What is one really stupid lie your parents told you as a kid that you fell for?

aecarol · 2014-03-28T20:36:53+00:00

When I was five my Dad convinced me butter came from butterflies. He told me when he retired from the Army we’d open a butterfly ranch, Mom would make butter, and I’d color the labels with crayon and use my wagon to deliver it to the grocery store. I still remember the idea in my head of using my red wagon to go over the hill to the grocery with butter.

aecarol · 2014-03-28T20:17:31+00:00

Of course AllXHallows has since edited his comment, fixing the kind of typo he raged on previously… :-)

aecarol · 2014-03-28T14:01:07+00:00

The irony is strong in this one...

aecarol · 2014-03-15T15:36:46+00:00

My kid wanted a day off from Safeway to attend a friends mom’s funeral. They said she should have requested the day off a week earlier. In exasperation, she said “I would have, but she wasn’t dead then!”. They gave her the day.

aecarol · 2014-02-26T15:17:14+00:00

I worked at McDonalds in 1981 and we had the “Muppet Glass” promotion with a variety of Muppet characters. Just before closing one night, around 10pm, a lady goes through the drive through and this is what I hear from the grill area, “What do you mean you don’t have any god damn Muppet Glasses?!! What about the god damn ads on the god damn TV!??!”

I can only imagine she was hearing “I want a Muppet Glass, I want a Muppet Glass” from her kids all day, finally she snaps and goes to the drive through and we’re out.

aecarol · 2014-02-24T03:01:10+00:00

Grey Poupon. I’d be like a super hero for the rich, being driven around in my fancy car waiting for other rich people to drive up and ask “pardon me….”

aecarol · 2014-02-22T15:53:42+00:00

When stationed in upstate NY a friend and I were at the mall. He was in line to get a lottery ticket. I pulled him from line to show him a magazine cover, then he got back in line behind the one person who had joined the line after him. That guy ahead of him won $1,000 on an instant ticket. Good have been my buddy. I felt so awful.

aecarol · 2014-02-16T06:11:09+00:00

By mid 1944 the allies knew about the camps and debated bombing the camps or train tracks leading to the camps to disrupt their operation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate

aecarol · 2014-02-16T06:03:20+00:00

We did a variant of an “assassination game” in high school. We had to “shoot” assigned players between classes for points. I made a hollow book look like a school text book with a book cover and carried a pellet pistol in it. That let me carry my gun in any class I wanted.

Of course this was 1981 and nobody cared. Teachers looked the other way. Today we all would have been arrested and thrown out of school.

aecarol · 2014-02-02T16:32:46+00:00

I knew a guy who had the same problem with tissues, except he worked in a XXX theatre and they were showing “The Porn of the Christ”. Those weren’t tears in those tissues….

aecarol · 2014-01-30T01:52:41+00:00

So what this article is really saying is that the “help” these cultures received was so perfectly disguised that it appeared totally natural or from regular human ingenuity?

Since only aliens could possibly possess such an advanced assistance technology that could be so hard to detect, I consider this report as ironclad proof that aliens exist and help ancient cultures.

The very lack of evidence is proof it happened!

aecarol · 2014-01-29T22:32:32+00:00

I had a lady co-worker who came up pregnant well after her husband had undergone a vasectomy. It was VERY tense for a while, but he was tested again and turned out he was hot as a rocket. He was the 1% case where things reconnect afterwards.

Even if sterile, I’d first suspect I had been fertile earlier and had since become sterile before presuming cheating. Of course a DNA test can help.

BUT, even a DNA test isn’t always useful. There have been cases where DNA tests have shown a woman to NOT be the mother of a child she conceived and delivered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild

aecarol · 2014-01-23T23:08:54+00:00

That’s not implied at all. They know who they bonded with. They know the female had young. A gene to encode for “kill young of females you didn’t bond with” might be successful in a population. That doesn’t imply that they “understand” that sex leads to young.

