Things that you've thought that were in fact absurd

[Pacificplaza]

Inspired by another current thread: what things have you thought to yourself, and accepted as true, which on telling someone else have quickly transpired to be completely ridiculous?

E.g: I always thought that when drinking a hot beverage, that the misty effect observed should you happen to glance down into the cup was your EYEBALLS getting STEAMED UP in the manner of a pair of glasses. When I casually mentioned this at work everyone kindly pointed out that I was just... seeing the steam.

My car is an old banger with no air con, just the air blower. For my entire life until my ExDP corrected me, I thought you had to 'run' the hot air until it turned from cold to hot eventually in the same way you do the tap. Rather than just turn it on once the car's warmed up. The hours I must have spent grimly tolerating a stream of freezing air in winter .

I'm not normally a simpleton by the way, I've got degrees and stuff and mostly manage to function.

So please tell me I'm not alone!

Oh my, I thought I was reasonably intelligent until I read this thread (only on page 3). So far I have learned.....

1. Wolverines are real
2. The channel tunnel is under the sea bed
3. Under soil heating isn't to keep players warm
4. It is not illegal to drive with the internal light on

I thought until quite recently that the contestants on University Challenge sat in a booth with one team on top of the other and the team on top must have to climb stairs or something!

The revelation on this thread for me is that gherkins are pickled cucumbers! I've never tried one as I didn't know what they were

I never knew that about (Condo)Lisa Rice either. Bloody hell 😳

Dispatch like this?

m.youtube.com/watch?v=z3HvchF49AM

Yep!

I thought Dunkirk was a person I.e. Don Kirk.

I am pretty academic but am the only one in my family who is so I'm sure there are some other classics as people were often as I missed out on some things at home that made others well-rounded!!

Oh yes and also that Helsinki was in the Caribbean. I think in my mind it sounded exotic.

Finally I got confused in front of my DH once as couldn't remember if dragons were real or mythical?! Similarly my brother thought unicorns were definitely real!

So I've only just realised the thing about the air blower in the car OP

Wow some of these are literally amazing my favourites (love that there's more than one of you that thought this) have to be thinking that Davidoff is something to do with David Hasselhoff!!

I've just remembered one that, while short-lived, was particularly dippy. I was driving along at night in one of my old bangers from years ago when I looked up and noticed that the moon was BRIGHT BLUE! It was so beautiful! I was naturally astounded and pulled over in wonderment. Thinking I needed to let everyone know about this wondrous phenomenon I texted all my friends and family to urge them to go outside and look at it immediately.

Looking up again I then realised that this particular newly-acquired banger had a strip of transparent blue plastic stuck along the top of the windscreen...

Oh and the car I had after that had a sunroof but I didn't notice for three years.

Distracted - yes, December is a summer month. So, yes, it's hot on Christmas Day. We do incorporate snow, snow flakes etc into our decorations and cards, but we also have Aussie representations of traditional Christmas concepts - eg, Father Christmas in his usual garb but with short sleeves and shirt trousers, wearing flip flops instead of boots.

Up until about month ago I thought the Netherlands were landlocked and I've been there many times over the years!

We used to go camping in France a lot when I was a kid and there were always loads of Dutch people on the campsites. I think I once asked my mum why they all loved camping in France so much and must have said something like 'because they don't have beaches in the Netherlands', from which my young brain somehow extrapolated that they didn't have any coast at all. And then it stayed that way until I was 33 and finally looked properly at a map!

Timbuktu is a real place.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1911321.stm

When I was pushing my dc around once I said to dp wouldn't it be nice if there was a chair for adults that you could be pushed around in. He said 'what like a wheel chair?

Ah, I hadn't realised either about "the other side" being the punchline of the chicken joke. But it gives a certain irony to one of the variations on that joke:

Why did the chicken jump off the cliff?
He was fed up with people making jokes about him.

But another one which fooled me for a long time: "she was his coke and spiriter." I thought it was some kind of slang for accomplice. (Co-conspirator )

And here's a physics enigma, which has sometimes made my pupils stare at me open-mouthed: it's not just the Earth, or the moon, or the Sun that have gravity. Everything that has mass has gravity, even objects like bricks. We only notice the Earth's gravity because the Earth is so vast. (My school had some equipment to measure the gravity of some very heavy metal spheres, but it was so sensitive it would be disturbed by passing traffic.)

I invited my dad for lunch recently and asked him if he also wanted sweetcorn. He replied "no thanks, I stopped eating that years ago as for some reason it doesn't agree with me because I can't digest it".
What he didn't realize is that everyone passes what looks like undigested sweetcorn and its just the 'shell' of the kernel thats discarded!

He's now back to eating it again

MyPatronusIsAUnicorn
I'm not sure I get the car heater one? You turn engine on, if you put fan onto hot, it won't get hot because the engine is cold and takes a while to warm up as the engine has been running for longer? Is that right because that's what I thought?

I think people thought that you have to have it blasting to get it hot (sometimes like a hot tap) Not realising that they can keep it off until the engine is sufficiently hot, then put it on for instant heat rather than enduring endless freezing cold air blasting whilst waiting!

I thought Dundee was in Australia because of Crocodile Dundee. When I was about 12 my parents' friend got a three month work contract in Dundee and was commuting weekly from SE England. I thought he was flying home from Australia every Friday night and going back every Sunday night.

I was sterilised many years ago. A few weeks later I was on my period when my DH asked how this could be possible when I had been sterilised.

When I was small I used to be convinced that if we sat upstairs at the very front of the bus, it would tip up.

I thought Dunkirk was a person I.e. Don Kirk.

hahahahahahaha.

I laughed.

The most absurd thing I've heard people (men and women) believing is that women piss out of their vagina. Totally freaking stupid, especially for a women FFS.

Sorry @DadDadDad and @strawberrygate I dropped off the thread yesterday afternoon!!

We feel for the cervix rectally and then use the other hand to insert the AI gun (looks like a roughly 30cm long thin bit of wire with a disposable plastic casing around it containing the semen) through the vagina. Didn't explain that very well! So the only hand that's inside is the one in the cow's rectum with the other hand outside the vulva with the AI gun inside the vagina. You can feel you've got the gun past the cervix with the hand that's not controlling the gun!

That Washington dc (the capital of USA) is on the East Coast and nothing to do with the state of Washington which is on the West coast.

And that DC isn't a state. It's between Maryland and Virginia and is it's own thing (Washington District of Columbia.)

I've only just found this out and it's caused all manner of confusion.

And as a kid I thought that 'Left Wing Guerilla's' were actually Gorilla's with a wing on the left side only...

As a child I was really surprised that football players knew exactly how to replay the game on Saturday night for Match of the Day.
The hymn 'There is a green hill far away without a city wall' puzzled me because I couldn't understand why a green hill would need a city wall in the first place.