I used to think prowrestling was real, and thus refused to watch it as I hate sports. Then I found out it wasn’t and became a huge fan.
I thought Bat Out of Hell was a heavy metal album.
I assumed As I Lay Dying would be the novel-length stream-of-consciousness final thoughts of a Civil War soldier who’d been fatally shot.
I had much the same reaction to this movie. I was quite surprised at how *anti-*disco this film was; the movie depicts the whole disco scene as banal, vacuous, and full of shallow, misogynist jerks. (Actual quote from the movie: “You’re a loser, Vinnie. You’re going nowhere.”)
I almost didn’t go see Rabbit Proof Fence because I mistakenly assumed from the title that this was a kiddie cartoon movie with ani-morphic animals (basically, I thought it was going to be a remake of “Watership Down.”)
Based on the trailer for Greenberg, I thought Ben Stiller would be playing a blissed-out, inspirational slacker who’d teach everyone a feel-good message about the importance of “just doing nothing for a while.” Yeah…not quite.
I’m younger than that, but that’s what I thought, too. Why? Because that’s what my parents told me, and I believed them.
My relationship with South Park is pretty much the same, save for my opinions being formed on their own. My opinions on Family Guy went in reverse, especially after it returned.
Might you conceivably have got that notion by having in your mind, at some level of consciousness, the old armed-forces song about the tail-less monkeys in Zamboanga?
My sentiments there, were the exact opposite. Was initially attracted, because it seemed that the film must be about rabbits. I then discovered that the subject matter concerned humans, in a very depressing way; and steered clear of the film. For sure, it deals with issues of dreadful institutionalised abuse, which it is imperative to address – it’s just that such is not my personal idea of a fun night out at the cinema.
What’s the misconception here? Holmes’s intravenous use of cocaine and opium is explicitly described at the start of the second book, The Sign of Four. This passage really surprised me, as I had always assumed that his drug use was something ambiguous, that one could never be sure about, like his possible homosexuality.
Nitpick Holmes doesn’t do opium. At the start of The Sign of the Four, Watson at first suspects he does morphine but Holmes explains it’s cocaine to keep his mind alert when he’s not working on a case. As far as I know the only time he takes morphine is as a painkiller when he’s injured in The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.
It’s clear that Holmes is a junky, though. His primary drug is work, and when he can’t get a fix, he turns to cocaine.
Yes, Holmes’ cocaine use is very explicit in The Sign of the Four, but I think there is very little (if anything) about it in any of the other stories. There may be a handful of other places where it is briefly mentioned, but you could read most of the Holmes canon and never get any sort of impression that he was a drug user at all. IIRC it is also The Sign of the Four that prominently features the Baker Street irregulars, who rarely, if ever, get mentioned anywhere else. The Holmes stories are, of course, full of inconsistencies like this, especially about the characters and histories of Holmes and Watson themselves.
Like the significance of Moriarty, Holmes’ cocaine use is something that has frequently been made much more prominent in non-canonical works by later writers, and theatrical (and radio, movie, and TV) portrayals, but plays only a very small role in Conan Doyle’s original works.
I had the idea that Mark Rothko was a great artist…till I saw his “best” works.
They remind me of the marks that painters make on walls (test strips).
I also thought that James Joyce’s Ulysses"was about ancient Greece. I tried reading it…and stopped.
I still don’t know what it is about.
Man, you mentioned it, and my brain immediately went, “The bunco squad. The bunco squad.” How sad is that?
I wrote opium when I should have said morphine, but in my edition of TSO4 Watson says “Which is it today, […] morphine or cocaine?”. That shows that he sees Holmes taking morphine as frequently as he sees him taking cocaine.
Until I read him, I would never have guessed that Dostoyevsky was funny.
That is kinda sad, but I’m right there with you. Odd that a series that only ran 13 episodes almost 40 years ago can stick in your head like that.
However, John Schuck stills shows up on TV from time to time, notably as some high ranking police official on Law & Order: SVU. (He’s the one who comes, in dress uniform, to bawl out Capt. Kragen whenever someone in the squad pisses off city hall.) I just tell myself that Det. Yoyonovich has been promoted way up the ranks and then laugh my ass off. That idea improves both shows simultaneously.
I remember a couple of lines. Now see if you remember any jokes from “Quark” or “When Things Were Rotten”.
That’s ok. Nobody else does either. 
I think most people would say that of a lot of Literature they were taught in school. To be fair, a lot of it has to do with the fact that most of the good jokes probably aren’t appropriate for explanation to children.
“The pretty one is the clone.”
<simultaneously>“I am not.”