Gene Simmons - Kiss and make up
is a good read.
( Ya What Skiddlyboop, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 12:02, 2 replies)

i didn't believe in santa, god or the easter bunny
however, when my mum said "run upstairs and get my whatever-it-is-i-want-this-time from my dressing table and i'll count how long it takes you", i actually believed she was counting and that i was getting faster at running up the stairs :(
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:54, 9 replies)

Ends meat
I must have been pretty small when I first heard someone say '...they can barely make ends meet.' I understood that 'they' were poor, or hard up and I imagined 'ends meat' as being bits of meat scraped together after the butcher had done all the good cuts, scraped off bones etc. A bit like 'scraps' in the chippie.

It was many years later when I first saw it written down and it finally twigged what the 'real' meaning was. I still think my definition is better, after all, the ends of what exactly can't they get to meet?

Anyway, we'll all be eating it soon, once we go into recession again. If someone wants to set up the 'Ends Meat' company, specialising in poor cuts and offal, I want a share of the royalties please.
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:52, 12 replies)

Childhood Memories...

When I was a youngster I was quite naïve
You’ll be staggered to hear of the things I’d believe
Stuff like ‘kissing it better’ could cure any pain
And that should the wind change, then my belm would remain!

The entire universe would revolve around me
And some small people lived deep inside my TV
I thought dad was the strongest man in the whole world
And I’d vom vital organs each time that I hurled

If I swallowed my gum then my tum would explode
And road-kill was ‘asleep’ at the side of the road
I thought girls couldn’t fart, and I'm still in some doubt...
Are their cloppers just cocks that are turned inside-out?

If I touched things called ‘drugs’ I’d fall instantly dead
There's a ‘sleepy time monster’ that's under my bed
If I frequently fwapped then I feared I would find…
That my hands would go hairy...and then I'd go blind

But the worst lie of all, and it's really a stinker,
I totally fell for it - hook, line and sinker
That if I behave, and I work really hard
Then 'the world is my oyster'…

...

Yep, I'm a spacktard!
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:48, 9 replies)

My dad told me when i was a kid
that when prisoners wanted to commit suicide in the old days they ate sandwiches full of broken glass, if the prison wardens found out then they fed them sandwiches full of cotton wool so it would wrap around the glass and stop it cutting their insides....sounds feasible i suppose.
(djgalaxe, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:44, 1 reply)

When out with my Grandad 30 years or so ago I pointed at wind speed monitor and asked him what it was.
"It's a wind winder."
"What's that do?"
"It winds the wind."

For years after that I believed that these little spinning devices were responsible for making wind.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:43, 3 replies)

Polio
After hearing someone mention it on telly, I asked my dad what polio was.
As a result for a few years I believed polio was a disease that meant that when you went to the toilet only polo mints came out.
(FootOfTim, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:40, 2 replies)

That punching my sister was wrong! Hahahahahahahaha
My parents were such jokers.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:29, Reply)

Flammable/inflammable
After learning with interest that "Flammable" and "Inflammable" meant the same thing, my grammar-challenged friend and I concluded that "non-flammable" must also mean the same thing. Because an "In-" prefix means "Not", like in "Inoffensive" or "Ineffective", right? Game on!

And that's why we wasted a whole box of hard-won matches trying to light a bonfire with a can of emulsion paint nicked from our garage.
(richardm, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:17, 1 reply)

Aged 11 I used to believe that Suzanne Henshaw fancied me..
..after some classmates told me she did.

I spent a year trying to put my moves on her to no avail.

Turns out they were just winding me up as a cruel prank and didn't have the heart to tell me the truth.
( Airman Gabber Living life like a 70's BBC presenter, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 11:07, 6 replies)

When I was a dot - about three or four (I clearly remember this)
My sister was dressing up her teddy bear in baby clothes.

I asked her if, when her teddy grew out of them, my teddy could have them.

