A family friend refused to wear seatbelts because he was, in fact, the one who survived by being thrown clear of the car in an accident.
One counterexample to all the lives saved by wearing them - amont them mine, and my husband (twice in his case).
Some towns, towns noted for cattle drives. The reason was cowboys shooing off their guns up in the air, etc.
Deadwood, Tombstone, Brodie, Dodge City.
Was the “Old West” violent? Scholars have established that it was not as violent as most movies and novels would suggest. Murder was not a daily, weekly, or even monthly occurrence in most small towns or farming, ranching, or mining communities. Still, homicide rates in the West were extraordinarily high by today’s standards and by the standards of the rest of the United States and the Western world in the nineteenth century, except for parts of the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Likely the most famous actual high noon gunfight was Wild Bill, but yeah, they were rare.
There was - and probably still is - a persistent urban myth that soldiers returning from Vietnam were spit on and called names. Not one has ever been verified (that I’m aware of), yet there are those who still whine about how poorly vets were treated upon return. I will grant that treatment for PTSD was slow in coming, but that was a holdover from previous wars and was systemic rather than personal. I never got a hostile vibe from anyone, though people were reluctant to talk about an unpopular war.
Who were the supposed people mistreating Vietnam vets that way? Hippies who condemned them for having fought an unjust war, or conservatives for losing a war in god knows where against the commies?
Over in the Pit is the Sovereign Citizen thread with countable (I’m not going to count them) urban myths.
A cooking favorite is you add salt to your water to raise the boiling point when you make pasta. Yeeesss sorta. For 1 gallon of water, you’d need ~0.65 lbs to gain 1 deg F. You add the salt for taste.
Related, you don’t break the spaghetti in half. People will tell you it changes the taste somehow. Somehow??? There’s approximately 87 different shapes of pasta. Telling me a 5 inch piece of spaghetti tastes different from a 10 inch piece; I’ll start backing away slowly. Yes, you can make a slightly different “swirley” presentation but taste, nope.
As far as I could tell, the hippies were pissed at the government, not at the soldiers who were sent there. My present wife was one of those protesting the war. But in the stories that were passed around, it was always some long-haired hippy type.
… shouting “Baby killer!”
I just a couple weeks read someone saying this had happened to her father. No idea if it was accurate.
Too much beta-carotene WILL turn your skin orange if you consume too much of it.
When I was a tween in the late 1970s, someone came out with “Tanning Pills”, and one of my classmates bought a bottle and smuggled it into the house. Being a tween herself, she took a handful of them before going to bed, and when she woke up the next morning, pumpkin-orange from head to toe, her parents put her in the car and made a beeline for the emergency room. (No, she didn’t tell them what she’d done. Remember, tween.) When they walked in, the staff knew exactly what she had been up to, and it took a week or so to completely fade. I mean, even the whites of her eyes and the palms of her hands were bright orange!
There is some truth to that, but the iron in spinach is ferric iron, which is less useful to the body than ferrous iron, contained in animal products and of course supplements.
There also a misconception about what cowboys looked like thanks to Hollywood. Real cowboys didn’t look like John Wayne. Many* cowboys were black and Hispanic. Cowboys were farm laborers, and what demographic do you think would have been doing that kind of labor in the 19th century?
*I’m not sure if it’s correct to say “most” without looking up some statistics.
In the early 1970s, a pediatrician named Benjamin Feingold invented a diet for kids with multiple allergies and eczema, that excluded artificial flavors and dyes, and recommended going light on sugar.
Some parents of kids on the diet, whose children had previously been diagnosed with “hyperactivity,” reported that the diet seemed to alleviate the hyperactivity as well. As word-of-mouth spread, other parents of diagnosed hyperactive children tried the diet, and liked the results. “Hyperactivity” was the correct medical term for ADHD now.
No study was ever done that tried to separate the results of the removal of artificial dyes & flavors, and reduction of sugar itself, from the effects of a generally healthier diet with more home-prepared foods, and probably more attention focused on the child, in general.
That did not stop Dr. Feingold from publishing Why Your Child is Hyperactive in 1974. It’s from this that people got the idea that if removing sugar from the diet of already hyperactive kids reduced their activity level, then a normal child could have a fit of activity from eating excessive amounts of sugar.
It’s the same thinking that makes people think that if eating carrots restores night vision to people with vitamin A deficiency, then eating excessive beta-carotene with give you superior vision.
