Grown adults whom I'm assuming do not interact with livestock outside the State Fair gates and had never seen cows other than Holsteins. I hope the people who asked about the horses were kidding but I've heard the "chocolate milk" question without a hint of irony many times over years. My dad used to volunteer at the educational booth in the dairy barn and that was the tip of the iceberg.
Got a couple from just today: -"Wasn't Rikki-Tikki-Tavi a ferret?" No, a mongoose. A mongoose is from the Feliforma side of Carnivora, along with cats, other vivverrids like itself and hyenas. A ferret is a weasel, along with other mustelids it's in the Caniforma, the skunks, the seals, walrus, fur seals and sea lions, dogs, bears, raccoons, etc. -"Why doesn't Tylenol list if it is gluten-free?" What the fuck, old lady. The poor schmuck behind the counter at Walgreens doesn't know either, and it is already such a dumb question to ask.
No lie. I once had a lady touch one of our show cows, and ask me "why is it warm?" Another time, I was manning a booth where there was a Highland steer (the really hairy ones with horns that the British Royal Family owns), and a kid of about 10 walks up and asked me "why is the pig so hairy?" I thought he was fucking with me, but I replied, "because it isn't a pig it's a cow" and he said "cool, I've never seen a cow before" and walked away.
From some dog groups on Facebook I'm in: "What is an LGD?" Livestock guardian dogs, abbreviated, like Great Pyrenees, Central Asian Shepherds, Akbash and Kangals. "Oh, so they herd the stock?" No, herding is an exaggeration of the wolf's (which is still what a domestic dog is, just a successful domestic variant of, the wolf) predatory behavior sequence but rarely results in a kill, although an ill-trained, hungry or never introduced to the work herding breed will readily hunt and begin eating on a livestock animal. "What do LGD's do, then?" [cough, Google could've told you, cough] Well, LGD's stay calm and reassure the stock when properly trained with them, and protect them from other carnivores by basically defending the stock as a rival carnivore who considers the herd his family/territory. Also, people need a lot of LGD's when in wolf country, because unlike a barked-at big cat or bear they're not going to just fight a little while and usually just split for the high country, and coyotes who aren't clever enough to bail get raced down and killed, wolves are equal or slightly better matches. "So the wolves send out their champion wolf, and the dogs send out their best dog?" While that sounds so fucking awesome, no. Wolves and dogs just fight in that case, so if you've ever seen a dog pack fight over something it is exactly like that. It's anyone's game, but for the most part, people who have stock are rarely running enough dogs with the stock in many places. In the Lower 48 people just had the idea in the 1700's onward to just blast everything they hated to death, trap them, put out bounties on them and strychnine every carcass they could. So you've got LGD's, mostly used by people who are at least half-nomadic and who are also out in the fields with their dogs defending the stock from everything, being put in the hands of a lot of weirdos once they get into 'civilized man' hands; from people who breed Kangals in a postage-stamp sized yard and claims they're proven livestock guardians, when none of them have even seen a goat, to people who get registered show dog Great Pyrenees who for some reason don't want to guard anything and just act like a dopey dog who barks at anything at the drop of a hat.
I was thinking exactly the same thing - If I was at a party or gathering I would just walk away from all that blather. I get it, you know about dogs and other animals, next...
My coworker told me today that octopus and squids are the smartest creatures on Earth, even above humans, because their whole bodies are their brains which is why they can change colors. No word on chameleons though
It pains me to hear that the praying mantis and cuttlefish is my intellectual superior. I wish Audrey was here for this. The daily questions she gets redefine stupid.
Last Christmas my mother asked me if I thought my 11-year-old (male) cousin was gay. I told her that I didn't think he had reached that level of psychological/emotion maturity yet, and just because he's a bit effeminate and shows signs of a promising career in the theater she shouldn't jump to any conclusions.