I will never forget the shame, the scorn, and the burning embarassment I felt as she laughed me out of the room.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 10:53, 4 replies)

My wife believed that your belly button was where the baby attached too
Not where you attached to you own mother mind but that when you have a baby inside of you the umbilical cord comes out of the baby and attaches to the mothers belly button from the inside. She believed this for years

She mentioned it to me whilst she was pregnant with our second child and when I had stopped laughing I gently explained about the placenta she pushed out after our first child was born and she said "Oh yeah, I forgot"
( Peej, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 10:48, 2 replies)

Someone at school told me Jamie Lee Curtis was born a man
There not being much of an internet at the time to check facts such as these, I believed it right up until my late teens. Kind of ruined True Lies for me, and don't get me started on 'that scene' in Trading Places.
(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 10:21, 14 replies)

aParrenttlh waznkinhg dosess makew yuou go bloind@
And braille keyboards suck.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Thu 19 Jan 2012, 10:14, Reply)

I didn't believe the nonsense......
Now I have to shave my hands once a week.
(iggyflynt Cleaning blood out of my clown costume, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 10:04, Reply)

I used to believe in anarchy, punk rock, smoking and drugs.
That we needed to smash the system; burn it down, blow it up, and kick it 'til it breaks - fuck the law and fuck the pigs, I'm doing it my way, copper, and you'll have to kill me before I surrender!

Then I grew up, and realised that actually we've got it pretty fucking good here if you're prepared to put your back into it, and that it's nice to earn your pint instead of fucking scrounging it like a spoilt teenager having a tantrum.

Striving for anarchy is absolutely bloody stupid (though as a lens for social study can be relatively useful), punk rock is just a capitalist mechanism designed to profit from selling a message of anti-capitalism, and smoking, too, is absolutely bloody stupid. It took me quite a while to get rid of that last one, mind.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 9:50, 12 replies)

Unfortunately, one day 'the wind changed'...

...and my face DID stay like that.
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Thu 19 Jan 2012, 9:26, Reply)

That people on an internet forum
Cared what my opinion on religion is.

Edit: Or Thatcher.
( MatJ LOOK, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 9:25, 8 replies)

"Being attacked very badly"
As a kid I liked to stay up late and watch the news with mum and dad.

A report of a vicious rape comes on the News at 10.

Me: "Mum, what does rape mean?".

Mum: "errmm, errmmm...it means to be attacked very badly".

2 weeks later I was (genuinely) attacked very badly by an Alsatian dog.

Imagine the hilarity when I told my less innocent peers and school teachers that I had been "raped very badly by a big Alsatian dog". I retold the story well into my teens until someone was kind enough to reveal the true meaning.

oh dear.

first post (as a born again b3taean) - be gentle.
(griffo, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 9:05, 8 replies)

Perhaps the snorkers were poisoned?...

Bohemian Rhapsody. That song seemed fucked up enough as it was, but it certainly didn't help when you didn't have a Scooby as to what the lyrics really were.

Subsequently, amongst half a dozen or so other frightening lyrical innaccuracies, I could never understand why Mr Mercury and friends had to tell 'Miss Miller' that 'we will not let him go', and why we had to 'spare him this life from these pork sausages'.

Still makes me shudder to think of the amount of times I proudly yawped the completely wrong lyrics at the top of my voice to bemused family and friends.
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Thu 19 Jan 2012, 9:00, 8 replies)

City centre
As a kid I believed that a city centre was a massive shopping centre that every city had right in the middle.

Persuaded my mum and dad to take me to 'The City Centre' one time and was gutted when we got to the CBD, asked my dad where the city centre was and he replied 'you're standing on it.'

Gutted.
(Rambo, John J, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 8:42, Reply)

Last one
Ghostwatch was *real*.
(kithkill, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 8:21, 5 replies)

Old Mother Shipton
As well as that, a year or so after that I was left in the lounge one evening to watch telly while my mum sat upstairs at the knitting machine, crafting another Xmas horror jumper.

I was playing with my LEGO, but I slowly became more and more aware of what was on the TV - a documentary about some dotty old lady living in olden days (probably Old Mother Shipton? I dunno) who was a bit like Nostradamus and predicted the world would end. When? Oooooo, about now-ish.

Of course, anything on TV spoken by a well-mannered grown-up, especially this late at night when it was grown-ups' TV, *had* to be true. So I went upstairs, and told my mum how sad it was that the entire world was going to end tonight, and that I'd miss her.

I think perhaps I was quite a morbid kid.
(kithkill, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 8:21, Reply)

Chemical weapons
When I was but a wee bairn, I used to live on an RAF base. Quite a coincidence, as my dad also happened to be in the RAF. This base - RAF West Raynham - was essentially in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Norfolk), and our house was on the very edge of the married quarters estate. Nothing out the back of the house except lots and lots of fields.

Specifically, there was a place in those fields. A special place, beloved of all the local kids in quarters. At the point where a number of fields joined, there was this little area we all called Mud Hill. This place was *amazing*.

The titular Mud Hill was essentially exactly that - a giant (to our tiny legs) mound of excavated earth that the farmer had obviously moved at some point, probably (I'm having to fill in the blanks here) pushed up against a natural bit of hill. But there was much more to it than that. Behind Mud Hill was a small copse of trees, and if you walked around the outer edge of the copse there were all kinds of interesting sites. Mud Hill, the biggest obviously. Then a long ridge. One year there was a dead animal of some kind a bit further round. Then some cool trees. And so on.

But perhaps the most mysterious relic on this sightseeing tour around the copse was an area of rough ground littered with chunks of brickwork. Not bricks, but entire sections of brick wall just lying around. All had come from some structure that had been knocked down, and the lower portions of some of the walls were still in situ. To a kid it was like walking around the Planet of the Apes, seeing the ruins of some mysterious civilization. What was the building? Why was it knocked down? (Or more likely exploded, we decided.)

All would become clear one summer afternoon, the day the big kids came.

It was strange, to have our supposedly secret retreat invaded by older kids. They were probably about 12 or 13, but to our eyes they were practically adults. And it was one of these scroaty bastards who told me *exactly* what that brick building had been. It was, he whispered conspiratorially, eyes flicking left and right furtively as he leaned in towards me, "... a bunker".

A what?

"Y'know, a secret bunker." This wasn't wholly unbelievable. After all, we all lived on a military base. Every time we drove past the entrance to the base we'd be driving past an enormous, decorative Bulldog missile. When we went to church in a tiny portacabin on-base on a Sunday, we'd have to stop at the gate and a man with a torch with a mirror attached to it would occasionally look under the car for bombs. Y'know, if he was bored and there was nothing decent on the radio in the guard hut. These kinds of concepts were not entirely alien to me, young as I was.

"What sort of bunker?" I asked.

"It's where they had all these chemical weapons. Things that make you ill, and then you die!" (or words to that effect).

"Wow!" I whispered hoarsely. I mean, how cool was that? And then suddenly the quiet moment of revelation was gone. Probably because some kids had found some sticks, or I needed a wee, or god knows why. I trotted off and continued to play around the field of bricks.

This, of course, would therefore be the first day I ever got hayfever. Twatsocks.

By the time I get home, my eyes are red and streaming. Nobody seemed to notice, but all I wanted to do was rub my eyes over and over. My nose was running. It all came on so suddenly! I had never heard of hayfever, nobody in my family had it. And as the symptoms got worse and worse, I suddenly knew what had happened. Whatever was in those chemical weapons, I'd breathed it in, or touched it, or something! There was only one way this would end.

I was going to die.

I manfully choked my dinner down. I said goodbye to my toys. I got ready for bed. But as my mum came to tuck me in, my bottom lip started to quiver. This would be the last time I ever saw her. She asked me what was wrong, and I decided - knowing that I'd almost certainly get into trouble for playing with chemical weapons - to tell her.

I suspect I was probably very relieved when she laughed in my face.
(kithkill, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 7:55, 5 replies)

Space-Time Continuum
When we used to go on road trips, I believed that Ringroad was a magical place that was just outside of all the major towns, and couldn't understand why my Dad didn't just take a shortcut through it, instead of driving the long way round for hours on end.
( Pope Shax XIII uses Visio for picture editing, does it show?, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 7:14, 1 reply)

Belly-button sex holes
When I was wee, I thought that when adults had sex the mans willy went into the ladies belly-button, what else was that hole for? Made perfect sense.
Made for an interesting first sexual encounter.
(technocore, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 5:44, 1 reply)

Six-year-old criminal mastermind
Sorry for being only tangentally related to the question - This story isn't so much about the thing I naively believed, which was pretty common, but about an unexpected result of that belief...

