Stupid stuff you once didn’t know… or still don’t know.

In My Humble Opinion
61

I’m 38 and still have to sing the alphabet song and the month poem.

I truly s*ck at math even though I’m a musician and am supposed to be good at that sort of thing. My last math class was geometry in the 10th grade. I got through the rest of HS and four years of college without taking any more math courses. Now THAT’s an accomplishment! Because it’s so alien to me I now find it interesting so go figure.

Perhaps I make up for it in navigation skill, map reading, and innate sense of direction - except when I’m in Pennsylvania.

This just in - I just realized last week that the french word for states - etats - is state spelled backwards! Dude!

I still don’t know much about women. I managed to get one to like me, though.

62

What? You’re all psychos! It’s “doss” (“oss” as in the end of “boss”), the way it looks. In all my years I’ve never heard it pronounced any other way… and I know a lot of people into computers. Maybe it’s just my kerrazy Aussie accent… but it would seem to make sense…

63

You sort of lost the rhyming there at the end.

ahem

30 days hath September,
April, June, and November.
All the rest have 31,
excepting February all alone,
which has 28 days clear,
29 in every leap year.

64

I didn’t know where babies came out of until I was 11. I knew just about everything else about reproduction until then, but I just assumed some extra orifice would magically appear in the woman’s stomach when it was time to deliver.

I didn’t know Nissan was Datsun until about a minute ago. 8^)

65

I also had problems remembering the order the months were in for a while…I think I was 10 or close to it before I had them down pat.

Oh yeah, I also couldn’t tie my own shoes until 3rd grade. I got in trouble because my bitch of a teacher told me to tie my shoes and thought I was smarting off when I told her I didn’t know how.

66

I learned…

…which has 28, rain or shine,
and in leap year, 29.
I used the knuckle calendar for a long time to remember which had months had 31 days and which didn’t:
Make a fist with your left hand.
Start from the pinky knuckle and move right, naming the months.
On each knuckle (31 days in the month)
Space between knuckles (fewer than 31 days in the month):

January [sub]February[/sub] March [sub]April[/sub] May [sub]June[/sub] July

Ran out of knuckles? Start again at the pinky and move right.

August [sub]September[/sub] October [sub]November[/sub] December
[sub]Okay, I still use it once in a while.[/sub]

67

What’s that suppose to mean? Huh? So I was about seventeen or so when I learned it. Got a problem with that, Mr. Harvardyard brainiac?

Actually, the only way I could remember it was the ‘JASON’ trick. Those months always screwed me up. But, remembering JJASON- June, July, August, September, etc., helped me tremendously.

Someone else mentioned strange ways of doing math. Me too! And let me just point something out here, either I’m the biggest dolt that ever lived and posted on this board, or you people are not admiting to dick around here!

Where was I? Math. That’s it. I’ve always hated math. I too was able to avoid it during the later years of HS and first years of college. I was happy.

However, once I changed my major, I had to have ‘X’ amount of math classes under my belt to graduate. That, or test out of it, I don’t remember. What was truly bad was having to go in for a placement test, at age 23 or so, full of machismo, and being placed in elementary math for no credits. That sucked.

Anyhoo, back to how I do math. I’ve never memorized the answers to questions like, 'What is 9+8? or ‘What is 6+8?’. Instead, I do another trick. I look at what will take me to get to 10, and go from there. With the 9+8, I’d go, well 9+1=10 and 1-8=7, so the answer is 17! Or 8+6=?, 8+2=10 and 6-2=4, so 10+4=14 or 8+6=14! Yay!!

This little method or trick comes in handy when adding a bunch of numbers, ie. it came in handy when I bartended and the few times I’ve played 21 at the casino. When you get used to it, you can add sequentially pretty damn fast.

That damn knuckle to finger-gap, days-in-a-month, thing always irritated me… for obvious reasons. I could never figure out what people were doing when they showed me that. They always looked so smug when they said, ‘Simple. Do this- blah, blah, blah’. I never had the heart to go ‘HHhhhaaayyyy!?!’.

