Driving through Lichfield one night last week we came to a temporary traffic light on red for some road works. It seemed to be on red for an inordinate length of time. My daughters boyfriend said ‘If you flash your lights repeatedly it thinks you are an ambulance and will turn to green to let you through. We used to do it all the time when I was in the car with my mum, its hilarious’.
It occurred to me that how would we know if this was true or not because there is not evidence that it would be the case – more coincidence. Also an ambulance would drive through regardless of whether the lights were red or green.
Is this an urban myth, an old wives tale or a shaggy dog story? There are many around, what are your favourites?
Urban Myths or old wives tales?
by 141 Comments
I love those stories especially when they either turn out to be true or there’s a seed of fact there. My first port of call is then snopes. Here’s the link to the flashing at traffic light one:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/flash-point/
and it seems that there maybe an element of truth, in the US at least.
Not sure if this qualifies but putting any old card into a hotel room’s card slot turns on the lights. Did it last week and I felt like I was sticking it to the Man.
Like the sound of that one BC. Must try it out.
Yes I learned that relatively recently. It just needs something to push a switch, nothing to do with the card’s security capabilities.
In the UK in the past I have used old train tickets. Anything the right size works.
It often does in hotel rooms.
hur
MIND. BLOWN.
It doesn’t work in every hotel – I keep an old keycard just for this purpose but it didn’t work on one occasion.
Just tried this with the cardboard cover for my key.
Had to fold it to fit but worked a treat.
Ta
What was the oft-repeated one about the alcoholic drink where, the following day, you’d drink water and it would get you drunk again? Was it Pernod? I could never understand how – when your body has already processed the alcohol to the point where you’re sober – adding water (i.e. diluting the remnants of the booze) could make you drunk??
I’ve heard this from so many different people in my life. It sounds about as likely to be true as Noel Edmonds answering ‘yes’ when people ask him if his beard colour is natural these days. Is it based on anything with even a hint of truth? I’m happy for someone to puncture my scepticism with the flashing blade of steely truth.
I’ve no idea about weather it’s true or not, but the first version I heard specified very strong malt whisky.
It was Polish vodka when I was a kid.
Ouzo when I first heard.Based on the fact that the spirit just might remain in your stomach as unabsorbable until diluted when you have a cuppa on the morning. Sort of forgets about the acid in your stomach.
Ouzo and Pernod are both made from anise. It was Pernod that I always understood to be the one that gets you drunk if you drink water the morning after. Absinthe too. Never tried that, what’s it like?
Tried it once on a stag do. It was quite pleasant, but was taken amongst a number of other shots. Didn’t make the heart grow fonder, mind.
Absinthe mixed with water is similar in flavour to pastis – not as sweet as Pernod, though. There is a convoluted way of taking absinthe that involves filtering it through sugar that has been caramelised using a heated spoon (or something – it’s been a while). I may have got it wrong, but the end result was like drinking sweetish, warm Fairly Liquid. (I would imagine). Sadly, although I’ve got a few bottles of absinthe in my booze supply, I’ve never reached the point of seeing green fairies however I consume it.
That’ll be because you’re dead hard, not a steaming great ponce like Van Gogh.
Parker shot the Pernod out of Lady Penelope’s hand in an episode of Thunderbirds…bet they wouldn’t show anything like that these days…
Speak up! I did both ears!
At least you had that green stuff to anaesthetise.
People who tap the top or sides of a can of soda before opening it thinking it will stop if fizzing over.
It’s bollocks.
You could have tried it, then at least, had it not worked, you would have debunked the myth.
I asked this traffic light, here’s what he told me –
Were the TV Detector vans really empty?
I always wondered how their aerial could tell if my Mum and Dad had a piece of paper in their house.
An ambulance wouldn’t just go through a road works red light anyway. It is likely to be one lane only and if it meets vehicles coming in the opposite direction it will be stuck. Those vehicles won’t be able to allow it to pass.
I LOVE stuff like this – and one my great unpublished book ideas is to investigate things like this with an open mind!
One I’ve heard is:
If you get parking fine, send a cheque for the amount with one pence added to the total. Apparently they send you a cheque back for a penny…. but (and here’s the twist) they can’t cash your cheque until you cash theirs…. so if you never cash it you’ll effectively never pay the fine….apparently….
