IS… Selective Service registration is still going strong from what I can tell. That’s different from the “Draft” though. If it comes to that, the government holds a sort of lottery to determine who’s drafted and who’s not, based on the info on people in the Selective Service database.
As for the notification letters vs. actually registering I think the idea’s that they have some idea that there may be a 18 year old living at that address, but they may not have all the pertinent info. IIRC, even though the notification letter showed up at my parents’ house, I still had to go to the Post Office and fill out the card.
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but one of my former coworkers came in one day and asked us if we knew storks were real. She was in her 50s, and had believed until then that they were made up like dragons and unicorns.
Kinda mundane, but I was probably in high school before I realize cornerback was a different football position from quarterback. Before that I always assumed the announcer was saying quarterback with poor enunciation.
I was well into adulthood when I found out that cops generally won’t ticket other cops for speeding. I mean, the reason always given is that speeding can lead to car crashes, and sometimes cops would visit schools and talked about speeding being a bad thing. So I didn’t think that cops would consider one of their own putting people’s lives in danger no big deal.
I assumed — until I was in my 20s, married to a sports nut and immersed in the NFL — that the Washington Redskins hailed from Washington state. It seems a more likely location for Indians than the nation’s capital.
I wasn’t an adult before I realized the truth but when I was a kid, I thought that all of Canada was French speaking. I grew up in northern New York and all of the Canadians I had met spoke French. And it made sense to me - I figured the Spaniards had settled in Mexico, the English had settled in America, and the French had settled in Canada and each colony eventually became its own country.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that “Episcopalian” was a real word. For years, I always misread it as “Escopalian” and assumed that people said “E-piss-copalian” as a cutesy affectation. (Like when Homer Simpson calls Lisa’s instrument a “sax-o-ma-phone.”)
? Do you live in an area where police cars and non-fire vehicles only have blue and white lights? I’ve only seen emergency vehicles (of all types, police, fire, EMTs) with red and blue.
I said this in another thread, but until a few years ago I thought the part in the song “Let’s call the Whole Thing Off” about pronouncing tomato as toe-mah-toe instead of toe-may-toe was made up.
Strange considering I watched a few British shows growing up.
Yes, just blue and white lights (except tail lights, obviously). This is several towns away, but this is what cruiser lights look like here. And an unlit one here.
Well then, consider that just one more thing I didn’t know until WELL after adulthood.