An added bonus of this thread, to me, has been learning the different tricks people use to get by when they can’t remember things. I think I’ll try learning that poem and stun my friends the next time we’re out for a few beers, “Hey John, watch this- 'Thirty daaaaays hath Septemmmmmber. April, Junnnne, and Novemmmmmmber…”.

Seriously, this has been enlightening. Add to my idiocy here, and give me some home-grown tricks of the trade.

68

CNote
Rest assured, I would never be smug to you (or anyone elese for that matter).

69

Well now Screech.

If you show me your way, I’ll show you mine. He he.

Seriously, though, having only recently mastered the months and their corresponding numbers when I need to write a check, I’m letting the how many days in a month thing go for now.

But it does remind me of a funny story. A few years ago, when I was still tending bar, my manager came up to me with a big grin on his face. He handed me a schedule request he had just found in his in-box. It was from our dishwasher, bar back, and all around gopher. I forget his name, but he was a great guy, all of us liked him and he worked well.

His only problem was being a bit of a stoner at that point in his life. He didn’t always pay attention to the details and could care less about it. I admire that- screw the minutiae, give me the big picture.

Anyrate, I forget the exact details, but the request went something like this- “Mike. Could I please have March 28-33 off? I want to go to the NORML convention. Thanks.”

NORML has something to do with legalizing weed and all that is good and swell. -I still get a smile just remembering that story.

(I should note that I only mention this because the guy in question, when we pointed it out to him, laughed about himself and didn’t take offense. He was that kind of guy. Had he been humiliated or hurt, I wouldn’t repeat it here.)

So, Screech, when it comes time for me to learn how many days are in a month, I’ll come looking for ya. Thanks.

70

Oh lordy…I’m a really stupid person :slight_smile:

Until I was in the 8th grade, I had no concept that the south had lost the Civil War. (I lived in Florida at the time) I recognized that we abolished slavery, but I guess I always assumed that the states sat down and compromised. Man I had shitty teachers.

It was only last year that I discovered that Alaska wasn’t actually seperated from the rest of the US. You know how it’s always in a seperate box on maps? I thought it was an island.

Until I moved up here, I thought all the little Northern states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, etc.) were really just a cluster of empty land. Man was I shocked when I saw Boston!!

I still don’t know the first thing about cars. I drove around with my ‘check oil’ light on for a good 2 weeks before adding oil. Mechanics must love me.

Nissan and Datsun are the same? I honestly never knew that!

71

Guano-that’s how I learned it…
In third grade-we kept questioning why it no longer rhymed.

72

I never learned my weights and measures. Pints? Quarts? Cups? How many ounces in a pound? How long is a mile? I’ve no idea. I think that was because when we were going over this in elementary school, they were also trying to teach the metric system. So I wound up being completely unable to remember either.

73

I can’t figure out how money worked in England before they decimalized it. Makes some mystery novels incomprehensible. I can’t imagine people’s bodies based on height and “stones” either. A stone’s about 18 pounds right?
I can’t spell to save my life. I copy and paste everything from Word, too.
I’m just a little dyslexic, it wasn’t caught until I was in college.
I have a hard time judging volume by eye. Is that a six-quart pan or a eight-quart pan?
Worst of all, when I was a grrrl, the person who taught us “health class” said there should be twenty eight days between your periods. I counted and there was, so I thought I was normal. I found out in my college sophomore human physiology class that you are supposed to count the days you bleed as well. I have a 31-32 day cycle, not a 28 day cycle. Thank God I never tried to use the rhythm method.

74

Or the Bugs Bunny version:

30 days hath September,
April, June and Montana
All the rest have cold weather
Except in the summer, which isn't often!

Punctuation with a large circus sledgehammer at this point is entirely optional and up to the one reciting.

Seriously, the mnemonic I always used for the months is the knuckle sequence:

Count out or recite the months on your knuckles and the spaces between (four knuckles and three “dips” between them) and wrap around again to the first knuckle if/when you run out. If your month is on a knuckle, it has 31 days. If the month is on a “dip”, it has 30 days, unless it’s February.