Another one I’d like to try but never been brave enough is just to stop paying my tv licence and see how far I can get. They can apparently send you as many threatening letters or make as many visits as they want, but as long as you never consent to them crossing your threshold to witness you have a tv, they can’t do a thing… apparently…
I wouldn’t be too sure on the last one. Only a few years ago, the commonest reason for a woman to serve jail time was being too poor to be able to pay the TV licence.
Haven’t lived in the UK for a while, but do men need TV licenses too?
Men are much better at getting locked up for other stuff.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/17/70_pc_tv_licensing_convictions_women/
1. Smoking dried banana skins would make you high.
2. Tapping out the number on the keys of a public phone box (ie 1 tap = 1, 2 taps = 2 etc) would get you a free phone call.
No 2 wouldn’t get a free call, but you could make a chargeable call on any old style phone by tapping the cradle as you indicate.
Now many taps for zero?
I’ve seen the second one in action a few times back in the early eighties. Friend of mine used to phone his girlfriend from a public box using that system. There’s a knack.
“Phone Phreaking” used to be a countercultural “thing” in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Devices that mimicked not only the dialling but the signal that told the exchange you’d put your money in the box.
Ten times.
Dialling zero on an old pulse dialling phone sends a string of ten pulses. An actual zero on that type of equipment would not be possible as the equipment would not recognise the absence of a pulse as anything but a pause by the person dialling. It would just wait for the next set of pulses, having the same effect as missing the zero altogether.
To best of my recollection #2 used to work. Pretty sure we used to do that to listen to Dial A Disc.
Of course my recollection is not so good due to #1.
I seem to remember that dialling 1 then zero then tapping six times used to work.
I can’t remember what for though – may well have been “Dial a disc”
Putting salt in flat Coke to make it fizzy again. Bollox. It makes it even more disgusting.
A friend reports from long, long ago – Alternatively you can put a couple of sugar cubes into a fresh bottle of coke and instantly crate a horrible mess in a perfectly nice Borth cafe.
Oh, this.
A bunch of 14 year olds in a caff. A sugar cube is dropped into a bottle of Coke. The froth just keeps flowing out of the bottle. The entire table was nearly covered when ‘someone’ yelled ‘Leg it!’
Sorry.
Typing Google into Google will cause it get stuck in a loop and break the internet.
Palpable nonsense … or is it?
Used to get told by my parents as a kid that if I swallowed chewing gum
it would strangle my intestines and I would die. Despite this dire prophesy I always swallowed the gum and was strangely immune to the warning.
I am quite glad in hindsight that I had a healthy dose of scepticism at such a young age.
Another “don’t eat that” story:
Eating apple cores would result in an apple tree growing in your stomach
Apparently a bay leaf is indigestible… don’t know why you would want to eat a bay leaf, but there you go.
Rats eat bay leaves – because they want to. And then it kills them. Hurrah!
Tomato skin – your body has no need for any of it. Straight through.
I worked for a few weeks, years ago, installing new pumping and metering equipment at a big sewage treatment works near Rickmansworth. Lots of tomato plants growing wild around the treatment tanks. The seeds are quite often still fertile after passing through your digestive system.
The arnswer lies in the night-soil.
There’s a Defra recommendation that animals aren’t allowed to graze on fields where sewage sludge has been spread, on the grounds that eating tomato plants could poison the animals.
Not quite the same, but it did remind me of this story from last week:
“A missing man who was murdered more than 40 years ago has been found – after a seed from a fig in his stomach grew into a tree which was unusual for the area.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/murdered-mans-body-found-after-13278205.amp
Eating your crusts would give you curly hair. As a kid I couldn’t work out why I would want curly hair, but it occurred to me a few years ago that it might be a sly reference to pubic hair, a version of ‘make you grow up big and strong’.
I never swallowed my chewing gum because Biggles told me you could use it to repair a hole in the fuel tank of your machine. (Always a machine, never a plane, wonder why?)
Crates over the briny….
Sorry, I don’t understand your banter, old man.
