Lies My Parents Told Me

[ciphergoth]

meta asks for stories of lies your parents told you, here:

http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=meta&itemid=119465

I thought this was an interesting question worth propogating!

My parent's weren't the sort to lie, but I've come to realise that a lot of the things my Dad told me that I took on faith were a bit misconcieved. He believed that a stitch from running was the result of ribs rubbing up against each other. It wasn't 'till years later that I got a stitch again and realised that it couldn't possibly be that and it felt much more like a muscle cramp...

Now it's your turn. Tell us about a bizarre or stupid lie your parents told you.

Comments

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

But coca cola will dissolve your teeth. I remember doing this as an experiment at school. We dropped teeth in coke to see what would happen and within a few hours they were gone.

Thing is that this only happens if the enamel is broken and the coke is in contact for a reasonable time

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Humm, others who have tried this experiment report very different results...

http://www.snopes2.com/cokelore/tooth.htm

is there any possibility it was fixed by a zealous teacher?

[adjectivegail]

well, after i decided the tooth fairy didn't exist, i did this experiment myself at home - we never got soft drinks when we were kids, so i said it was an experiment for school *grins*
anyway, after about 24hrs the tooth was definitely pitted and stained and generally rather miserable looking.
hasn't put me off drinking coke, though.

Right

[kitty-goth.livejournal.com]

The next time I happen across a tooth that's not being used by anyone else, I'll do an experiment on this.

I have for some time now been becoming a little suspicious of snopes.

I'm not sure it is as well-researched or unbiased as it may appear. It also appears to split hairs almost arbitarily thinly in some cases.

For example, the Madness of King George story (that the stage show was called 'The Madness of George III' and that the change was forced by Holywood producers, because USians are by and large too stupid to understand that it wasn't a sequel)

Snopes lists this as a false story, despite the fact that investigation shows that the name was changed, at the time when the film rights were shown. I think this level of hair-splitting is disingenous at best.

Further more, as some investigation of David Farber's IP list, and the local news stories referred to shows, the story presented at http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/oden.htm
is nothing like as clearcut as snopes makes out, and their unsubstantiated use of official sources raises, to my mind, serious questions about their objectivity.

Re: Right

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

Their item about vortices in water going down plugholes in the north and south hemispheres was misleading last time I looked, too. I wrote to them about it some years back.

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

Well, they wouldnt let us drink the coke, so maybe they threw in a beaker full of nitric acid or something. But then again I remember putting coins in coke as a child to shine them up overnight