Until I saw a public works guy carrying one under his arm, I had always assumed that traffic lights weighed as much as refrigerators.
The reasons for thinking this are as follows:
It's possible I've been projecting a lot of personal bullshit onto Jerry Mathers.
My resolution this year was to make a list of things just like that; things I'd been wrong about my whole life. This will sound like a brag, but it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.
The reason that's not a brag is that I'm still wrong an inordinate amount of the time. Thinking that you have enough gas to make it to work and being wrong about it three out of fifty two times a year is not the same as realizing in the privacy of your own wandering mind that "Greensleeves" and "What Child is This" are actually two separate and distinct pieces of music.
The reasons for thinking this are as follows:
Traffic lights are machines that tell us what to do.
And...
On 70's television, all the machines that told you what to do were robots.
And...
On the "Kill Oscar Part II" episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, Oscar Goldman steps on a pencil and crushes it into tiny fragments, because he is actually a robot and extraordinarily heavy.
Therefore,,,
Traffic lights, which are robots, are heavy.
Furthermore...
Those "this guy is a robot" episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man always had a scene where someone takes off their human face and then walks around for the rest of the hour with circuitry where their face should be -- which is THE broth in my particular bowl of nightmare soup. So I didn't ask a lot of follow up questions.
Finding out that you've been wrong about something your entire life can be one of the best parts of being alive. As long as you're not being publicly shamed or snottily corrected, you get this nice little shift in reality.
You know what I found out this week? I found out that hansom cabs are not called "handsome" cabs. And it was much less rewarding than the traffic light thing because I read it in a Buzzfeed article that was built around the idea of mocking people for their ignorance. It was a pale, dull imitation of the internal joy that gripped me last month when, while sitting at a stop light, I realized for the first time that the title of the show Leave It to Beaver is actually straight up criticism of a child, presumably spoken by his parents and not, as I had always silently assumed, an expression of their eternal hope that he could be counted upon to do the sensible thing in spite of his previous performance.
You know what I found out this week? I found out that hansom cabs are not called "handsome" cabs. And it was much less rewarding than the traffic light thing because I read it in a Buzzfeed article that was built around the idea of mocking people for their ignorance. It was a pale, dull imitation of the internal joy that gripped me last month when, while sitting at a stop light, I realized for the first time that the title of the show Leave It to Beaver is actually straight up criticism of a child, presumably spoken by his parents and not, as I had always silently assumed, an expression of their eternal hope that he could be counted upon to do the sensible thing in spite of his previous performance.
It's possible I've been projecting a lot of personal bullshit onto Jerry Mathers.
My resolution this year was to make a list of things just like that; things I'd been wrong about my whole life. This will sound like a brag, but it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.
The reason that's not a brag is that I'm still wrong an inordinate amount of the time. Thinking that you have enough gas to make it to work and being wrong about it three out of fifty two times a year is not the same as realizing in the privacy of your own wandering mind that "Greensleeves" and "What Child is This" are actually two separate and distinct pieces of music.
There's a page on Wikipedia dedicated to commonly held misconceptions. It'd be nice if there were a national holiday dedicated to reading it*. And vetting it. It would also be nice if it were required reading for public office candidates. And then you'd have this ballot full of people who'd have at least paid lip-service to intellectual curiosity and who would maybe form subcommittees dedicated to discovering new misconceptions until eventually our new, truth-driven president would approach the lectern for his first State the Union address, take off his face and there'd be nothing but circuitry underneath. And then we'd all jump out of a window.
I may be wrong about this whole thing.
I may be wrong about this whole thing.
*In 2011, XKCD proposed the idea of reading the page annually. I thought the idea was mine, but I was wrong. How deeply, deeply rewarding.
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