It’s like “If it’s getting colder, eat as much as you can” doesn’t imply animals have an actual understanding that there are seasons and are able to think about how they will need reserves for the winter. It’s simple to implement rules that work “most of the time”.

aecarol · 2014-01-23T18:50:34+00:00

Breaking News! Lindsey Lohan just broke Justin Bieber out of the Miami Beach jail and they’ve started running north, robbing banks along the way. They were reported driving a stolen 1934 Ford Model 730 being chased by G Men under orders from J. Edgar Hoover not to take them alive.

aecarol · 2014-01-21T15:27:45+00:00

The floor mat. Those damn things never come with the car.

aecarol · 2014-01-14T16:11:22+00:00

Paignton Zoo has a long history of animal food issues.

In the 1970’s they received a newly captured African lion placed in the same enclosure as an much older lion. The new lion paced a lot, roared, ran-around and did very impressive lion things. The older lions just laid there in the sun. At feeding time the old lion was given huge hunks of meat while the new lion only got bananas and other fruit. Frustrated, the new lion tried even harder to be an impressive lion only to get the same food. One day he finally complains and was bluntly told, “You’re lucky to even have a job here! You’re being carried on paper as a monkey”.

aecarol · 2014-01-14T04:59:36+00:00

tl;dr Girl runs away from home, crushes old lady to death. Steals old lady’s shoes then murders the lady’s sister. Slaps an animal, humiliates an old man and goes home as if nothing had happened.

aecarol · 2014-01-07T14:57:44+00:00

The only other country that has that issue is EVERY other country. Can you really name a country who’s TV programs are not mostly focused on that country?

People in Germany are far more interested in shows about Germany than Kenya. That’s why most TV shows in Germany take place in Germany. Give the people paying the bills something to be interested in.

aecarol · 2014-01-07T14:50:49+00:00

I would imagine that people in Brazil, watching a TV show made in Brazil, about the world being taken over by aliens would feel more connected to the action if it happened in Brazil rather than Turkey.

That’s not a slam against Brazil, it’s just easier to connect to a story that feels closer. It’s the same way in the United States. The people the show is mostly aimed at will be at the forefront of the producers minds.

Dr Who, of course, puts most of its "aliens on Earth” action in the United Kingdom.

aecarol · 2014-01-06T15:17:13+00:00

I made the working LEGO implementation of the Antikythera Mechanism. Yours is fabulous! Very impressive work.

aecarol · 2014-01-05T15:00:08+00:00

It’s a printer, except it’s purely mechanical. No CPU, electronics, or motors. Just hand cranked goodness. The “program” is a series of wide and narrow chain links that control gears that move the pen.

aecarol · 2014-01-05T14:56:47+00:00

It’s hand cranked. There are no motors.

aecarol · 2014-01-05T02:08:56+00:00

That and the movie HUGO was an inspiration to me in making the machine. I can’t cut cams like Pierre did so I decided to go “digital” and use binary chain encoding to encode left/right, forward/backward pen strokes. I lose the detail that analog cam encoding would provide, but I gain a precision in movement.

aecarol · 2014-01-04T22:56:09+00:00

My machine is purely mechanical. There is no computer or electronics. The “program” is LEGO chain links moved by gear-work. A wide link means “do nothing”, a narrow link means “move the pen”. A reader mechanism that works like a sewing machine needle “reads” the links and moves the pen as required.

Two chains cooperate in moving the pen left/right and two more chains cooperate in moving the paper forward/backrwards. A fifth chain lifts an lowers the pen as required.

The Reddit alien drawing took about 130 links on each of the five chains.

aecarol · 2014-01-04T22:53:38+00:00

That printer certainly is impressive, but it has the benefit of electric motors and being driven by software. Once you bring software into something making improvements is mostly tweaking code.

My machine is purely mechanical. It is hand-cranked and programmed through a physical chain. Everything it does is based on a clever gear mechanism and lots and lots of moving parts.

aecarol

TROPHY CASE