At the centre of every gobstopper is a black speck that is poisonous.
I don’t know of anyone who ended up having to marry a spider….apart from Jerry Hall, of course!
How about THAT for satire, Ian so-called Hislop !
Someone get a bucket of water, BC is on FIRE.
Mmm, wondered what that burning smell was round our way
Too much winking makes you go blond
(It also gives you Irritable Vowel Syndrome)
I read that a lift engineer had revealed that, if you press the floor you want and the doors close buttons EXACTLY at the same time, the lift will not stop at other floors.
I’ve done it a few times (when I remember) and it has always worked, but I guess I’ll never know if there was anyone else ‘calling’ the lift………
And the door close button (on it’s own) doesn’t actually do anything, the doors close at the same time they would have anyway …
The action of the Door Close button in a lift depends on how the lift has been set up. There is a standard minimum time that the doors remain open, set by the manufacturer and in that case the Close button would have no effect. They can be set up to stay open longer if required, in which case the Close button will work.
It annoys me in movies where lifts go plummeting down the shaft when the suspension cable breaks.
That just could not happen with any lift still in service as they must have a failsafe that prevents it. The weight of the lift on the cable keeps an automatic braking device from operating. If the cable should break, the tension on the device goes and spring-loaded arms are released which wedge the lift where it is in the shaft. You could get stuck if the cable breaks but you won’t plunge to your doom. Unless someone’s disabled the failsafe.
Yes, otherwise why would they bother installing a ‘close door’ button? Having lived and worked in Asia, where no one wants to wait a millisecond more than necessary for the doors to close, that button is always fully employed.
Just symmetry with the door open button? Anyway I have a problem with those symbols and invariably press the wrong one.
Oh aye. Regularly. I hardly ever get it right
There must a legions of individuals who I’ve inadvertently left standing. Despite seeing them running towards the lift with a ‘wait for me!’ air.
I’ve returned that with a ‘don’t worry, for I am a chivalrous gallant and I shall make this device wait for you’ air, and promptly pressed the wrong button and fucked off up 6 floors
If you find yourself in a plummeting lift, simply wait until it’s just about to hit the ground and then jump in the air. You will land safely and without injury. [failsafe device not withstanding]
Yeah, but I’d time it better – obviously..
I used to work for a telecom company that would send a bill to the lift company Otis to an office it had in Reading.
The account was ‘Otis, Reading’
Do please carry on, all of you. .
At my office the lifts are made by the Company Schindler, so I’m often found in Schindler’s lift.
Otis lifts… Marvin separates
This was a joke I first made to my wife on holiday in the US over ten years ago. I still use it every time and it wore thin many moons ago apparently!
If you play Come to the Sabbat (by Black Widow) backwards, you go mad. Here it is in case anyone wants to try it out with Audacity.
Isn’t there one that if you watch “The Wizard of Oz” with the sound off and play “Dark Side of the Moon” they sync up perfectly. Never tried it.
I tried it about 20 years ago and found it was spookily synced in places.
Tried that, definitely doesn’t work.
Sort of works with playing “Echoes” at a certain point in “2001.”
We haven’t yet got round to that old wives’ tale all adolescents have to ponder – that w**king makes you deaf, or blind. I’m guessing no one here has experienced these symptoms.
Pardon?
Who said that?!
Walking? Surely not?
Do porn stars still drink copious amounts of pineapple juice?
Apparently it makes their um…output taste sweet.
That’s the men of course….although in these modern mixed up times it could, I fervently imagine be the women.
Dirty bastards…
I wonder how much action you would get in a “non-binary, gender fluid” porn movie?
I have no knowledge of the pineapple/porn confluence, but what you eat definitely has an effect on your, er, excretions… lots of asparagus will make your pee smell, and as most us will have probably experienced, more than a little garlic will happily escape your system via your sweat…
On a related (and true) note, about 15% of people carry a genetic anomaly which makes coriander taste horrible to them, usually like soap…
Experienced The Simpsons? Well it’s a while since I watched the show, but I haven’t been under a rock these 30 years y’know.
Warming your cold hands over a fire gives you chilblains and doing pretty much anything just after eating lunch is gonna kill you. Oh and don’t start me on about turning the telly off in a thunderstorm…
The latter is a good tip if the TV is connected to an aerial.
