One of my co-workers warned me against reaching above my head while I’m pregnant because someone she knows was hanging the washing out and it “hung the baby” (by the umbilical cord).
I said “Thank you for the warning”, and considered my breath saved.
I know someone who believes prunes and plums are two different fruits. She refused to even look at the dictionary definition.
I read a lot and never heard of her either. Granted, I mostly read computer science books. Yes, I read them for fun. Why do you ask?
LOL 
Seen her name? Yes. Know even the slightest thing about her books before this thread? No.
…
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.
If you’re over 70, single and looking, they pretty much are.
To quote Frank Costanza: “You have the rooster, the hen, and the chicken. The rooster goes with the chicken… So who’s having sex with the hen?”
My ex-gf had some of her books, I think, and I got the impression they were pulp novels about “Betrayal!!! Romance!!!” etc. So I never read them, and I have effectively no idea what they’re like. Basically, I got the idea that they were to some extent “chick-lit”.
Susan’s Dad: They’re all chickens. The rooster has sex with all of them.
Frank: That’s perverse!
When my wife was in the hospital with pneumonia, one of the persons visiting the other patient in the room was worried about the flowers someone had sent her.
“They take in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide,” he proclaimed, and the folks in his party nattered over that revelation in agreement and fear that this would be bad for their sick loved one. When the nurse came in, they asked her about it and she wryly replied, “Oh yeah, they’ll kill you every time.”
Away went the flowers.
My favorite are are arguments against evolution from people who are grossly unclear on the concept.
I had a boss whose argument went somthing like this:
“If I took ten people and threw them off a building, they, fall to the ground and die. Same with a hundred, a thousand, ten MILLION! Not a one of them would grow wings. Wings would let them survive, so they must be a ‘survival trait.’ So why wouldn’t any of them evolve wings?”
That’s when I stopped trying.
One of my sisters, a summa cum laude college graduate, swears that smoking cigarettes while pregnant actually strengthens the baby’s lungs. That’s why her premature baby only had to be on a respirator and in an incubator for three weeks, instead of five or six. She says that her doctor told her this, but I don’t believe that for a nanosecond.
My aunt, who is now in her early 60’s, spent her late teens working in a doctors office. She claims that back then doctors would prescribe cigarettes to women whom they thought were gaining too much pregnancy weight
That really did happen. My mother had experience with it when she was pregnant with her second child (early '50s). She had stopped smoking, but her doctor was afraid she would gain too much weight, so advised her to start again. She didn’t manage to quit again until she was 51.
Anyway, I’m not sure I’d call that “willful ignorance” (though I realize you didn’t actually claim it was; you were just responding to someone else). Back then, they really did believe that the placenta would block toxins from getting to the baby. Add to that the idea that the toxicity of cigarettes was waaaay underestimated anyway, and it seemed like a sound plan to the doctors.
[hijack] Doctors still haven’t settled on how much weight it’s “okay” to gain during pregnancy, either. In the mid-80s, when I was pregnant with kid number one, I was told I didn’t need to gain any weight, because I was already obese (I gained 20lbs anyway). With kid number two, four years later, I was told it wasn’t an issue, and don’t worry about it. I gained 20lbs. With kid number 3 in '99, I was told not to gain more than 25lbs since I was already obese. (Okay, with her I gained 30lbs. but in my defense, she weighed almost 12lbs at birth).
[/hijack]
Actually, I think she’s been losing popularity lately. She’s only had like two books out in recent years and there are so many more authors pushing out two or three a month, that she doesn’t get as much display time. Also the big mystery/thriller type books are spy novels a la Bond and Bourne, and Da Vinci Code style ‘secrets.’ I think Janet Evanovich and Patricia Cornwell are just as big or bigger names in the female mystery writing genre.
She’s still popular, but she’s no longer a big name. Janet Evanovich is the new bigtime female mystery writer. Although, I guess MHC writes “suspense” novels which is just a literary term for “not really mystery/but not really ‘general fiction’ either.”
And as for the cell phones in the library. While they are prohibited at the library I work at as well, we’re not really supposed to say anything to people unless someone complains because most people can talk on cell phones quietly and most know to switch off the ringer in the building.
Yeah, she writes “women in danger” books, along with people like Heather Graham and (I think) Tami Hoag.
And then there’s Carol Higgins Clark who writes mysteries. I don’t know if they are related.
My willful ignorance story:
My cat stuck his claw in my eye and I went to the emergency room. In the ER, a guy took my glasses, then made me go stand in the hall so I could look at the chart. I told him that my eyesight is extremely bad without glasses and he said I had to look at the chart. He marched me twenty feet away, turned me around and asked what the chart said. I said, “What chart? I can’t even see a chart.”
He was absolutely enraged by this. Apparently the sheer heft of the glasses he was holding didn’t clue him in that I can’t read such a chart on a good day without a cat claw in my eye.
He stormed away and didn’t come back.
The ER doctor who came in a few minutes later thought that was hilarious, took one look at my glasses and said, “Jesus, you ain’t kiddin’.”
Carol Higgins Clark is Mary Higgins Clark’s daughter. I believe they have even co-written a few books.