It is a common urban legend that any mistakes you see on uniforms worn in movies and tv are done on purpose because it is illegal to wear an actual military uniform. That belief seems to be particularly strong with veterans. Its not true. The belief you state seems to be an outgrowth of that. There is a law on the books stating a military uniform can be worn in theatrical and movie productions as long as it doesn’t discredit the military. In Schacht v US it was found to be unconstitutional. The only only reason why Hollywood makes mistakes with uniforms is because of stupidity not law. He probably also heard that the military has an office that does approve scripts. This is only for productions that are asking for assistance with equipment and technical personnel. The Pentagon has no power to stop a production but they can chose to give no assistance. Add in a pinch of paranoia and you get what you heard.
Language nerd alert! In Welsh (here he goes again), “dog” is a masculine noun and “cat” is a feminine one. You can refer to your dog as “she” and your cat as “he” within a sentence, but grammatically, things like soft mutation bend around the gender.
Robin Williams did jokes along those lines in his late eighties standup, including in the monologue of one of his SNL hosting gigs. Not a high point.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, I worked in a pharmacy with two pharmacists (one Ethiopian and one Nigerian) and a Ghanaian pharmacy clerk who all believed that AIDS jumped from monkeys (or maybe apes) to [white or at least Western] homosexual men who went to Africa to have sex with animals in the jungle. They didn’t believe that AIDS was a widespread problem in Africa or that it could be because traditional African values did not promote the spread of the disease.
As an aside, they also despised Black Americans to an extent I have not seen from any other person in real life since then. They had scientific racism theories to account for why Black Americans and “Afro-Caribbeans”, as they called them, so really all people descended from slaves, were genetically inferior to Real Africans and people of other races.
Similarly, NASA also sometimes offers assistance with movies, and attaches similar conditions to that assistance. In both cases, it’s not particularly hard to meet the conditions, though either probably would (understandably) withhold assistance from a movie that portrays them as the villain.
You sure it wasn’t a reference to Community?
Another weird movie belief, that “most movies” made after 9/11 have Muslims as the bad guys, either directly or allegorically, and the proof of this was the movie Avatar which they said “The Navi are CLEARLY the Iraqi Resistance”.
The fact the Navi are depicted as the GOOD guys in that movie was not responded too.
It’s possible I’ve told this story here before.
Back in the mid-90s I worked at a Walmart during the summers between a couple years of college. Many of my coworkers were my age, including Erica, who was well-known to be a ditz.
One night a handful of us from softlines (clothes) were sent to health & beauty to help them clean up after the store closed. So, we got to facing the aisles and eventually discovered Erica in the shampoo aisle, looking befuddled. We asked her what was wrong, and Erica expressed confusion that there were black women on some of the shampoo bottles.
Someone figured that she was just unaware of the existence of ethic shampoos and conditioners, and began to explain when Erica interrupted and said that didn’t make sense because black people don’t use shampoo.
We all just stared at her for a moment, but then someone demanded to know what she was talking about.
It was nothing racist, she explained, just biology. Black people don’t need to wash their hair because when it gets dirty it simply falls out, and fresh, clean hair grows in in its place.
No one could get her to tell us where on earth she heard this (possibly it’s because she was immediately called an idiot and therefore unwilling to say more) and just mumbled something about “some guy” telling her that.
Actually that was just one guy. Chucko, a fraternity brother of mine. He wants me to tell you all he’s sorry.
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Serious addition to the topic:
I worked with a writer who had a Ph.D and taught University-level English Lit. Brilliant guy. Well, one day he said “Bet you’ve never met a Pantheist before. Well, I am one… This chair? It’s God. Dan from Accounting? He’s God as well. This chewed-up pencil? It’s God, too.”
I’m guessing you are talking about the Earth being accelerated upward, toward you, thanks to your own body mass. But of course we’d never actually see or be able to measure that effect, of the Earth moving upwards due to that acceleration.
The increase in tornados is because of cars and trucks on the expressway whizzing past each other at high speeds causing the air to spin.
Probably falls more into the “old wives story” category:
One of the jobs I had as a teen was at a dairy company. One of the many things they made, of course, was butter.
There were these 100 pound cubes of butter that got pushed down into a vat furnace to get boiled down into a butter oil for companies that made cakes, crackers, and cookies and such.
Some of the older employees would take a big handful blob of the butter and shove the entire handful into their mouth and eat it. I mean a huge glob, like a quarter pound or more.
Then after eating it they’d say “if you can eat butter comfortably like that it means you will never get cancer.”
Uh, ok. Probably because heart disease will off you first.
That golf balls would explode if you opened them
When I was a kid, and doctors started to warn us off cholesterol in butter, my family switched to margarine. Now we’re told that trans fats, such as in margarine, are more dangerous to our hearts than butter.
Caffeine has been good for you, bad for you, and back again so many times I’ve lost track.
This was all from “respected experts.”
No, it’s not about Newton’s Third Law pulling the Earth up. Rather, the idea is, if you drop a baseball, the ball isn’t accelerating at all, but rather, the surface of the Earth is accelerating upwards at 9.8 m/s^2. And if someone on the opposite side of the Earth drops a ball, that ball isn’t accelerating either, and the surface of the Earth below it is accelerating upwards, too. This despite the fact that all of the pieces of the surface are at rest relative to each other. And to explain THAT, you need to invoke all sorts of weird curvature of spacetime.
That’s the basic idea behind General Relativity. And amazingly, it works. But it’s not appropriate fodder for a 101 class.
Although, PBS Space Time does a good job of it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NblR01hHK6U
Nixon called out the national guard afraid the yippies were about to levitate the pentagon.
An old one but a good one!
You mean Edward Lear.
If a butterfly can do it, why not cars and trucks?
They Did levitate it( you had to be there …)
That reminds of a headline I saw where a Kenyan official declared that two homosexual lions learned their behavior from gay tourist. Someone on Reddit posted, “Hats off to the gay tourist who fucked in front of the lions.”
Here are a few weird beliefs I’ve encountered
I had a coworker who was convinced that “skin” on food was bad. Skin could be defined as animal skin, the skin of fruit, breading, the crust of bread, or generally the outer most layer of most any food. I watched her peel apart a chicken strip to eat it without the breading.
The first person I ever met who I identified as a conspiracy theorist was a moon hoaxer. This was back in the late 1990s when conspiracy theorist were just kooky and we hadn’t realized how destructive their beliefs could be. Dude was a computer programming and a fairly bright guy but he really believed the United States never landed an astronaut on the moon. And he had a very limited diet and French fries and hamburgers were one of the few things he would eat. We were at a dinner party and I volunteered to drive him to McDonald’s to pick up some dinner. That’s when we talked about the moon landings.