71–80 of 106 posts
My grandfather told me a version of this story and I have been lucky to tell my kids (who loved it). Our version: There was once a boy that was born with a golden screw where his belly button should be. This made him very self-conscious about it. The kids at school would tease him about his golden screw and lack of belly button. It was so bad that he didn't want to remove his shirt when swimming. One day his class to…
The belly button joke is very old and widespread, I believe my father was warned by his father.
I can't recall the exact lines but Thomas Pynchon's V. has an interesting variation of this story.
He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man’s instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years’ curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off."
I thought of the same thing when I read the title of the post as well. Lovely book, made me laugh many times.
My grandfather told me a version of this story and I have been lucky to tell my kids (who loved it). Our version: There was once a boy that was born with a golden screw where his belly button should be. This made him very self-conscious about it. The kids at school would tease him about his golden screw and lack of belly button. It was so bad that he didn't want to remove his shirt when swimming. One day his class to…
This reminds me of Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear... seems that his dad told him a similar story :-) > “Once upon a time,” I began. “There was a little boy born in a little town. He was perfect, or so his mother thought. But one thing was different about him. He had a gold screw in his belly button. Just the head of it peeping out.
Screws and screwdrivers are at least 500 years old, so this joke could have been mutating around its core punchline through generations for quite a long time before it was first written down.
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My parents told me that you get a hole in your belly if you eat gum. As a child I panicked once because I accidentally swallowed some gum, it's a mean thing to lie about :(
My parents told me something very similar about gum, and a whole lot of other weird things over the years. Is this a universal experience? I wonder if it's a helpful evolutionary trait, sort of like training your "mental immune system" the same way that your mother chewing your food and feeding it to you, germs and all, strengthens your actual immune system.
I also enjoy planting small "easter eggs" for them...e.g. whenever we drive through the Holland Tunnel I hum the Super Mario underground theme, which I have explained simply as "tunnel music". One day they'll get it.
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> your mother chewing your food and feeding it to you, germs and all, strengthens your actual immune system. [citation needed]
The comment you're replying to was obviously written by a bird.
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My parents told me something very similar about gum, and a whole lot of other weird things over the years. Is this a universal experience? I wonder if it's a helpful evolutionary trait, sort of like training your "mental immune system" the same way that your mother chewing your food and feeding it to you, germs and all, strengthens your actual immune system.
Not sure how helpful it is. I wasn't told much lies as a kid. Plenty of wrong things, yes, but those were all common misconceptions (some still widely held by people today, plenty of them present on this Wikipedia list[0]). Someone close to me, however, was told a lot of such lies in their childhood, and continued to believe them into adulthood. When we met during our university years, I unknowingly debunked a few of…
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Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the co…
Oh dear. This has made me a bit teary
Not exactly my idea of heaven.