So, you’re stupid if you don’t speak Spanish?
My sister in her mid twenties…“Which part of the egg is the yolk?”
“I kinda sorta completely disagree with you.”
-girl in my formation of modern american culture section to my roommate
My uncle telling my father, an MD of 20 years at the time, that blood flow is controlled by magnetic fields and refusing to accept otherwise.
On Leno once, during some kind of game show type thing where they ask college students various remedial questions.
Leno: “Tell me what a podiatrist is.”
Ditzy girl: (looking horrified and disgusted) “Isn’t that, like, a child molester?!”
I suspect this was staged.
Okay, here’s my two:
In college, one of my roommates was a very sweet but ditzy blonde from a fairly well-to-do family. She wanted to bake her boyfriend a birthday cake, but had no idea how to do this. So I said I would bake it, but she had to watch and help (and hopefully learn). So we open the cake mix, and measure the water, and then I crack open the first egg…and she says, “Oh so that’s how you get those open!” 19 years old and never seen an egg cracked open…apparently they had a cook.
Then last year, I went down to sit by the shore of Lake Erie. A middle-aged woman and her adult daughter walk up and sit near me. Apparently the daughter had never visited her mom’s new home, so mom is telling her all sorts of things about our town, and then she looks out over the lake …one of the Great Lakes, remember, and tells her daughter that every summer they fill the lake up so the boats can float better. I nearly bit my lip trying not to laugh, thinking about some poor guy from the Parks Dept. standing next to the lake with a garden hose, filling it up! And the worst part was the daughter didn’t indicate that this was a preposterous notion. To her credit there had been recent publicity that the water levels in the lake were down, and boats couldn’t launch from the ramp anymore. But she really thought it was easily solved…
ok I have to admit I said this one…
My hubby and i are walking down the street (like 15 years ago) and i saw a sign in a store window (you know the kind it has the letters on these clear plastic sheets and you slide them in the groves…anyhow)
I read the sign and said “there must be a lot of people asking for Terry there.’’
my hubby said “What???”
i said the sign says " no terry”
he said "hunny it says noteary (i may have spelled that wrong but its the guy who stamps legal papers for you)
one of my blonde moments (i have had a few…thousand) and i have YET to live that down
Once had a fella swear that gravity was caused by the rotation of the earth. “It creates a wind that holds everything down to the surface.”
I’m sure he thinks I’m the stupid one, for claiming that matter “warps space” around it, creating a gravitational field. Pull the other one. 
When I was about 15, I had a plumber tell me that the word “plumber” came "from roman times, before they had tap & die sets. They just soldered the pipes together, so the joins looked like “plums.”
Being a smart-assed juvenile, I told him that he ought to be called a “Pruner” in that case.
(God help ignorant tradesmen to suffer the derision of children with respectable Latin vocabularies.)
My high school had an annual basketball tournament; the same guy, Ed, had been announcing the games for the last 34 years. During the championship match, he got up to the mike during halftime. At some point earlier in the game, he’d made a mistake on a stat, and wanted to correct it. So he starts “let me tell you all about my boner…”
He thought we were laughing with him.
Today in Philosophy class when discussing evolution.
FS (Fellow Student): Why do you think we evolved to be smarter than animals?
Me: Because we are smarter than animals.
FS: How do you know?
Me: Because we have larger brains.
FS: But we could all get our minds from the same place.
Me: But we didn’t, because our brains cause our minds (enter huge discussion between “brain” and “mind”. Class ulitmately decides “goddidit”.)
Me: We’re still smarter than animals.
FS: The only reason we’re different is because we adapted differently! (Said with a sense of authority and definitiveness, as though he just put me in my place.)
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s what evolution is.
It saddens me that I’m in a class full of college students ranging from fresh-seniors, and none of them, not even the prof, understands evolution. WHen I try to explain it to them in very simple terms, they argue with me, even though they admit that they don’t understand it! I’m not even trying to make them believe it, but they keep bringing it up, and nobody knows what they are talking about!
I’m done ranting.
My father is driving, and accidently pulls into a handicapped spot at Denny’s, to which my mother says “You can’t park here, this is Paralyzed Parking!”
LOL - we still call it that to this day.
This doesn’t quite fit the category, but I always laugh thinking about it.
We were driving back from a ski area on your standard two lane highways. My dad pointed out that there was a guy behind us driving in the oncomming lane. We looked an it was clear the guy didn’t understand that this wasn’t one half of a four lane highway.
Talking to myself outloud I was thinking ‘I wonder if it would do any good if I stuck my arm out and waved him back’, but what I actually said was ‘I wonder If I should get out and wave him back in’
My mom turned around with a dead serious expression and said ’ You can get out! We’re going 60!"
Hehe, Thanks for pointing that out mom, I often step out of cars at highway speed.
From a New-Age Woman at a California (where else?) party:
N.A.W.: “I once accidentally cut off half my big toe.”
