When i was a child, i believed autopilot really worked like in the movie Airplane, that it was an inflatable dummy.
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I thought that I’d die of cancer because that’s my zodiac sign and nobody could convince me otherwise.
New York city was the size of the whole state. Like the entire thing looked like manhattan.
My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.
So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.
I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.
Christmas tree as extraterrestrial cargo cult ritual. Holy shit that’s brilliant.
I used to think a car direction indicator was a GPS guiding system, and not manually operated.
Not me, but I have heard that kids used to think ‘olden times’ were black & white, because all old films were before the introduction of colour. Like, it’s only in the last 80? years that people see in colour…
It makes me giggle when modern movies use b&w to depict pre 21st century, or even ‘flashbacks’ are b&w
Honestly I have to remind myself of this myself. Yes, these are images of events in (say) 1938. No, things weren’t actually black and white in 1938, people saw colors the same way, with the same sharpness, they do in 2024, it’s just photographic technology that has improved since then.
I used to think those coins in the fountain at the mall were just money people wanted to get rid of. One day, little me tried getting away with a skirt full of coins and got in trouble.
I mean, to be fair, a coin on the ground is fair game, and they don’t make these “unspoken rules” clear enough, so I couldn’t imagine a coin in a fountain not being free to just pick up.
That we would live in peace
In the 80s when i was a child there were billboards with PSAs saying don’t drink and drive. I’d promptly scold my parents if i caught them taking a sip from their soft drink after hitting the McDonald’s drive through.
“Drink” is such a weird word in how it has both a general and specific meaning, but no other word for the general meaning is commonly used.
“Drink you’re milk! No drinking until you’re 21!”
There was a park near my house where often cops would sit to catch speeders. Driving past one day, I didn’t see a cop and I told my parents I was surprised by this. My folks told me that they were there, just undercover. I asked where, and they pointed to a woman walking a dog and they told me it was an undercover speed dog. For years I’d point out suspected speed dogs when we’d drive places. I am not a smart man.
There’s a park in Brasilia that has a “little rocket”. I refused to enter it when I was something like 4yo, because “What if it launches while I’m inside?”
Actors are dying… for real.
I used to think that there was a country called Cyclopedia, that was full of all kinds of fascinating things. I had a book all about it called “In Cyclopedia”.
I thought propeller planes worked by spinning so fast that they temporarily moved the gravity out of the way so the plane could fly.
That God exists
Not me but really funny - when my mom was little she thought white people weren’t real. She thought they were made up for tv
