“No, I mean do you play basic guitar?”
[/QUOTE]
Am I the only one who thought maybe they were thinking Bass Guitar?
[QUOTE=Boggette]
Am I the only one who thought maybe they were thinking Bass Guitar?
[/QUOTE]
Sure, except that the conversation addressed and specifically eliminated that as a possiblity. Otherwise that would have been my first thought too. As it is, I’m just baffled.
[QUOTE=Skammer]
Not only that, but (in the book of Acts) the disciples praise God with one Accord.
[/QUOTE]
In the Old Testament, the roar of David’s Triumph was heard throughout the land.
I’ve got a couple.
First one. I’ve got a brother who believes that there really were WMDs, that they were hidden in Syria before US troops could find them, that Iraq really did have something to do with the attack on September 11, 2001, that we don’t need to raise taxes to pay for the war because oil revenues from Iraq will more than cover the costs, and that George W. Bush will go down in history as a great president.
Second, quite a few years back, an entirely different brother brought a girlfriend home one summer. She spent the summer shacking up with him. Lovely girl, really, and very expensively educated, but one night, over dinner with the whole (very large) family, it became clear, during a discussion of some historical event or other, that she was unaware that BC dates ran in the opposite direction to AD dates. I can’t even imagine what her mental picture of the ancient world looked like.
OK, that one isn’t wilfull ignorance, I guess, just plain old ignorance with a good bit of stupidity thrown in, but I thought I’d put it in my post anyway.