You know, whenever you see TV news coverage of a shooting, there’s invariably a witness who says, “We all thought it was a car backfiring.”
Yet talk to someone who has had a car backfire on them and they will says, “Man, I thought it was a gunshot!”
Why is that, do you suppose?
Do people ever get surprised by freight trains and say, “It sounded like a tornado!”?
My min boggles. Usually when I’m staring at my ceiling trying to get some sleep.
The strangest? Wondering about how eskimos at the Poles can tell whether its summer or winter considering it’s cold all the time
Huh? :o
Just don’t watch the home shopping network late at night. Those bloodsuckers feed on insomniacs.
Assuming a gunshot was a car backfiring or a powerful firecracker is in line with the false assumption that you are in a safe, peace-loving area.
We want our neighborhoods safe and our cars fully operational so a loud, jarring malfunction in either is sure to set off our doubting instincts. You wish it was a normal noise so bad that you’re fairly conditioned to doubt it was an unsafe one. Now I’m repeating myself. Woo.
Tapping my wife on the shoulder. :o
In line with these thoughts, how come mean people never die?
Anytime you hear on the news of someone getting killed, the victim was mere inches from sainthood: kind, loving, funny, beloved by the community and gentle to small kittens. You never hear someone saying, “Man, he was a nasty sonofabitch,” or even, “I didn’t like him. He never recycled.” I mean, I can understand not saying bad things about the dead, but they lay it on thick.
Very nearly, actually. I live high up in a block beside a railway line. Because my flat is high up, and at corner of building, sometimes I am really not sure if a sound is that of a train apporaching or that of a high wind suddenly kicking up.
Yes, I never said I was very clever.
Other night thoughts - I make terrific plans for how to tidy up house, take my dead computer to bits so as to put bits of it in this one that I use, and generally plan great stuff to get my act together and life all organised. Only at night-time, though - I never do these things.
And I can get all upset because I have a sudden need to remember the author of a certian book, or the origin of a quotation - that sort of thing. (Of course, this is one good reason why the internet and the wonderful SDMB can be useful. ) 
I didn’t really expect an answer to that, but this actually makes sense.
Cut that out. 
I noticed that too, when I was in elementary school. Every safety warning had an anecdote attached about the beautiful, bright, charming, adorable child who perished doing the thing parents were being warned away from letting/risking their kid doing. I finally asked my mom why it was only wonderful kids who died, and she said, “No, it’s just that nobody’s gonna say ‘He was kind of a brat’ when they’re talking about a kid who choked to death.”
And conversely, why are criminals almost always* described as “a quiet guy who kept to himself”? Do people think their neighbor is going to say, “Hi, I’m Ted and I kidnap young women in parking garages!” or “I’m gonna be prowling around most of the week looking for kids walking alone…mind feeding my dog for me?”?
Re: the OP. Serious question: Are there still enough internal-combustion engines on the road to make backfiring a likely occurence? I thought most cars nowadays were fuel injection anyway.
*Ted Kazyinski had a run-in with a neighbor that I don’t even like to think about. But that’s the one exception I know of.
Overly pedantic answer: yes, they can tell, because of the length of the day and night and how high in the sky the Sun gets. In fact, above the Arctic Circle, or below the Anatarctic Circle, the Sun doesn’t set at all for part of the summer, and does not rise for part of the winter. Even when the Sun rises in the winter, it’s very low to the horizon all day, and the day is very short, and the opposite is true in the summer. Also, I feel compelled to point out that there are no Eskimos in the Antarctic. Just penguins.
One guy in my hometown got gutshot by a woman who answered his personal ad in the newspaper. When he found out she was married, he told her to get out. She grabbed the .38 he walks around with like a wild west sheriff and shot him in the stomach.
Everyone in town said he deserved it because he was such a giant prick and expressed disappointment at the woman’s inabiity to finish the job.
[nitpick]
You mean carborated engine. Almost all cars on the road (save for a very few all electric and so forth) are internal combustion.
[/nitpick]
You haven’t gotten the fusion car yet? .9 Giggawatts though, I’m waiting for the upgrade.
Nowhere must be really behind!
I have so many strange thoughts in the late hours of night that I’d fill a notebook or two with them. I should start writing them down…
About why mean people never die: nobody wants to go on TV and say “Man, that guy was a horrible, nasty, cruel a**hole. I’m so glad he’s dead”. Talk about a televised nightmare.
I don’t think at night. If I think, I won’t be able to get to sleep.
Even more pedantic answer: No one lives at either pole. Especially not Eskimos, who would not come anywhere close to the southern hemisphere at all.
Also, in summertime it’s above freezing.
Heh. I feel victim once to a set of “wonder velcro curlers” and my Mom fell victim to Victoria Principal’s comestic line (it ends up making you look like a corpse).
Not at the poles, it’s not.
There are people living in Antarctica. Scientists. And they dress like eskimos. But my original brain-fuzzer was supposed to be “How DID eskimo’s tell that it was summer or winter considering it was cold all the time. I don’t know exactly how they would tell that days are longer or shorter considering I look at the clock when I assume its about 1pm and its really 11am or 3pm. So if I din’t have a watch, I’d only be assuming. Did that mean that the eskimos just had to assume?”
Or something like that