Unplugging the aerial from the back of the set could be a good idea in a really bad thunderstorm. If the roof aerial got struck, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference just to turn it off at the mains.
More important to disconnect the aerial than to switch the tv off though.
Eating celery uses more energy than you get from digesting it. Or was it cucumber?
And, given the comment count is currently 69, by removing a rib you can, ahem, “relieve” yourself.
There are more reasons for eating food than just getting energy from it. Vitamins, minerals, fibre, enjoyment of flavour, opportunities to socialise with others…
I met my best friends at the pie and mash stall.
Yes, but we’re talking celery. Flavour?
As I may have mentioned before* I have Crohn’s so absence of fibre is a bonus. Unfortunately, that usually means absence of enjoyment and flavour as well.
(*) Yes, you bloody well have – the AfterWord.
Celery has a flavour, if your taste buds are working correctly. Whether it’s a flavour you like is an entirely different matter.
Cucumber, OTOH, is a bit useless in my opinion. Not much taste to it, not much nutritional value AFAIK. Mostly just water n’est ce pas?
Cucumber smells very strong and very bad once cut. Stinks your fridge out.
Celery is best used in tomato sauce. Fresh celery is reputedly good for your wad . Just sayin’.
Seriously @Mike_H ? Cucumber might not have much flavour on its own but add it to cheese on a sandwich and the sandwich is transformed I tell you.
I’ve heard from several people that cutting the skin off cucumber means it will repeat on you.
I’m a bit of a cucumber-agnostic. Its ok; not offensive like celery or avocado.
It looks really neat if you take some of the peel off it lengthways, and then slice it. Or perhaps I’m just channelling Fanny Cradock. . .
Sir,
Re: The last three words of your post.
Hurrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Faithfully,
Moose
Isn’t celery really good for your teeth? That’s what I was told.
The best thing about cucumber is the French translation: concombre … a great Gallic rumble of a word, impossible to say in any kind of normal voice. When our class learned that at school we spent a good few days bellowing that down the corridors I can tell you.
What appalling little herberts we must have been.
In Dutch it’s komkommer, which is strangely satisfying to say aloud.
That’s all very well but what has this to do with celery? I write about celery and now everyone’s banging on about cucumbers.
Please, don’t let’s fight about this. Think of the children. And your stalk is wilting.
PS On reflection this is my fault for inserting my cucumber in the wrong place. It is evidently unwelcome, even with the French translation.
Bananas are the only food you can live on exclusively without eating anything else, though the excess of potsassium will make you rather ill at the same time…
If the radiation* doesn’t get you first.
*About 1000 bananas is an equivalent dose to 1 X-ray. I quite like bananas, but I can’t see myself ever eating 1000 between trips to the dentist.
If you haven’t gone bald by the age of 35 you’ll always have decent head of hair.
I wonder if that’s the same for blokes.
Ka-pow! You can have that one.
Didn’t work for me! I was in my early 40s when I started noticing a breeze around my crown.
I’m in the same pickle. Breezed through 35 with follicles a-overflowin’
54 now and HANGING ON LIKE A BASTARD!
PAH!
Balderdash!
Follicles!
My dear old mum would insist that drinking a cup of tea in hot weather would cool you down. I think a nice hot cup of tea was her answer to most things actually.
That’s generational – cf. Beyond the Fringe’s Aftermyth of War. “Never you mind, let’s have a nice cup of tea”
Just had a flash of memory from that ’60s satirical movie “How I Won The War”, where John Lennon played the part of Private Gripweed, one of a squad of soldiers tasked to set up a cricket pitch behind enemy lines (IIRC). Naturally nearly all of them are killed, including Gripweed. Last words, to camera: “I knew this was going to happen. You knew, didn’t you.”
Anyway, at some point one of the squad, forget who, is shot and is lying there dying. An apparition of his wife with floral pinafore and hair in curlers appears and says to him. “Never mind dear, just run it under the cold tap.”
Michael Crawford is quite beautiful in that film.
Er… so somebody told me.