If you need some kind of mnemonic for the number of days in February, you’re beyond any help I can provide. <grin>

I forget when I learned this, but I don’t think I was in high school yet. It was a lot easier to remember than that stupid chunk of doggerel, and I could do it silently and look like I was just twiddling my fingers.

– Bob

75

Ack. Bob needs a mnemonic to remind him to read the entire thread before replying. <sigh>

– Bob

76

I’ve mentioned it before, when I was little I thought people from Canada were called “Canadates” (candidates). I used to wonder how people from Canada could run for office in the US.

My SO was shocked to learn (after marrying a word freak) that the word is “unkempt,” not “unkept.” My inlaws still say it that way (upper class college-educated!) and I’M not going to correct them.

77

Matt, we’re pronouncing it the same way, but writing it different. Wow, that stirred up a lot of controversy for something that everyone was actually in agreement on.

78

I use the poem for figuring out how many days are in each month. Until this thread, I had never heard of that knuckle trick.

79

I don’t know the alefbet (Hebrew alphabet). This might not sound so bad to some of you, but I am a Hebrew teacher. I get stuck after the tenth letter or so. I know all the letters, I just can’t remember what order they go in. I also can’t write in block lettering, which is, unfortunately, the way my Hebrew school requires that we teach the kids. (I learned how to write Hebrew in script writing. The difference is approximately equivalent to the difference between printing and cursive. Script is easier and faster to write, but doesn’t look very much like actual text in a book, which is what the kids have to read, so it’s been decided they should write that way too.)

80

In the spirit of further exposing my stupidity, here is something that happened to me today. I was renewing my ID because my mom threw my pants in the washer without checking the pockets first and, well, you can imagine the rest. When my ID came out from the whirlpooling, centrifugal action to which it was victimized, it was soaking wet and totally useless. So, going back to the story, I was giving the clerk my data when he asks for my fingerprints and tells me to put my index finger on the little machine that reads your prints and sends then into the computer’s dbase.

At this moment I realized that, unless I was using it to point at something, I didn’t have a clue as to which hand appendage my index finger was. So, to save myself from humiliation, I devised this creative little plan, I casually say to the guy, “Wow, that’s a hoooot looking babe.” His attention having drifted away from his job, he starts bobbing his head around trying to check her out. When he desperately asks, “where is she? I cant make her out?,” I calmly reply “Right there,” while instinctively I point at the aforementioned goddess.

Presto! After stretching the desired finger to point, I finally realized which one the index finger was. Saved by the bell, or rather, by a hot-assed, sexual-desire-enticing bitch, I mean, by a good-looking woman. :smiley:

Anyhow, funny how your brain works, it stores so much stuff in your unconscious and, even though it is right there ready for you to use, it is totally inaccessible unless the right connection–brought about by an instinctive reaction–is used to catalyze the process of arising conscious awareness.

And, for you wondering about the girl, she was a big-breasted blond wearing an ass-embracing tight set of jeans and…well, sigh, actually there was no girl. I made her up to divert your attention from my pathetic display of ignorance. What really happened was I rubbed my fingers against my shirt as if I was cleaning them. That bought me enough time to visualize me pointing at said girl (Anna Nicole Smith, for those wondering) and thus was how I remembered about the geographical position of my finger relative to his other four companions, saving myself from potential embarrassment.

Or, more simply put, I don’t know my damn fingers. :rolleyes:

Something I am still ignorant of

Maybe some of you guys can help me, especially those who speak Spanish. How do you say cédula in English. I called it ID at the top of this post but I assume there is a more correct term for referring to it. For all of you who don’t know what the hell I am talking about, a cédula is the identifying document that officially enters you into the system when you reach the legal age to qualify as an adult. I had searched this a couple of months back in my crappy English-Spanish dictionary; IIRC it stated that the correct translation was carnet, which I had never heard before in reference to the aforementioned document. So, any of you out there can straighten this out for me?

And yes, I am aware that I overextended myself with this post( I’m so ashamed) My apologies to all of you–if any–who are still with me. Guess you can count my inability to summarize among the things that I still don’t know. :slight_smile: