neighbourhood

When I was little, I assumed that gas stations had to be built over underground gasoline deposits (naturally, because gas comes from the ground, into the pumps). So when they knocked down the FoodTown by my house and built a gas station in its place, i could only wonder why they didnt just build an Exxon to begin with.

in the summer, i used to get scared at night when i was going to sleep, because i was scared that Albinos would come and swim in my pool at night...i used to lock the gate at night when i was the last one in...hmmm...

When I had to ride on escalators when I was little I would always get really nervous near the top or bottom. My big brother told me that little kids had gotten sucked down the grates and they would try to grab your ankles and make you live down there with them.

when i was younger everytime we went to the parade we would stand on the sidewalk and wait, so i thought that on any given day if you stood on the sidewalk for long enough a parade would come.

I was born and raised in Washington, DC - the National Air and Space Museum opened when I was six years old. For an embarrasingly long time I wondered who this guy was who was so cool he got an entire museum full of planes and rockets and cool stuff. I think I was 12 or so before I stopped wanting to meet Aaron Space.

Shortly after my mom got a ticket for speeding my dad had the radio on and they were talking about winning a ticket to a concert or something. I was very happy that my mom had already won one so I told my dad and he laughed at me saying it was the wrong type of ticket.

I moved houses for the first time when I was four and I strongly believed that you traded houses with someone else. I realized it was a lot more complicated than this when we were at the buyer of our house's current house and I told my parents I didn't like their house so we couldn't trade with them.

I used to believe…

the numbering in our street when I was young went even down one side and odd numbers down the other,So i lived at number 3 and my friend lived next door at number 5,we used to think that number 4 was demolished because somone was murdered there...no amount of digging turned up any eveidence though.

I used to believe…

you know those bags of sand used to hold down the construction horses? well, for some reason i always thought they were filled with poop, not sand. they had that lumpiness to them. i wondered, how do they get the poop in there? does someone hold the bag under their butt when they go poop?

I used to believe…

a friend of mine believed what his mum said (rather cruel!) the noise an ice cream van made meant there was no ice cream left

When I was a young child I used to believe that the cats eyes in the middle of the road were actually lights operated by a man in an underground room beneath the road who switched them on and off whenever traffic drove along the road. I never worked out how he knew the traffic was there so he had to switch them on.

My younger brother and his friends used to believe that the yellow boxes with flashing amber lights on top of them used in construction sites were tv cameras. They spent hours dancing and singing in front of them.

The first time I ever saw the Rose Parade on TV the announcer said something like "the floats are all made entirely of flowers." I took him literally. I did not understand that they were DECORATED entirely with flowers. So I wondered for several years thereafter, how the floats were able to move under their own power -- how, in other words, one could build a working engine, tires, and all the rest, entirely out of flowers!

my dad told me the icecream van played music when it was out of icecream

All the mothers in our neighborhood tried to prevent us from playing in the open irrigation ditch near the main road by telling us that dogs peed in the ditch. Somehow, this was supposed to induce an eeeuuuuw reaction in us.

No, it didn't work. Never had a chance of working with little boys.

As a kid I once asked an adult how all the streetlights knew when to turn on and off. I was told that they were all linked to a clock.

I immediateley imagined each streetlight as having an alarm clock inside it (like the old style bell & hammer ticking ones). But I was told they were all linked to the same clock.

I therefore thought that every streetlight was physically coming out of a MASSIVE alarm clock underground inside the earth, big enough for every streetlight in the world to come out of.