I might have mentioned this in the past few months, but: Sometimes, I think I must be retarded, and that there's a vast, all-permeating conspiracy to make me feel smart. Just outside of my sight, someone like Ben Kingsley's character in Shutter Island is pulling the strings of this noble, progressive psychological experiment. As paranoid as that sounds, as paranoid as it is, there are days it passes Occam's Razor better than everyone else being as thick as they act. Maybe I'm not the only one though, maybe "THEY" have some of you fooled too! Or maybe I could benefit from psychiatric meds; like Dr. Nash, I know not to listen to certain parts of my brain. Um, Focus? Any really good stupid questions are escaping me right now. I try to surround myself with reasonably intelligent people, and the above paranoid conspiracy theory stems mainly from people at work being impressed by things like knowing how to change their screen resolution for them.
My girlfriend, who has her doctorate in a core science field, is one of the smartest people I know. Every once in a while, though, her brain short-circuits and she asks some amazing question. A good one I remember was back in 2005 when we hadn't been dating that long. We somehow we got on the subject of the 2004 election. I mentioned Kerry and Edwards and said that I couldn't remember everyone else who ran. She ponders for a moment, looks at me and says, "didn't someone named George run?" I stared at her and tried to figure out if she was joking. I eventually burst into laughter as the embarrassment of what she had just said dawned on her and her mouth dropped open in horror.
This may be deleted and if need be, please do so. I dated a woman who believed the moon landing was faked. She also strongly voted Republican. I also understand the idea of correlation doesn't causation.
Good analogy; I know what you mean. There were some times in prison when I felt that the person was asking questions that were just too stupid to be serious, and I figured that the guy was just trying to get a rise out of me. I still gave an honest response, but later I asked around about the guy's reputation, and it turns out they really were that dumb. Example: One day I was watching TV in the day-room, and a movie came on: The Road to Perdition. It said it right there on the screen. White letters on a black background. The guy sitting next to me turned to me and asked: "Is this Goodfellas?" "Really?" I asked. "It says right there on the screen that it's The Road to Perdition. Are you serious?" That's when a guy who was a member of the same gang tapped me on the shoulder and told me that he was illiterate. Well excuse me all to hell. (You'd be surprised how many prison inmates are illiterate/barely literate. Or maybe you wouldn't...) Don't let this fool you, there are A LOT of guys who play stupid/retarded/crazy/non-english-speaker in prison, but most of the time guys were embarrassed to come up to me to ask questions. But I answered questions and edited letters because I felt it was a sort of public service. Anyway, I just remembered a mind-blowingly retarded question that was asked of me by -- wait for it-- a law enforcement officer! The date: 2001 The idiot: US Customs Agent Way back when I was married to the Ice-Cream-Cake-Girl (My Ex-wife), we went to Mexico to do some shopping for her parents, and we took a baby version of Li'l Bandit (my son) with us. Everything was going well until we got back to the US side. We were grilled up and down about how she and I knew one another, where we were born, where we currently lived, what brand of toilet paper we preferred, etc. Ice Cream Cake Girl and I had identification, but we didn't think to bring any for Li'l Bandit... This proved to be a crucial mistake. At one point a straight-faced Customs agent asked me : "Can he tell me that he's a US citizen?" At this point, Li'l Bandit was about 4 months old. Seriously, how fucking retarded was that question? Lesson learned: If you take a baby to Mexico, bring it's birth certificate. You will still be detained and harassed (She and I found that out later), but it's something they ask for at the border entry. They won't recognize it's authenticity, and they will still detain you until they can prove you are innocent of any wrongdoing, but they want to see it. Fuck Customs and Border Patrol. You people wonder why I have issues with law-enforcement officials? This is one of the reasons why.
For both dumb & mind-bogging weird, I was once asked by a customer of ours, a fairly old hippie-ish lady that we'd reassure her that her transformers could 'talk' to each other, through that 'Humming they love to do to talk.' I looked confused, but I just nodded, she smiled and long story short, she paid her invoice I handed for roughly $3,000 about a month later in cash, and wrote, no joke, "Thanks for reassuring me the transformers will be able to talk to each other!" I'm voting her brains were a bit addled from her younger days of wanton drug use. That, or she thought transformers were Transformers.