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!

So Fallopian tubes aren't tubes? What are they? And are they connected to the uterus? I'm very confused by all this.

Until about 19m ago I thought you could get pregnant at any time, and it was soooooo easy to do so. I had never been told about ovulation etc and just believed all the stuff they drummed in to us at school about if you had unprotected sex, you would get pg, just like that. Now I know that's not true.
Snap

@excusemyfrench Is that not true then? What is the cord attached to? Am very embarrassed about this particularly as I have one ds and pregnant with my second

To inseminate a cow one arm is in the vagina operating a 'gun' that deposits the semen, the other arm is inserted rectally to guide the gun and make sure it is in the right place. There is a technique where the hand inserted rectally grasps the uterus and pulls it into a different orientation to allow the semen to be placed in the horns of the uterus.

Just the thought of it makes me cross my legs!

Again not me (honestly, really honestly). A friend of a relative of mine thought that the Concorde model that used to be on display right by the entrance to Heathrow (just after the tunnel I think), was a real one, you know - used for transporting people.

When I first went to primary school, I was convinced teachers lived at the school. The first few years had a hut each outside the old Victorian building due to overcrowding and the reception one had a sort of kitchen, toilets and a small bed for sick kids to wait to be picked up. I was sure Mrs R and Mrs A shared that tiny bed each night. :D

I only realised the truth when we went on a class trip where we walked to Mrs A's house with our favourite teddies for a teddy bear's picnic and were provided with paper plates full of sweets in her garden. Teachers probably wouldn't be allowed to do that now, but gosh I loved it.

i used to feel sorry for the radio DJ if my parents put a tape on in the car. i thought he had to sit there quietly in the dark til he was needed again.

poor Tony Blackburn :(

@Elmo1980, @excusemyfrench,

The cord is attached to the BABY'S tummy, which eventually becomes the belly button, but in the mother, it is attached to the placenta. This allows mum's and baby's blood to get close to each other so that substances can pass between, but the bloods never mix or come into contact with each other in any way until birth, which is why being Rh+/- can be such a problem.

HTH.

@meltingmarshmallows well that makes me feel a lot better
I remember realising what i was saying as I was saying it but at the same time being so confused as to why Id believed that for so long. Weird!

Thanks for the support!

OAP was an Over Aged Person until I was about 15, and Alzheimers Disease was Old-Timers Disease....

Not sure what I had against the elderly!

Nooo, surely it's not legal to have the interior lights on at night? It'd affect your night vision! In fact I'm not sure that mine even work when the engine is on but will need to test that.

Oh, another one from primary school! Mrs S was quite strict and told us her dragon brooch would breathe fire if anyone talked in assembly and we fell for it. Though she did teach us the "splat on the floor with his guts hanging out" version of "10 in the bed" so she could be fun.

Re Fallopian tubes not being tubes: I'm sure I've seen a diagram of reproductive parts with fallopian tubes drawn on it. Erm..maybe I was looking at something else, the intestine? But isn't that higher up?

@elmo1980 the cord is attached from the baby's tummy to the placenta.
If you look at a picture it makes complete sense.
Thanks for sharing my confusion

My ds doubled over and eventually managed to tell me that passenger planes do not reverse! I seriously never knew this hmm

He sounds like an arrogant little tick who needs a good dose of Victorian parenting.

Next time you get on a plane which is nose-in at the stand, ask him how he thinks it's going to get away from the terminal building without reversing.

I once said to DH "wouldn't it be a good idea if you could adjust the windscreen wiper speed when it's really raining?" he pointed out to the little slidey switch on top of the wiper controls.... we'd had the car 11 years at that point!!

Kitten - the North pole is dark for much of the day in winter as the North pole is not at the top of the world just as the south pole is not at the bottom, both are off at an angle. If you image the world as a clock face the north pole is at about 10 or 11 o'clock. As the world spins on this north / south axis and also rotates around the sun, different parts of the world get differing lengths of exposure to the Sun, so getting different amounts of heat and light.

MaroonPencil apparently the sun rises at the North Pole on 21 March and goes in circles every 24 hours around the horizon, getting slightly higher in the sky each time until 21 June, and then circling lower and lower until the sun sets on 21 September. Then it's night for six months. Something to do with the fact that the earth is tilted so for half the year it's light and for the other half it's dark at the poles. Also, apparently there isn't really an east or west at the North Pole - every direction is south. I can't quite get my head around this.

Another one: when I was at primary school, the nun who taught us said never put your head outside the window of a moving train because a train could come the other way and chop your head off. Then someone else told me that it was impossible for that to happen. Very recently, within the last year or 2, I heard on the news that someone put their head out of the window of a moving train and his head was decapitated by another train travelling the other direction. I was amazed and said 'Sister Veronica was right!'

There's probably a moral there somewhere.

HOOTED with laughter at You can tell by the way I use my wok

Oops, cross posted! Thanks, DPotter!

Re airplanes reversing: don't they usually get pushed back from the gate by a small truck-like thing? Thought I'd seen this but it's been a while since I flew.

Definitely didn't have to google what OAP means
I thought the car interior light was not illegal but frowned upon because on the motorway because from a distance it might look like a motorcycle to other road users

When I went to kindergarten as a five year old, the teacher put a tooth in a glass of Coca Cola and the following day we children could all see that the tooth was gone, entirely dissolved by the Coca Cola, or so we were told. It was scary, the tooth totally dissolved! The five year old me took that at face value. I now know (or suspect) that the teacher fooled us by removing the tooth overnight, but the point was clearly made, and to this day I'm terribly convinced that Coke is severely bad for your teeth, having not quite been able to shake off the feeling of disgust and awe from this traumatic experience learned in kindergarten. Imagine, it was totally dissolved by the sugar, or so we all thought at the time.

I thought Al Jolson really was black, until my parents told me the truth

I thought Jimmy Krankie really was a little boy too.

I believed cauliflower cured whooping cough until I was 17.

And I though Chesterfield was a county until I was in my mid-twenties.