Pineapples don't grow on trees and other misconceptions that MN has revealed over the years

[DadDadDad]

To celebrate that Chat threads will no longer disappear after 90 days, I thought I'd honour that with something that's been a MN staple over the years: curious facts that apparently came as a surprise to some people.

Sad person that I am , I've kept a note of some of these over the years. I won't paste them all into this first post, but feed them in over time assuming anyone shows the slightest interest. Please add your own...

The following are all TRUE. In some cases, you may think "so what?", but remember each one has come up because a MNetter found it surprising or even BELIEVED SOMETHING CONTRADICTORY

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Places

The Channel Tunnel passes through the bedrock underneath the sea, it's not sitting in a tube resting on the seabed.

Edinburgh is further west than Liverpool and Bristol.

Portsmouth is on an island off the British mainland. Gibraltar is not an island.

Casablanca is in North Africa (Morocco).

Timbuktu is a real place (in Mali, Africa).

Dunkirk is in France (not Scotland) - maybe the film will now have got everyone up to speed on that one .

Budapest and Bucharest are different cities.

County Durham is in NE England (County Down is in N Ireland).

Tripoli is in Libya.

The place you hear as 'Arkinsaw' is written 'Arkansas'.

Yes to Belvoir being called Beaver. I had a lovely day there at the castle ending in wine tasting. The food was lush.

Gibraltar is not an island.

Just reminded of that one, after presenter Charlie Star on BBC Breakfast made that mistake just now!

Just last week,after reading here about Mumford & Son(s?) cancelled gigs, I realised that they weren't a transport haulage company, sort of like Eddie Stobart?

And now I'm wondering what Eddie Stobart, the elderly pop singer, would look like? I'm thinking grey wild curly hair (permed), shirt opened to the waist exposing more curly grey hair. And a medallion.

graphista i saw the thing about the cheese grater recently and tried it at work and it really is easier using it on its side when grating

I'm really confused about the walkers one because I remember them swapping 😳 what????

The recent Moon landing by China has reminded me of a misconception I had where I thought others had the misconception.

The dark side of the Moon is another expression for the far side of the Moon. The word "dark" here means "unknown" rather than "unilluminated". The half of the Moon that is unilluminated changes all the time - that's what we see as phases of the Moon through a monthly cycle.

So, that means during a new Moon, the 'dark' side is the bright side (which we can't see) and the side we can see is in darkness but is not the "dark side".

The soft bit of a clementine is actually the bottom of the fruit not the top. I found this out the other day when we got some with leaves on!

Sausage Simon the blood of the covenant is a religious (Christian) thing- so it basically means the church is more important/binds you stronger than family. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb

A few new ones:

When you save a file to the "cloud", that just means that you are not saving it on your device, but on servers via the web, so that you and others can access it from other devices. Cloud computing means running an application on a server (or even several servers) giving more power than on your local machine.

Holland is not a country (it's a region of the Netherlands).

Panther is not a separate species - it's just the black version of a species such as leopard or jaguar.

Mince pies have a sweet filling - no meat!

Camels don't store water in their humps.

I thought of this thread today when I visited a Cornish garden where they have special heated frames for growing pineapples. Photo evidence attached for the record.