I hate when a throw-a-way one-liner derails an entire thread.
Oh, wait. I mean I Love it! 
No, they actually look plenty alike (for cartoon characters), and so do Calvin and his mom. Squdgy round noses, little ears, big mouths, thin lips, skinny arms, slouchy walk, etc. (To be fair, Susie and most other people in C&H look like this too; Watterson didn’t really have a wide variety of physical types except the one heavyset schoolteacher, and IIRC there were never any non-white people in the strip.)
The only real difference is that Calvin’s hair is yellow and uncombed while his parents’ hair is darker and tidier.
A whole lot of adults still believe this.
Ask any PC repair technician.
Good grief.
The correct line is Round yon virgin, not young virgin.
I know what I heard. You callin’ Jesus’ mum old?
Also, the hymn is set in the time when the baby Jesus is actually present post-birth, so “yon virgin mother” isn’t pregnant any more and thus no rounder than anyone else.
(Nitpick: The line is 'round yon virgin mother and child, no comma. But most singers need a breath about halfway through that line, so people have come to expect a break between the words “virgin” and “mother”.)
I was absolutely convinced, never having seen them, that House on Haunted Hill and Rodan were the scariest movies ever made.
That little subtlety didn’t occur to me when I was that young. I was a little vague on the transition from pregnant to having had a child.
Hey, at least you didn’t mistakenly extrapolate from the estrous cycle of the (not-yet-spayed bitch) family pet to the incorrect inference that women can only get pregnant while they’re menstruating. So avoiding pregnancy must be really no big deal at all, right?
Honestly, I don’t think I quite got that error fully figured out until Sex Ed in my middle-school health class when I was about eleven or twelve. Sure glad they caught it before I embarked on the sexually active years myself.
Not so far from reality. My sister-in-law and her husband have only ever lived in new houses. She’s a bit of a germaphobe and can’t abide the idea of living in a house that some other gross people lived in. I don’t know how much flexibility you get in having the house built to spec though, I assume there’s only so much leeway there. But if you have enough money I imagine you can have the house built almost any way you want, depending on local zoning laws.
The fact that the Holy Infant is tender and mild made me think that they were describing a recipe. Frankly, it STILL makes me think recipe, and is weirdly appropriate since Jesus is on the menu every Sunday at church.
The light was controlled by a tall skinny man who lived in the pole and changed the lights. At least that’s what I believed when I was 6.
I heard this as an old joke:
"An Indian chief had two sons, Straight Arrow and Falling Rocks. As young men, they went on quests to find their purposes in life. Straight Arrow returned and took over the burden of ruling from the chief; he ruled wisely and the people prospered. But Falling Rocks never returned.
The tribe searched and searched, but never found him. And to this day, parents tell their children to be Straight Arrows. And to this day you see signs on roads all over the country which state “Look out for Falling Rocks.”
One of David Barry’s more famous columns has this (paraphrase) “For a long time the only women getting pregnant were unwed teenage girls, who are incredibly fertile and can get pregnant just by standing downwind of teenage boys.”
Mad Magazine #93 had a cartoon of a child reading the headline “Guerillas attack across Plain of Jars.” And the accompanying thought picture was, of course, gorillas running across the tops of glass jars.
Now my turn. In the 1960’s there was a announcer for the Tiger baseball games and whenever a ball was hit into the stands he would immediately announce something like “And that ball was caught by Bill Smith, visiting from Toledo Ohio.” I could never figure out how he KNEW. Until someone explained - He’s making that up.
Well, Calvin is a redhead
My grandparents owned a movie theater. When I was told that Abraham Lincoln was shot in a theater, then carried by soldiers to a building across the street, I visualized G.I.s in olive drab fatigues carrying him from my grandparents’ theater.
At some delicate pre-teen age I had cobbled together enough facts about how babies are made that PIV was required. However, the only thing that I knew that came out of a penis was urine (and I knew that THAT didn’t make babies), and wondered what in the world a man could do to make something else come out, and what this mysterious substance was.
I (over) use the line “how cruelly we mistreat you” to my teenagers whenever they rail against some perceived injustice that me or my wife has committed – like insufficiently stocking the pantry with their favorite snacks, or not cooking dinner in a timely manner, or not driving them 4 blocks to their friend’s house when it’s drizzling.
My contribution, and I’m actually embarrassed to admit this… for years I though sex (the actual physical act) was a painful experience for both partners and that it only happened out of sheer necessity to propagate the species. Otherwise it was a horrible disgusting vicious act.
My mother was raised old-school Catholic and had an uber-sinful, fire-and-brimstone view of sex. She informed me and my brother that sex involved the couple being literally stuck together for ~2 hours (in her description, the man’s penis swelled and prevented the woman from moving or otherwise disengaging) and was a miserable experience for both partners. I recall once that they tried to breed their female pure-bred Rottweiler. They paid some guy a fee to use his stud Rott for a long weekend and I remember my mom making sure my brother and I were not allowed to witness any possible canine copulation. I was maybe 11 or 12. I still remember the stud dog’s name: Panzer. Took me a few years before that one clicked.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid teens and the advent of the internet that I discovered the truth.
I’ve never really analyzed why my mom told us that weird shit for so many years. She and my dad have a fairly normal relationship – all their arguments that I know about were about money and he certainly isn’t the abusive type, if anything she’s meaner than he is – and she was never abused as a kid / teen as far as I know. So… I dunno. I don’t dwell on it because I probably really don’t want to know the answer. I hope it was just a way to avoid having sons who were teenage parents.
Are you sure she wasn’t describing dogs? They actually do get stuck – it’s called the copulatory tie. I doubt it’s a miserable experience for the dogs, though.
Along similar lines, when I was very young and learned what the word “virgin” meant, I had a really hard time with it.
See, there was the Virgin Mary. And she was perfect and good. And sex was bad and sinful. And even though “virgin” meant that someone had never had sex, it was still a sex word about sex, which made it a dirty and sinful thing to talk about and something that should just never be mentioned at all… so why was it in the hymns? Why were we talking about sex in Christmas songs? Why was a sex word essentially part of her name?
Of course, it made sense later on when I more solidly understood the connection between sex and babies and the miracle of a virgin birth and so forth.
Allllso… this one was when I was quite a bit older, but…
Okay. So I loved to read books about horses and read all the horse books I could get my hands on. And they would occasionally talk about giving a horse his head. Which I figured by context meant sort of loosening up on the reins and giving them more freedom.
So later on, when I heard people talk about “giving head,” I thought it meant something similar. It.. uh… doesn’t.