When I was in infant school, I went through a brief period of kleptomania - egged on by my gleeful bastard of an older brother, (as if that excuses me somehow.) One day a week at my school, we were encouraged to bring in a toy to play with - Most of the boys chose Star Wars figures, or Transformers, or one of He-Man's awful brigade of crap sidekicks. It was a day filled with joy, but also avarice: All these beautiful toys. All these toys I didn't own!

So, one of these days I happened to find myself in the cloakroom alone, with larcenous thoughts on my mind. With a criminal cunning that I seem to have entirely lost in the intervening years, I rifled through all the coats until I found something worth stealing: A red Tonka flatbed truck. It was amazing - I can still picture it today in all its shiny die-cast glory. I quietly hid it away, and at the end of the day managed to smuggle it all the way home without incident.

Victory! I'd learned a fantastic lesson: Stealing is easy! I was free to play with my spoils as much as I liked. And I did. The truck was the perfect size and weight to be launched along the landing and bounce solidly down the stairs just like I'd seen cars falling over cliffs do on TV so many times. It was a shame I couldn't make it explode into flames at the bottom, but on the plus side the truck survived the stunt so I could repeat it as many times as I liked. Which, it turned out, was an awful lot of times.

But there was a snag. It'd never occurred to me that my mum might have a pretty good idea of what toys I owned. So when, investigating the sound of me repeatedly knocking chunks of plaster off the landing wall, she asked, "Where did you get that truck?" I panicked.

Time froze; I simply wasn't prepared for the question. I had nothing - I couldn't admit to the truth, but I had no believable cover story to hand. I could say I borrowed it from a friend, but that would surely only lead to more questions, and I hadn't prepared the sufficient web of carefully considered lies to deal with that sort of cross-examination. All seemed lost.

But then! I had a flash of true genius. There was a single moment, a mere few weeks before, when in all the confusion a new toy could feasibly have passed unnoticed. I thought back to the day; there were loads of new toys, and she definitely wasn't paying full attention at the time. If the red truck had appeared at that moment, it would be entirely possible that she might not have noticed. This was my way out! A bullet-proof, entirely unverifiable back-story for my new illicit toy. I'd won! I'd outsmarted everyone! Smiling smugly, I picked up the truck and informed her:

"Father Christmas brought it for me."

My victim, and his furious mother, stood in stony silence as I recited my shame-faced apology the next day.
( Zoroastermouse thinks therefore he am, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 2:38, 1 reply)

I could kill my dad
After a game of play fighting he collapsed, out cold, dead as a dodo.
Anything I did didn't seem to rouse him, shouting, poking him, begging him to wake up, which eventually led to crying for my mum. Who didn't help as she appeared and looked on in horror at the body of her dead husband.
I ran away in fear and went to hide in my bedroom. In the wardrobe.
He left me there for HOURS. It was only when I had finally calmed down, he came into the room and tried to coax me out, I had my bottom lip firmly stuck out as I opened the door and he started laughing.
I burst into tears. Again.
( Herb Alpert's Taxi Driver I have very beautiful lips, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 1:04, 8 replies)

I thought inflammable meant it couldn't burn. Oh, how we laughed after the firemen left.
(mousehats, Thu 19 Jan 2012, 0:09, 2 replies)

Around the time that my mum was buying one of her houses.
She'd put in an offer and an "Under Offer" sticker was placed on the For Sale sign. I thought that this meant that my mum had put in an offer lower than the asking price (which was the case) - hence it was an "under" offer not "met" or "over".
This I saw as a ploy by the sellers/agents to try to start a bidding war with other buyers, prompting them to *hopefully* put in "over" offers.
EDIT: It didn't once occur to me that "Under Offer" meant "a buyer has made an offer to the vendor to buy this property".

On a tangent - why have a price range when selling houses? F'r instance, if I look at a house and it's price is "$450000 to $460000" I'm not about to rush in and offer the larger amount when I might be able to get it for 10 grand cheaper now am I? To me that just goes against the whole concept of haggling.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Wed 18 Jan 2012, 23:32, 8 replies)