Same here!
But instead of a good giggle, you’d probably just get arrested, because I would have been six years old.
I once commented to my sister that it gets dark so much earlier where I live than where she did. She didn’t believe that that was possible. I explained to her that since I live a few hundred miles east of her, and since the earth spins, that it’s very possible. “Oh yeah? If that’s true, then it would get dark a lot later in, say, California. Explain that, Mr. Smart Pants.” I then spent a good long while explaining the concept of time zones to her.
I’m not at all surprised to hear that. Herman’s Hermits was a great group and Peter, as their lead singer, was quite famous.
Chefguy’s Velcro story reminded me of the other day when my roommate and I went to the local Walgreens to ask if they had cookie cutters. The staff member who helped us did not know what we meant until we explained. We went next door to the supermarket (which is sort of a high-end “gourmet” type supermarket), and the staff there also did not know what cookie cutters were.
Ass is pronounced differently to arse, but there’s still no r sound in non-rhotic arse. (Heh, non-rhotic arse. :D) It’s a long ‘ah’ sound, written as a: in IPA (except that it’s not a colon, it’s two tiny triangles, but I don’t have it on my keyboard and can’t be arsed to look up the code for it). There is a tiny schwa sound, kinda, sometimes, but that’s just a function of long vowels - it’s not enough to be a dipthong and it’s not like an r. The same sound is in father and ask and all sorts of other words, but there’s no r. That tiny schwa is also in rhotic ‘arse,’ if you think about it, because the vowel is still a long vowel sound.
FYI, there is no ooo shaped schwa; I know what you mean by that sound, but it’s not called a schwa.
Often when my GF and I tell each other what we’ve been doing, the answer is ‘arsing about on the internet.’ Tonight that’s doubly true! 
A friend of mine believed that there was an all-powerful all-seeing supernatural being, who had created the entire universe, but had a particular interest in the planet earth, and after creating all the living things on it, randomly guided or ignored them just to see what would happen. There was also some weird stuff about rewarding the good and punishing the bad, but that seemed arbitrary, so I’m not sure about that bit.
It was in some book he read.
Agreeing with scifisam here, and I have a direct anecdote to demonstrate this misconception - above and beyond the fact that “arse” and “glass” rhyme perfectly in my southern English non-rhotic accent.
I have an ongoing argument with a couple of my Irish friends about the RP English pronunciation of the French car manufacturer “Peugeot”.
In England, most people pronounce it to an anglicized approximation of the French pronunciation. Thus I pronounce it “PEUH-zho”.
So my Irish friends (a doper and a former doper, you know who you are) ask me “why are you putting an R in there? You’re saying ‘PER-zho’.” I reply "I’m not. “PEUH” and “PER” are pronounced the same in my non-rhotic accent.
“But it’s evident that I’m not pronouncing the R in a syllable where there is no R, because there’s no fecking R in the syllable; alas, to confuse matters, nor do I pronounce the R in a syllable where there is a trailing R. It’s an identical syllable when spoken, and I am not pronouncing an R in either of them.”
(To which they go “but you ARE pronouncing the R” and I get exasperated and say “no I’m NOT, and at least I don’t say ‘PEW-joe’” - which is how it’s said in Ireland. Then we have a big shouting match and then we have another pint and all is well again.)
Ooh Kaio another thing over here is the Ford Ka. It is a pun: it sounds exactly the same as the words “Ford car”. The pun simply wouldn’t work were there a distinguishable non-rhotic trailing R.
ETA: my daft friend Lou, referenced upthread, owns one and calls it a “Ford K. A.” She was amazed when I told her about the intended pronunciation.
Well the other guy was a little dim, and I’d only worked at that facility for a few months by that time, all in the production area. I started in the shipping department the week before, and I’d never worked in a job that had anything to do with shipping or logistics. All my mental energy at that time was diverted in three basic directions, 1) Load the right materials and quantities onto the truck, 2) My coworker is a moron and 3) Damn it’s cold on this loading dock.
No it’s not – if you count Dec. 22 as the middle of a three-month winter then the beginning of winter must be a month and a half earlier – which pushes it into October.
But even if you were right about Nov. 11 being the beginning of Winter, it’s still* a longer period of time between the start of winter and the maximum cold in February than it is now – so people will still complain about a longer winter. And the spring will start earlier, so they can still complain about a colder spring.
I am probably an idiot, but how can you consider yourself talking properly when you do not pronounce words properly? I really do not know of any rule of grammer where R is considered silent.
Well, you did the research, so maybe you know. But there is a standard international definition of astronomical seasons. (Meteorologists refer to meteorological seasons and they can indeed vary depending on latitude.)
Defining the seasons strictly by weather can be faulty, too. Every now and then we get a couple of days in the 60’s or even 70’s (F) in January. Does that mean that we have winter, then a couple of days of spring, then back to winter again?
Then most people in the USA in one way or another dont talk “properly”.
Ahem…I believe that would be, they don’t speak properly. 
Well, yes, but I am shocked that you didn’t know that.
I counted back 6 weeks from December 21st (traditional solstice, though of course the real solstice varies) to get the November 11th date, then counted forward six weeks to get to the first week in Feb. I should have added a couple of days, but it still doesn’t get to October. Winter would be 13 weeks long, same as the other seasons, if you define a season by daylight hours rather than temperature.
There are these things called ‘accents.’ You have one too.
Are the astronomical seasons similar to the ones based around the solstices and equinoxes, or something else?
Anyway, yeah, it was meteorological seasons that I think was in question here. Even when it comes to which plants grow when there’s no really good way of defining when Spring starts and Winter ends, not in a way that satisfies everyone.
I wouldn’t really consider February to be Spring, either, but it’s also not the coldest month in my part of the world - London, England: January is the coldest. Only one degree colder than February, but then there’s not an enormous variation in average temperature year-round. (Temperature is not an infallible guide - I mention it because of a reference by someone else to the ‘ultimate cold’ in February).
One thing I’m certain of is that the winter solstice is not the beginning of winter. Even if you considered all of November to be Autumn that would still mean the solstice is three weeks in, unless you’re counting December as Autumn, which is crazy talk.
I saw thisin a souvenir shop in Vienna.
(Of course I also saw an Australian pub in central Vienna - perhaps for this reason.)
Could we… please… not go there?
The way to not go there is to treat my post as the joke it was intended as.
I can understand that, NC. What kills me on Farmville was when they introduced harvesting your animals. When players first harvested their pigs (or selected ‘Collect Truffles’), there were so many people on the Farmville forum asking, “What part of the pig does the truffle come from?”
I laughed for an hour.