Me: “Oh, my God.”
N.A.W.: “It’s OK. I used my psychic energy to grow it back.”
Reminds me of a cartoon in a British paper during the height of the child-molestation hysteria. An angry mob is chasing a white-coated doctor down the street; he’s frantically shrieking “I’m a PAEDIATRICIAN!”
Once we were watching a baseball game at Candlestick Park, and the batter hit a ball that really should have only been maybe a double, but the wind caught it, causing it to sail out of the park for a home run. The announcer says: “Chalk another one up to windy Candlestick!”
My grandma says: “Who’s Wendy Candlestick?”
Years later we still sometimes ask her if she’s seen Wendy Candlestick around lately.
It wasn’t this guy, was it? I have to deal with this nutcase on a regular basis, and his pet (to the point of having published a book on it) theory is that Christianity arrived in Japan in AD 200, but was brutally put down by the eeevil Buddhists. (Shintoists didn’t even enter into it, as theirs is a false religion cooked up within the last hundred years). He’s also gone on and on about how MacArthur’s big mistake was not declaring Christianity to be Japan’s official state religion when he wrote the constitution.
Anyway, my own contribution happened this afternoon at work:
Manager: “We have a group of six students who’ve dropped out of their regular schools because of emotional problems. Most of them are pretty bright, but they need a one-on-one class environment, and even then it’s pretty hard to keep them focused on a lesson for more than 15 or 20 minutes.”
So far, no problem. Until he followed it up with:
“So we’ve scheduled you for a 2 hour lesson with all six of them together.”
The look I gave him actually managed to kick his brain into gear, but even then all he said was “Oh, yeah… well… uh… good luck!”
Fucker.
I haven’t read through all of these yet, but I wanted to put this in here before I banned it from my memory again.
From my sister in law: Gay people *chose * to become gay. It doesn’t just happen.
and another one from the same person:
Back ground: She & her husband are taking their (will be) 8 week old infant on a 3 week international trip with 10 other people and not staying more than 2 nights anywhere, traveling by train and carrying back packs. (entirely the stupidest thing I have ever heard of.)
Me: How can you do this after paying $10,000 to get pregnant?
Her: We prayed and prayed and God said it was ok.
Yeahhhhhhhhhhh. Pardon me while I just step over here and pop a blood vessel.
Yeah, because such a thing would never happen in real life a short time later.
(IIRC the cartoon was in Private Eye, but I coulnd’t find a cite. I am sure it was before the incident though.)
Hey, this exact joke was fodder for a series of two or three Dilbert strips! You oughta sue that guy for ripping off your idea. :rolleyes:
IIRC, Scott Adams said afterward that of the few people who wrote in about the gag, almost all of them thought it was about the stupidity of trying to legislate when people may and may not get sick. The statistical humor flew right over their heads. He said something like it served him right for trying to do a math joke.
there are quite a few from my history class, but the one that I’m thinking of right now is from today. It was something like this:
Idiot Student: “That’s not fair.”
Teacher: “Why is it unfair?”
ID: “It’s unfair because I don’t like it.”
I could start an entire thread on the stupidity of this class. It would be interesting since two other non-idiots from that class post here. I’m surprised one of them didn’t jump on this one earlier since he said he would, and I think he wrote down the exact quote.
Some years ago, my father was in a small convenience store that had milk in a glass-fronted refrigerator behind the checkout counter. He selected a few items and brought them to the counter. The gal behind the counter asked “Will there be anything else, sir?”
He said “Yes - a half-gallon of milk, please.”
A puzzled expression came over her. “A … a what?”
“A half-gallon of milk!”
Greater puzzlement.
“I … would … like … a … half-gallon … of … milk … please,” he said, pointing to the cartons in the cooler just behind her.
She looked where he was pointing and her face brightened. “Oh, you mean the Big Quart!!”
He left in wonder, having purchased one Big Quart of milk.
And here’s one of my own:
I was at an outdoor fish market with instructions to buy 10 of the biggest shrimp available. I found a stall with some likely looking shrimp listed at $12.99/lb and got the attention of the kid behind the counter.
“I’d like ten of those jumbo shrimp.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t sell shrimp by the ‘each’ – we sell them by weight, as our sign says.” This was offered in a kindly, faintly condescending tone, as from one who is an expert to one who is clearly a novice.
It threw me aback for a moment. “I see … well, then, could you put a handful of those shrimp in your scale and tell me what they weigh?”
This he happily did. “Around 3/4 pound, as you see,” he said.
“Great. And how many would you say are there?”
“Let’s see – eight of them.”
“Hmmm … I’m not sure 3/4 pound is quite enough. Could you put in a couple more?”
“Sure … let’s see … just under a pound.”
“Great – I’ll take them.”
He wrapped them up, obviously pleased to have straightened me out on the fine points of shrimp-buying.