At Busch Gardens: Africa, in an “African Wildlife” exhibit labeled “RING-TAILED LEMURS” in several places.
“Oh, honey look at the raccoons! I didn’t know raccoons could jump like that!”
I almost fell over. Note, these people were from the midwest US, from their accents. My family still hauls that one out whenever we see raccoons, most recently when we found a family of “lemurs” living in the chimney of our new house.
Obligatory text
This reminds me of a time my husband and I were in a pet store and there was this kid. He kept running up to all of the glass cases where rodents were and banging on the glass yelling “Look at the RAAAAAAT. Look at the RAAAAAAAAAT.”
His father was trailing along behind him making observations about the rodents. The kid got to the gerbils. “Look at the RAAAAAAAAAAT. Look at the RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.”
His dad said, “That’s a mighty funny looking rat.”
The kid reads the little tag and screams (with a hard g) “It’s a GURRRBIL! Look at the GURRRRBIL!”
His dad said, “That’s a mighty funny looking gurrrbil.”
Now I say that whenever I see a rodent. “That a mighty funny looking raaaaat/gurrrrbil.”
This thread is about willful ignorance, not sheer stupidity. But if you want to go down that road, here is something I posted a few years back:
I work in a hospital. In the main corridor there is a series of large portraits of not only great doctors but great thinkers. Like Alberts Sweitzer and Einstein. One portrait is of an elderly Helen Keller and her elderly companion Polly Thompson (the only “double” portrait in the corridor). As I was walking by just now a woman stopped to look at it, and said to her friend “Wow, this is a great one! Come here, you have to see this!”
So the friend looked at it and said “Wow, that is great. But how come there’s two of her? Oh wait, I get it. In one she’s not wearing her glasses.”
So, have we determined that Mary Higgins Clark is a basic guitarist with binocular vision?
Her joke reminds me of something from an early issue the late, great [del]PLANET EARTH[/del] Omni Magazine! (I would date the article to probably 1978, possibly '79.)
It was about the “Man Will Never Fly” Society. Their literature proclaims that the Wright Brothers did no such thing as build an (impossible) flying machine. Actually what they intended to do and actually did was build a “fat chaser.”
They idea is that when people lose weight, particles of fat enter the air, making it eventually quite clogged. Hence the need for a fat chaser.
… before you get all excited and confused about a “new” pseudo-science cult that you have somehow have never heard of, here’s the likely reason you haven’t heard of it until now:
MWNF Society is a drinking club!
So, unlike genuine Flat Earth groups, their literature and sayings are not meant seriously.
Although I suppose it’s possible that they have attracted some people who really are aviation-deniers.
True Blue Jack
P.S.: May be MWNF Memorial Society
Edited to remove “(” after third asterisk above.
In response to the whole eye thing: My oldest son grew up with what’s called “lazy eye.” I don’t know the actual term for it, but on his left eye, the muscles on one side were significantly weaker than on the other. Eventually, surgery corrected the problem, so he didn’t look “wall-eyed” all the time. Although his eyes appear to “track” together, he does not have binocular vision. He seems to turn one eye or the other off when he’s reading, often tilting his head to one side or the other to use only one eye to read. He has otherwise perfect vision in each eye. He has apparently learned to compensate for the lack of binocularity; in high school he played football and set a school record for PAT and field goal points.
Concerning the OP, I’m tempted to simply post that my BIL is Mormon, but that would be unsportsmanlike, so I won’t. However, when I was a lad, my cousin hit me with the old, “for every person who dies, a baby is born.” When I pointed out that (even back then) world population was growing rapidly, she shook her had and explained, “I didn’t say a person dies for every baby born, but a baby is born for ever person who dies. There’s a difference.” She didn’t understand that unless they are offset one-for-one, there’s no correlation, even a false one. Apparently, some babies are replacements, others are just for the hell of it.
I believe the accepted term in Reaganoptometrics is “ocular welfare dependency”.
Hmmmm, that would make sense, since he did grow up in the 1980s …
Years ago we had a major tornado outbreak that wiped out entire neighborhoods roughly 15 miles from my home. People lost everything.
There was a man that shopped at the store I worked in who really took the cake. He was threatening a lawsuit against the Red Cross because they wouldn’t pay to have a hole fixed in his roof caused by the same storm. He sincerely believed that the Red Cross was legally obligated to fix any and all storm damage at no cost to him because he couldn’t afford insurance. He wouldn’t hear a word against it either.
Funnily enough, he could afford a brand new Lincoln Town Car.
Earlier this year, I was going to head over to my friend’s house. He asked me to pick up a pack of smokes for him on the way there. Since he’s always been pretty generous with me, I obliged.
I was 20 at the time. When I asked for the pack, the cashier asked, “Are you over 18?” I said yes and pulled out my ID. He protested, “I don’t need to see your ID. You said you’re 18. If you ask an undercover cop if they’re 18, they can’t bust you if they say yes.” I tried to help him out by disabusing him of this popular UL, but he only got louder and more indignant. Hopefully that guy’s been busted.
It’s like the people who explain how they’re the exception to the rule like it’s a normal thing. Like all the two-eyed people who aren’t binocular.
My favorite example of willful ignorance: I was with friends when one of them was telling a story about how his brother, a newspaper reporter, called a McDonald’s manager and asked if rattlesnakes were ever discovered in their playground ball pits. The manager was of course extremely peeved.
I said “It’s just like when every town that has a KFC will have a story about the Kentucky Fried Rat.”
My friend Ted said “Well, I know for a fact it happened in Jacksonville.”
I said “Well, I don’t doubt that you believe that’s true, but my point was that every town that has a KFC has the rat story.”
He said “You don’t understand. I was there when it happened!”
The more I poopooed it, the more layers of authenticity he would add, like: he was working there when it happened; he was the one who discovered it; he was the one who cooked it; and he was the one who ate it.
And he was being serious. He does have a sense of humor, but hates to be disbelieved.
You pooped out a rat?
You should have kept going with him. In a few more minutes you could have forced him to hork up the rat.
Or escalate to admitting that he was the rat.
Actually, depending on where the sheep are at, it’s often more common to sheer the sheep in spring, after the cold of winter has passed. Certainly, when I was growing up in Massachusetts there was a sheep farm in town that did the sheering as an open house around Easter. And took orders for the lambs. 
So, sheep are more than wool-producing machines: They produce yummy lambs, too!
My mother was extremely suspicious when I told her that when she saw a star in the sky, that what was happening was that light had traveled hundreds of millions of miles across space and time only to enter her eye and terminate there. I told her she could effectively see hundreds of millions of miles. She wasn’t having any of it.
Good thing you didn’t tell her she was looking into the past as well or she would’ve taken a switch to your hide!
Um, Bourne isn’t a city, is it? At least not in the sense it’s used there.
It is a Surname though.
Here’s my contribution:
Yesterday, while debating global warming/climate change, a woman from Australia tried to convince me that if the poles melt, the tilt of the earth will change, and then to try to prove it, proceeded to provide me a link to a website that said the following quote:
“What does pace the buildup and collapse of ice sheets is changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis, the imaginary line that runs through the north and south poles. Increasing the planet’s tilt increases the intensity of summer sun without making summer shorter. That increases melting. Therefore, ice ages come and go mostly because of changes in the tilt of Earth’s orbit around the sun. It’s this so-called obliquity, not the wobble of the planet, that is responsible for the dramatic shifts in Earth’s ice cover.”
Good thing you didn’t tell her that when you said “hundreds of millions” you were understating it one millionfold! :dubious: