When we were kids, my brother was convinced that Alaska and Hawaii really were next to each other, because the jigsaw-puzzle map we had depicted them that way. I should add that the pieces for the two states were approximately the same size, and fitted neatly together.
And that’s not that plausible. Burglars don’t want TVs. They want things that will fit in their pocket so they don’t look like burglars walking down the street with a TV. The vast majority of house burglaries I’ve dealt with consist of ransacking the bedrooms only looking for cash and jewelry. Larger high dollar items are ignored.
I have a co-worker who believes the 13 stirpes on the American flag represent the 13 families that rule the world.
I have no doubt there are those who believe poodles are all female, because in every comic strip in the universe featuring a male dog, his ‘girlfriend’ is ALWAYS a foofy looking poodle with a pink hair bow.
I dated a girl in high school (the dark ages, so that’s a partial explanation) who believed a woman could only have four caesarean sections, because she only had four sides (!) to cut into. Leaving aside the pesky spine. She had a huge repertoire of similar misapprehensions; perhaps the kids at her all-girls school realized they had a live one. Sadly, or maybe not, all of the other whoppers have slipped fron my memory; sometimes old age can be a blessing.
Dan
If Neil’s words were doctored, then no doubt they’d want to doctor Pete Conrad’s line when he first leapt onto the moon in the next mission. IIRC: “Yippee!!..That may have been a small one for Neil, but it was a long one for me!”
The point being, hey, we’re Americans, we can say what we want without having words forced into our mouth by officials. As opposed to nearly everything done by the Cosmonauts (Soviets) being scrutinized and controlled heavily.
So if Neil flubbed his historic statement a little, I’d say, give the man some slack. If this is the only mistake he made all day, let it be a minor error in his spoken presentation, and not, say, an error in piloting to the lunar surface. Or in correctly and safely performing the first lunar EVA.
Is this related to the ‘black out the name and address on magazines you put in the recycling bin’? I spent many a tiresome afternoon at my mother’s, tearing covers off her billions of magazines and cutting up the address box in snippets (just blacking out the information wasn’t good enough because ‘they’ had ways of removing the magic marker coverup). I often wondered who in the world was curious to know who lived at 123 Any St., by reading the address on an old ‘Birds and Blooms’ magazine in the recycle bin. Or what harm could come from it. there are innumerable ways to know who lives where! But villains full of malfeasance wanted to know by pawing through the trash. (And yes, that could be, one might toss out some paper with their social security number on it.)
No special ink remover needed…just hold the blacked-out portions to the light at a certain angle and the name & address show up fine, because they reflect more brightly. So believing that this does any good is indeed weird.
My mom also had another maybe-not-genuine belief, but one she gaslit herself into believing and ramming down our throats. It is illegal to drive in reverse on roads or parking lots.
I didn’t get it at first, until I eventually realized she was bad at driving in reverse herself because she had very limited mobility and couldn’t turn/move properly to be able to shoulder check or use the mirrors to see if other cars or people were nearby. Backing down our driveway was fine: nobody was ever behind you and you could just use the driver’s side view mirror to go in a straight line backwards. But anywhere else cars or people might be moving around behind her freaked her out because she had huge blind spots there. So, she told us that it was illegal to use reverse, and that’s why she almost never backed up in public.
Ok, so that seems more like a silly personal cover story to mask a lack of driving skill she was self-conscious of. EXCEPT… when I was learning to drive and would occasionally stop a little too far into the intersection at say a red light, I was forbidden from backing up a couple feet to not block the crosswalk or get my nose away from cross traffic. That’s illegal; it doesn’t matter if there’s no one behind you or you’re going to get T-boned from the side. You cannot back up on a street, period!
I suppose she might have been thinking to herself that even though I could see behind me, she couldn’t, and didn’t want to say “go ahead and do it” if she couldn’t be sure.
She just had a strange way in general of going about being careful by fabricating ridiculous stories and actually expecting other people (including adults) to believe them.
I once knew a guy who asserted that, with the exception of Reagan, every American president had been a graduate of one of three Ivy League universities. When I pointed out that Andrew Johnson never spent a day in a classroom of any kind (his wife taught him to read and write) he confidently announced, “Andrew Johnson, bachelor’s degree, Princeton!”
This is a pretty funny two-line movie script. Even has a cliffhanger.
My dad always told me “It’s illegal to turn on any lights inside a car at night because it could blind the driver” to prevent us kids from using flash lights to read books at night during long road trips.
I always wondered if that was actually true or if my dad similarly made something up to force us to fall asleep on long night trips.
Maybe that guy made an understandable mistake or two along the way, but I see what he was getting at: first, let’s start with George Washington, who — hey, wait a minute.
The HIV virus was created in a government laboratory. The epidemic among gays was an accident. Blacks were their intended target.
I once knew a guy who believed that there existed a magical medical device. His description sounded sort of like a microwave oven. He believed that the proper wavelength of radiation would destroy microorganisms, without affecting human cells. Naturally, this would cure all infectious diseases. And naturally, The Big Corporations were keeping it secret.
I knew another guy who believed in Grey Aliens, and Nordic Aliens, and Reptilian Aliens. He said there were 12 starfaring civilizations in all. (I didn’t get a chance to ask about the other 9.) The Greys and the Nordics are at war. The Greys are the bad guys. Naturally, the U.S. government is secretly in league with the Greys.
A related one I’ve heard: The campaign USAID is sponsoring in many African countries to reduce the spread of HIV by encouraging the use of condoms is really just a conspiracy by the US to keep black people from reproducing.
Also, AIDS isn’t actually caused by the HIV virus; it’s actually caused by the drugs that are supposed to treat it. It’s all a conspiracy by the drug companies to sell more products.
Harry S Truman never attended college at all.
And likewise, the real reason we don’t have cures for cancer and diabetes is because Big Pharma wants to sell us more and more drugs. (headdesk)
The last half of the “documentary” “Cold Case Hammarskjold” has an interview with a man named Alex Jones, but he’s not that one, and he’s saying that the vaccination programs in southern Africa in the 1960s through the 1980s were nothing more than Westerners deliberately infecting black Africans with AIDS.
…and, on the other other hand: Grant and Eisenhower were both West Point men, right?
One of my favorite 9/11 conspiracy theories that I’d like if someone could give me the original source for.
Basically all four hijacked planes were actually landed at Dover Air Force Base (or something similar), the passengers forcibly disembarked at military gunpoint, loaded onto a military transport, and that military transport was flown into the middle of the Atlantic and blown up. Then all four passenger planes were rigged with explosives and remote piloting equipment and then those were the ones who flew into the Pentagon and Twin Towers. Flight 93 was a mishap with the remote piloting equipment.
I enjoy it for how overcomplicated it is.
This sounds like some of the historical uses of diathermy, now used for other purposes. See the last few sentences of the abstract at: