WHAT’S THE BIGGEST LIE YOUR FAMILY TOLD YOU? On Reddit, people are sharing the big lies they were told as a kid — by moms, dads and siblings.
• When I asked my mother where babies came from, she told me the grocery store. I asked her where you could get them from because I’ve never seen a baby department. She said, “They’re in big freezer section where they keep the meat. You just tell them what kind of baby you want and they go in the back and thaw it out. That’s why they come wrapped in a blanket… because they’re so cold.”
• When I was about eight my sister told me that mushrooms are actually tiny trolls and in order to see them move around and sing, I had to be quiet for three hours since they are shy. This resulted in me sitting amongst mushroom patches in our backyard for hours talking to them and I remember trying to convince them that they can trust me and we can be friends.
• I grew up near a light bulb factory. When I was pretty young I asked my dad what they made there. He thought he was hilarious and sarcastically responded with “chairs.” I went back to school telling everyone, “You know they don’t actually make light bulbs there?!”
• My mother likes to talk about how she, when I was very young, would give me white bread when they had cake, and convince me that it was the same thing. I feel like I’m owed at least four years of cake as reparations.
• I asked my father why we only got pineapple occasionally. He explained to me that it is illegal to keep pineapples in captivity and it was only legal to hunt them during certain times of year. Very hard to catch and dangerous when cornered.
HAVING AN EASY-TO-SAY NAME WILL HELP GET YOU PROMOTED _ If you’re hoping to be promoted at work, consider changing your last name to some easy, like Smith, Benson, Sherman or Jones. A study (Melbourne University and NYU Stern School of Business) that people with simple names enjoy quicker career advancement because hard-to-pronounce names inspire negative reactions from superiors. The researchers looked at dozens of surnames from different nationalities. The team found that people with more ‘pronounceable’ names were more likely to win political office, and lawyers with easier sounding names were promoted faster within their law firms.
DON’T BOTHER CLEANING YOUR KITCHEN SPONGE _ Kitchen sponges have been picked out as bacterial magnets for quite a while, though that hasn’t stopped new studies from surfacing. The most recent came from a team of researchers in Germany who used genetic sequencing to compile the most comprehensive list of sponge bacteria to date. The results weren’t surprising. Looking at 14 different used kitchen sponges, the researchers found up to 54 billion bacteria per cubic centimeter, spanning 118 types. Many of these pose no harm to humans, but some are. The study also came with another, more provocative claim: cleaning sponges doesn’t seem to help at all. Based on previous studies, conventional wisdom held that microwaving or boiling sponges helped to kill off bacteria. When they attempted to replicate these findings with their sponges, the researchers found very little difference in bacteria numbers between sponges that had been cleaned and those that hadn’t.
