When the cops pulled you over to the side of the road to give you a ticket, they actually tipped your car over.
I also refused to eat Pringles on the basis of a commercial I’d seen, where there was some Pacific Island-looking tribe, doing things, and then somebody pulled out a cylinder-thing of Pringles. The tribe ate the Pringles, and then everybody started wildly dancing. To make things worse, their motto at the time was “Once you pop, you just can’t stop.” This made me think that there was mind control in the Pringles that made you dance. :eek:
When I was 12 or so, and we were being taught every other day about cults in school, I read a mail order ad for an Lp record of Pachelbel’s Canon in D that described the music in such over-the-top hyperbolic terms (“hypnotic…you’ll play it again and again”) that I concluded it had to be a form of nefarious mind control. For a few days I was afraid I might hear the Canon being played accidentally, lose my powers of free will and hop the next guru out of town.
I was certain that adults were adults and had always been that way from birth, and that children were children and would never grow up. I was convinced there was a vast Adult Conspiracy keeping this fact from the kids so that we’d remain complacent and not rise up and kill all the grown-ups for telling us what to do all the time.
My parents had an 8-track player in their car when I was little, and I remember thinking that each 8-track had a different band made up of tiny little people that lived in the cassette. I thought that putting the cassette in the player turned on a light or a sign that woke up the tiny band and told them what song to play. For some reason, I thought that the band that lived in the Creedence Clearwater Revival cassette was Snap, Crackle & Pop from the Rice Krispries box/commercials. I still think about this every time I listen to CCR.
I thought the voyager probes had brave crews in them, setting off on a voyage never to return for the sake of science. I used to wonder why they couldn’t come back. Best I could figure was NASA didn’t know how to land them.
It seemed logical. “Satellites” as I thought they were, go up, gravity pulls down. So logically it seemed they’d balance out and the probes would come to a gentle landing on the earth’s surface, and happily reuniting those brave scientists with their families.
When I was real little I thought the earth was half a sphere because I saw a picture of it and the night side was too dark to see.
Also used to think there must be some place where it’s perpetually dusk. Which would be true at the poles, if the earth wasn’t tilted. Stupid tilt!
For a while I thought that. But for a while I thought that as people grew older, they grew taller. Since there was nobody taller than a certain height, I figured that there must be some place where really old people went. A land of the giants, where ancient people grew to be hundreds of feet tall.
And I knew about the conspiracy. I was the only human in the world, and everyone else was a robot manufactured by the washing machine. Their sole purpose was to make me cry. (I must have been in a really bad mood when I thought that one up. )
I believed the black and white thing too. You could even see some of the change occuring in The Wizard of Oz where the world transitions from b &w to the not quite like real life color.
I also believed that women had hundreds of tiny babies inside them that had to race each other to be born when she decided to get pregnant. And that people who weren’t married were incapable of getting pregant.
When my dad got pulled over for speeding and I asked how the cop knew how fast we were going, I was told that he had “radar”. Somehow, my little mind figured out that the guy from MASH was watching us with a camera. :eek:
I also thought that Vinne Barbarino, Chachi, and the Fonz were all cousins.
I thought we ‘invented’ color. That the world was black and white, and one day someone discovered colour and we all started using it. I blame old b&w movies!
I was a HUGE Jesus Christ Superstar fan when I was around 10 or 11. I thought it would be a nice gesture on my part to give Andrew Lloyd Weber a phone call to congratulate him on a job well done. Imagine my surprise and dismay not to find him in the phone book.
I thought your whole chest was your stomach, and that you only chewed food the get it past the narrow throat part, then it re-formed itself.
So, as I ate, I pictured the food coming back together in my great, big stomach area. Apples were especially neat, because they were perfectly re-formed, except for the core.
They used to list the New York Stock Exchange as well as the American Stock Exchange closing numbers. For some reason, I thought they were sports teams playing against each other, and if one was closed higher than the other they won.
I used to think television was live- more accurately, the commercials. I would watch commercials every time to see if they’d changed, and I thought it must be really boring to hang out and wait for your turn to do 30 seconds of work every hour or so.
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