I never thought there were little people in the TV, but when I was six or seven I did feel extremely sorry for that poor announcer on Nickelodeon, having to sit there and at every commercial break all day say the same things, over and over, in EXACTLY the same way, day in and day out.
Why it didn’t occur to me that the promos were on tape, I don’t know.
Up until I was seven, we had a fireplace and chimney in every house we had lived in. In the summer of 1965, we moved into a house that had a large oil-burning heater with a 8" (or therabouts) steel flue that came out the side and up into the cieling (thence out to the roof).
I took one look at that skinny thing and asked “How’s Santa s’posed to get down that skinny thing?” I had no way of knowing just how skinny a real chimney was, but I’d seen pictures of the fat guy and knew there was no way he’d fit down that skinny smoke-pipe. Even if he did, there were no doors on the outside of the heater, so how would he get out?
I talked it over with my parents, and they said Santa was magic, but I wasn’t convinced I mean, how could a fat guy like him even begin to get down that thing? From the tone of their voices, it sounded to me that my parents weren’t too convinced either. I suggested they leave the front door unlocked on Christmas eve.
They must’ve, because he managed to leave gifts that year and the next, the only two Christmases we lived in that house.
~~Baloo
My great-grandmother was always saying “Someone left the gate open” to mean that the light was green. I didn’t understand what she was referring to, and thought she meant this one gate at a house in the neighborhood. Kinda puzzled me as to why she would care about a complete stranger’s house.
At my elementary school there was a poster that said “Physical Fitness will help you in the long run”, or words to that effect. I exercised like crazy so that I would be in shape for The Long Run and I was worried because I didn’t know when it was going to be. After a few months I asked my dad and he explained the phrase to me. I was very relieved.
Also, I was convinced that “the future” was going to happen all at once, that suddenly one day everyone would wake up and find that robots had taken their jobs. That’s why I planned on being a “robot repairman”. Never occurred to me that a robot could do that job.
Dolores Claiborne, “There are these big bush/plant things (I have no idea of the real name for them) that are very tall and have big off white plume things coming out of the top.”
That is commonly referred to as bear grass depending on where you are. It looks like a bush of really long grass with the blade of the grass being razor sharp. I had many a cut from them too. 
Labradorian, “- it is entirely conceivable that the entire universe is actually just one big jeezus atom, embedded in a much larger object, like a giant rock, with other atom-universes. (Still waiting for this one to be disproved.)”
I still believe this but it isn’t a rock that the atom is part of. It is another giant person. I figure we are in the equivalent of a skin cell or something. When I was younger and prone to depression I figured we were the beginning of a cancer cell in the celestial body since we kept doing things to the planet. (Eco-nuts really pulled me in on that one. Now I believe the planet will take care of itself but we may kill ourselves off from the stupid things that we do.)
I still believe in Santa. He is a major hottie.
HUGS!
Sqrl
PS. Nekochan, as a fellow member of the Styled Nose Hair Club, I got those stares up until I was around 12 years old. It is embarassing to admit but I only ever knew one person with a moustache and I thought it would be rude to ask him how he grew it.
HUGS!
Sqrl
I think Tennhippie is having those flashbacks again.
Thanks!
I believed if you looked hard enough you could see the Three Stooges on the moon. Well, that’s what my brother always said. What a mean thing to tell a little sister…
[ul][li]I once left most of a cookie on my window sill just before going to bed. When I woke up, it was still there, but a different kind than I remembered. (I though I left a chocoate chip cookie, and a Fig Newton was there in the AM.) I was convinced that leaving cookies on your window sill would make them morph into Fig Newtons.[/li]
[li]I thought I had never been 3 years old. I remembered my 2nd birthday (still do; I remember my mom giving me a card with a big blue “2” on it) when I was 5, as well as my fourth. But not remembering my 3rd BD, I though I had skipped it. What enforced this was that I had attended a pre-kindergarten when I was 4-5. So when I went to regular public school, they bumped me up to 1st grade after only 2 weeks. Now if I could’ve only skipped junior high altogether.[/li]
[li]At night when our furnace shut off, all the aluminum ducts in the house would start contracting as they cooled. They would make booming noises as they popped back into shape. I imagined that these noises were monsters climbing up the heating ducts to get me. I really freaked out when my dad had taken off the grill to the duct in my room, then didn’t put it back on right away. Dammit man! That’s the only thing keeping those monsters from getting to me! Ahem… sorry, flashback there…[/li]
[li]I thought Broadway was in California and Hollywood was in New York.[/li][/ul]
Which is why he was worshipped: he prevented his parents’ plane from crashing just moments after he was born. :D:D
My mother used to take me into the stores and the first thing she would do was go to the toy aisle and pick me out a toy. I played and played with it while she shopped and whenever it was time to leave we would go back to the toy aisle and put that toy back. For the longest time I didn’t know that you could actually take the toys out of a store.
Loads of kids, (especially american ones) think that WWF is real
I used to think that the government shot rockets into the sky to make the weather change on a regular basis. So whenever the news reported a slight chance of rain, I figured the government was behind it.
(1) I believed that things like broken bones were contagious. Probably it was because I must have seen someone with a broken leg, in a wheelchair, but I’d also heard the word “wheelchair” in connection with hospitals
and illness generally.
(2) I had a storybook, beautifully illustrated, that had something to do with divers searching for treasure. In some pictures the divers were wearing not flippers, but those weighted boots that they use when working at the bottom
of the ocean. But in other pictures they were wearing flippers. So I wondered if the boots were somehow turned into flippers by the action of the water.
Wehen I was a kid and had heard of these two actresses, I though Katharine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn were mother and daughter! :eek:
Holy crap! I’m 28 years old, and I thought that they were mother and daughter until this very moment. (And for years I’ve been embarassed by the fact that I could never remember which one was the mother and which one was the daughter…) (and I had to go check IMDB to verify that dougie was correct)
PLEASE tell me that I was not alone in this misconception