Anyway, there actually was a study in 1994, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, that would have put the myth to a rest if it were more widely known, but it unfortunately isn’t. In short, there was no measurable difference in hyperactive children’s subsequent behavior, whether or not they had consumed excessive sugar, or NutraSweet, or saccharine as an extra control (NutraSweet was relatively new) in a study conducted over several weeks.
I read another study which I cannot now find, where parents who averred that their sons reacted almost immediately to sugar consumption by becoming hyperactive, had their children divided into 4 groups, one consumed sugary snacks, and their parents were informed thus; a second consumed sugary snacks, and their parents were informed they had consumed NutraSweet; a third consumed NutraSweet-sweetened snacks, and their parents were informed thus; and a fourth consumed NutraSweet-sweetened snacks, and their parents were informed that they had consumed sugar.
Over the next several hours, parents and children were in a room with lots of available activities from books, to TV, to Legos, and up to climbing equipment: in other words, progressive degrees of “activeness.”
The parents were told to write down what their child was doing, and their reaction to it every 15 minutes (or something), while the families were videotaped, and the children wore Fitbit-type devices that recorded just how active they were.
Want to guess the results?
The most active group was the group who had eaten Nutrasweet, but their parents had been told they had eaten sugar. There was no significance difference between the two groups whose parents had been told they had eaten Nutrasweet (whatever they had actually eaten), and both in aggregate were less active than the other two groups.
Additionally, the two groups whose parents had been told they had eaten sugar were corrected, reprimanded, and scolded by their parents a far greater number of times than the children in the other groups-- whether the children had eaten sugar or not, and whether the individual child was more active or expressing himself negatively, bullying, or committing anything objectively judged as warranting parental intervention, compared to all the other children.
I really wish I could find this study. I read it in a print magazine, and I’m pretty sure I was in college, so it would have been before the other study.
Anyway, so telling.
I remember one time at my son’s school, when he was maybe 8, there was a kid who wasn’t supposed to have sugar, and got his measly sugar-free substitutes at a party where the other kids got a cupcake and some candy, and a serving of juice. The kid was running wild, like pretty much all the kids, because, you know, party, and we were giving them a lot of leeway, because they were celebrating something, although I don’t remember what.
They were still a little hyped up from the party after school, so they were taken to the playground for a bit, and when Sugarless’s mom came to get him, he was still pretty wound up, so his mom asked the teacher if they were sure he didn’t have sugar?
Nope, just being an 8-yr-old at a party.
My father, who was a teen at the end of WWII, said every returning vet was greeted with confetti and laurels. He said his father, who was a little better off then most people coming out of the Depression, but by no means wealthy, a few times walked into a bar after the vets returned, and bought every overseas vet there a drink.
He said one of his uncles, a war vet, often went into a restaurant, and if he was in uniform (which he often was, because he was still in service for a couple of years after the war), someone would pay for his meal without even saying anything.
I think things like this didn’t happen to Vietnam vets, and a lot of people were aware of it. To some people, who just had an idea of how to treat a vet, ignoring their status amounted to abuse.
But I think Vietnam vets still in service didn’t tend to wear their uniforms when off-duty, which people did in the WWII era.
Drinking coffee will stunt a young person’s growth.
Only children are more selfish/narcissistic/etc. than those with siblings.
Pretty much all of these accounts are second-hand and therefore suspect.
Maybe 20-25% were black, about the same Hispanic. But the cowboys who did the big cattle drives were a different breed than “farm workers” as we think of them.
John Wayne was usually a ranch owner, and could have looked like that.
There are some first hand accounts, but not verified-
I cannot, of course, prove to anyone’s satisfaction that spitting incidents like these did not happen. Indeed, it seems likely to me that it probably did happen to some veteran, some time, some place. But while I cannot prove the negative, I can prove the positive: I can show what did happen during those years and that that historical record makes it highly unlikely that the alleged acts of spitting occurred in the number and manner that is now widely believed.[15]
There is a small bit of truth to this, though. In China the “little emperors” syndrome is well-discussed; how an entire generation or two born under the One-Child Policy have shown many people with some such traits - but not all that much more than those in multi-kid households.
Speaking of the late 60s, people still talk about “bra-burning” as if it was a real thing that happened. (What protestors actually burned were their draft cards.)
I recall photos in newspapers in the late 60s to mid 70’s of angry women protesting for “women’s lib” who were burning bras. Not many mind you, but I’m quite sure there’s a real life antecedent for the idea that it was a symbolic destruction of the patriarchy’s harness.
Lotta people protested for a lot of causes back then. Against the draft, against racism, for farm workers, for black power, for women power, for jesus, etc.
What women did was throw the bras in a garbage can.