I thought this might be a fun thread (or might die a quick death).
This morning at 1:45 AM I receive a text message from my son that said: “Do you think I could beat Serena Williams in a fight?”
I didn’t see it until I woke up this morning. For a little background; my daughter (26) had gone over to hang out with my son (29) last night. They get along like best friends; so when I saw the text message (and the time it was sent) I thought to myself that those two knuckleheads had a few beers and managed to get into a silly argument. It totally cracked my up. It reminded me of my brother, who as a 20+ something year old actually got into a fist fight with a friend of his over who was closer to a mutual friend of theirs that had died from Leukemia!
By the way, my son is 6’2", I’d guess about 225 lbs. and coaches gymnastics. Serena Williams is 155 lbs. Yes I know she looks bigger on TV!
So; anyway… Do any of you have funny arguments you’ve been witness to; that you’d care to share? Because I see great entertainment value in that!
Yeah, but they were more because of language issues than actual arguments.
One day I was talking to my friend’s sister about one of my co-workers who consistently left early, came in late, took long lunches, etc. My boss was always on me asking where the co-worker was and I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to be a rat either.
My friend’s sister had a reputation for being pretty tough.
She suggested that the next time he left early I should punch him out. I said I couldn’t do that, he is pretty big and strong. She says his size shouldn’t matter, punch him out. I’m thinking, ‘damn! this girl is tough’ I tell her, look he’s 6’2" and strong there is no way I can punch him out, she is arguing I can.
Finally my friend’s father looks at me and says ‘Time clock’.
Another time I got into an argument with a cousin who got a new dog. Somewhere in the conversation she mentioned she was going to get her dog a buzz. I told her that was a mean thing to do and even if she thought it was cool it’s not fun for the dog. She’s said what’s wrong with a buzz, it will be cool and the dog will like it. We went back and forth until I realized she was talking about a haircut.
I think I’ve told this story here before. There was a local bar that many of us would frequent on some nights. It had a pool table and there was a blackboard where people would list the next to play. The winner kept the table and prepared for the break, and next guy on the board would have to put quarters in and rack. IOW, typical bar activity.
One my friends at the time went by the nickname “Utah”. This is because he was basically a miniature version of Karl Malone. The reason I mention this is that Utah is not a typical nickname in North Jersey.
As coincidence would have it, another dude nicknamed “Utah” was in the same bar that night and put his name up on the board to get in line to play pool. Well, this really ticked off my friend who proclaimed “I’m the only Utah in this bar!”. Well the other guy was just as ticked, since he was apparently given the nickname since he was a child. Fight ensued, but we all broke it up before it got bad. We later learned that neither “Utah” has ever been near the state of Utah and neither knew the capital of state.
When I was a teenager my friend and I were talkin to another teen about Black Sabbath, and the first cut on the album Vol. 4. There’s a guitar break where in the background you can hear Ozzie say “yeah.”
“He says sack.”
“What?”
“He says sack.”
“Um… he says yeah.”
“No he says sack. Because he’s insane. You know that song Am I Going Insane? That means he’s insane. That’s why he says sack.”
I don’t know if that’s the stupidest argument, but it has to be in the top three.
Former friend (and this is one of the reasons why) would get ideas into his head and then get stuck in his own thought process, disregarding everything the other person said or any version of reality.
We had a session that I ran where they attacked a Kobold Procession. A bunch of Kobold Sorcerers run up and begin hurling spells at them, each one casting a different spell, the same spell each round.
After the game, he follows me back to my apartment to ‘confront’ me about it, claiming I was cheating by having one kobold cast all those spells every round. I point out that there were SIX kobold Sorcerers on the map, each casting a different spell.
“Well you shouldn’t have had one kobold casting all those spells”
“There wasn’t, there were six”
“But you shouldn’t have had one kobold casting all those spells”
<repeat that there were six different kobolds and ask if he’s even listening to me>
“I hear what you’re saying, but you still shouldn’t have had one kobold casting all those spells”
Repeat for several minutes with me getting progressively angrier and trying to get him to realize that he’s saying and how the rules of the game don’t allow that, but he just keeps saying “I hear you” and the same bullshit “but you still shouldn’t have had one kobold casting all those spells”.
I kicked his ass out of my apartment.
Later we discussed this (which wasn’t the first time I’d had this kind of argument with him) and he admitted that when he’s arguing things with people, he doesn’t actually listen to what they say. “I’m so focused on the fact that what I’m thinking makes sense to me that all I hear is that you don’t agree, and I have to keep making my point.” I explained that maybe if he bothered to listen to what the other person actually said, he might understand that he was being a fucking dumbass and he should stop it.
I find a lot of stupid arguments work this way. One party is so convinced that they are right that they don’t bother listening to what the other person said, or for the most part, listening to what is coming out of their own mouth.
Edit to add: or they fail to comprehend that the other person doesn’t understand what they’re saying and they just keep repeating the same words rather than using different words to try to gain understanding.
My husband and I once got into a fight over whether or not Green Day’s album ‘‘American Idiot’’ (Particularly the title song) was a critique of the Iraq War and Bush Administration. He insisted that there was no way I could know that, and it could have been any old war or political ideology in general.
And this was a fight. Like we had to pull the car over and I almost jumped out and left, and we were pissed at each other the whole night. I think I even pounded my fist against the inside of the car door at one point.
(He now admits I’m right and he has no idea what he was thinking.)
For a while at work there was a sign-up sheet to put your name on for coveted weekend overtime. When the sheet got posted, where, and who had opportunity to sign it first all became things to argue over. Some of those concerns were valid, actually, so the arguments served to get to a fairer sharing of opportunity.