Did you see the Bears game? What a game…
Hot cup of tea on a hot day should cool you down, by raising your core temperature and thus causing an opening up of the peripheral circulation and allowing a greater loss of heat from your body surface, more if it makes you sweat.
Same principle as to why partaking of the St Bernard supplied hooch when abandoned in the arctic is a bad idea, this time it being the alcohol that opens up the peripheral circulation, giving agin rise to heat loss, this time unwanted.
Yebbut there’s plenty of ice to go with it.
Yes – hot tea is popular in hot countries, probably for that very reason. And I suppose the fact that you are drinking water that has been boiled i.e. purified.
Purer than un-boiled, at any rate.
In a lot of the third world, the people who can afford it drink only imported bottled water. Even boiled, the local water is often not fit to drink.
Just finished reading “Spoils Of War” by a certain Tim Earnshaw (who he?) and Michael Lockwood, which references the lack of good water supplies in the Middle East, the reliance on bottled water in Iraq post-invasion and the resulting air pollution from the burning of all those empty plastic water bottles (no refuse collection).
Not a bad book. Not great either.
It made my EYES HURT.
If I dropped a sweet on the floor as a child and then picked it up to eat my mum would say ‘don’t eat that you will get dickdollaroo’. No idea where she got the word from or what the illness is but don’t believe I ever got it.
I’m hearing that in an Australian accent… did you grow up in Australia?
‘What’s up mate?’
‘Got a touch of the dickdollaroo mate.’
‘Aw mate.’
Nah Brummie born and bred but now you phrase it like that it does Aussie like.
I am not so sure you haven’t. The long incubation period can give false security and it is not often until late middle age that the true damage to the frontal lobes becomes apparent, with loss of inhibition and compulsive behaviour. Any of that going on?
Sadly yes @retropath2 maybe I should have needed the words of my mum all those years ago.
Beer on wine is fine
Wine on beer is fear
Despite nearly 35 years of practical experimentation in this field, I’ve never been able to tell if this is true or not
Logically shouldn’t that be the other way around….. ?
As far as I know, there is no scientific evidence to support the “grape and grain, never the twain” saying. It should be down to the alcohol content and given that wine is stronger than beer, starting on wine could lead to you drinking more – the ability to determine how drunk you are will go down as you drink more.
It’s just because you end up drinking more if you start with beer. You glug beer back and by the time you get onto wine you’re dehydrated and drink it faster than you would otherwise.
The main reason prosecco has taken off is that you have to drink a huge amount to get anything describable as a hangover.
I’ve always understood that the opposite is true.
Beer on wine, you’ll be fine
Wine on beer, you’ll be queer*
*oh grow up
I’ve only ever heard the German version –
“Bier auf Wein – das mag nicht sein.
Wein auf Bier – dat rat ich dir!”
As Willy Rushton once said while advising against mixing your drinks, “God made us in his own image, not the image of a fleshy cocktail shaker”.
Strategically placed chesnuts keep spiders out the house.
I half believe this one.
Although for aesthetic reasons I don’t tolerate spiderwebs on show in ceiling corners etc., I do believe that one should have at least one space in one’s abode where spiders can do their spidery thing unmolested. Only fair.
Spiders used to have free reign in our house, hopefully catching midges and other bitey things when the windows are fully open in summer.
One day, when the missus and I were making the bed, whilst watching a spider do it’s upside down walk across the ceiling, it fell right in the centre of her pillow.
Spiders are no longer tolerated in our house.
Hooligan spiders in your gaff, obviously.
Mine are quite well-behaved and limit themselves to occasionally scurrying across the carpet from one hidey-hole to another. And getting stuck in the bath, obviously. They are traditionalists.
We eat bluebottles and we eat bluebottles
We eat bluebottles and we eat bluebottles
We eat bluebottles and we eat bluebottles
We are the bluebottle
Ea-ters
PS. I position my chestnuts strategically as a matter of course.
Aren’t your chestnuts a bit shrivelled at this time of year?
I’ve dipped them in vinegar.
Take care of your conkers, Moosey.
They certainly frighten away spiders.
And everything else.
Better than roasting them over an open fire I guess!
Put the plug in the bath to stop spiders coming out of the plug hole.