The screaming, veins-bulging Springer-like whopper of all arguments came when two people decided to fight over whether printing or signing were equally righteous. Seriously, fighting about cursive. People were taking sides, profanity abounding, it was epic and the only resolution that happened was the end of sign up sheets and the beginning of a scheduled rotation of overtime.
Yes! Rules disputes in any sort of game (though especially those with aspects that are open to interpretation) can be really, really stupid. For my nerdier example, I’ve put the core in bold. Skip the non-bold bits if you don’t play the game and/or don’t care.
I once saw (and briefly posted in) an argument over what would happen if someone forcibly put a helmet on a druid. For those not aware, in 3.5 edition of Dungeons and Dragons, a druid who wears metal armor loses his powers for a day. The argument centered around whether the armor had to be willingly worn, how much lenience the god/nature spirits in question would have for unwilling wearing of armor and whether helmets even count as armor; logic says yes but the organization of at least one rule book says no.
I was once running a Dungeons and Dragons game in which a player used an ability with a fixed duration. Some time later, he asked me how much time had passed in-game since the spell was cast and I asked him how long the spell was supposed to last. I don’t remember which question was asked first but we managed to get into an argument over who should answer the other’s question first.
I once got into an argument on a Magic the Gathering message board over a new rules term being used and whether an old term in a different tense would mean the same thing. The argument lasted at least 2 or 3 pages. The game had just been updated to replace the phrasing “when is put into a graveyard from play” with “when dies” both on new cards and the officieal rules of old cards. Early editions of the game used the instruction “bury ” to mean “put in the graveyard” but had been replaced in more recent editions with “destroy . It can’t be regenerated.” which has additional rules meaning. The argument was whether “when dies” and “when is burried” would have the same meaning and whether the word “dies” was thus unnecesary to add to the game.
I once got into an argument during a game of Scrabble over whether or not “heck” is a word. One side argued that it was “just slang for hell” and thus not an actual word. No dictionaries were present.
I once got into an argument during a game of Scattergories over whether comic books are “cartoons” so that a character from a comic book who had never appeared in any other media would be a “cartoon character”.
I’ve run into these. I can’t remember any specifics, but I know I’ve had several arguments that evenutally ended with me shouting/posting “You can stop arguing! We’re agreeing with each other!” before the other guy realized he was so caught up in that he was arguing against points I had never made that he assumed I’d made because we were “arguing”.
I once asked my boss about some minor procedural point of the job and we ended up “arguing” for five minutes before we realized we were agreeing with each other using slightly different terms and examples.
One time I overheard an amusing argument between two people in another class at my school. They were discussing a drag queen. They had a (quite friendly) argument over whether the man should be referred to as “he” or “she” when he/she was in drag.
I had have two, stupid, BITTER arguments with my husband. The worst fights we’ve had about anything, in fact:
Whether Data is entitled to human rights (before I had seen “Measure of a Man”, which doesn’t resolve all of it anyway.)
Whether the aliens in the remake of War of the Worlds were “better” than the ones in the old version. I argued from a position of how likely a species would evolve to grow tri-color eyes (not), and we ran the gamut from sea creatures to gravitational issues. (I still don’t classify that one as stupid, but I can see how others may disagree).
These were the worst fights we’ve had - worse than ones about money and housework and stuff.
A fun one my wife and I recently got into was was regarding GI Joe. Of course my assertion is that GI Joe is NOT a doll, he’s an Action Figure, Damnit!
I try really hard not to be that guy, but I confess sometimes I find myself being that guy. It’s not something I especially like about myself.
Many years ago I remember an argument on a grammar messageboard about whether “John’s” in “John’s dog is a schnauzer” is an adjective, a noun acting like an adjective, or simply a noun. It was actually kind of an interesting discussion, but the vitriol hurled between different posters was wayyyyy out of step with the importance of the subject.
My wife and I saw Batman Begins together. I loved it and was nerd-jazzed when we got out of the theater; she hated it. Fine. Except that her criticism of it was that it should have been set in a 1930s Art-Deco world instead of a modern grungy world. I thought that criticism along those lines (“My idea is a lot cooler”) is an invalid kind of criticism, and we really got into it. Over a freaking comic book movie. We both know how ridiculous the argument was, but I think we’re still both a little bitter over it.
My brother and I were once playing, with some other people, a mediocre fantasy game called Talisman. It’s like a four-hour game, and it was running late, and I really had to get home, but I was also winning, so I wanted to finish. My brother is a genius at finding rules loopholes to exploit, and he found one early in the game that protected him from one of my powers; due respect. But against all odds he managed in the last few minutes to bring the game to an almost tie. I was still going to win because I was so much ahead–except that he found a new rules loophole that would drag out my victory for another 20 minutes and possibly endanger it, in part by reading an ambiguous rule slightly differently from how he’d read it during the first loophole. I kind of lost my shit and refused to acknowledge his new interpretation, and it was uncomfortable for everyone, and not at all my finest moment.
My husband and I once had a long argument about Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”.
His position was that “you probably think this song is about you” cannot be considered an example of the guy’s vanity, because he’s right; the song is about him.
My position was that whether or not it’s actually about him is irrelevant. He doesn’t think the song is about him because he hears it and thinks, “You know, I’m pretty sure that’s me she’s singing about. I recently won at the track, and I did take some ladies up to Canada for the eclipse. I’m even wearing that apricot scarf right now, in fact.” He would think it’s about him even if it actually weren’t, because he is so vain that he thinks everything is about him.
