'Everything You Think is Wrong' Day

This Saturday is National “Everything You Think is Wrong” Day. Here are some things that we tend to think are true but aren’t.

This Saturday, March 15 is National “Everything You Think is Wrong” Day.

On every other day of the year we are know-it-alls, believing we have a superior understanding of the world. But on Saturday we are supposed to sit back and reflect on our lack of knowledge regarding everything.

It’s true. Almost everything we think is true is actually false. This unofficial holiday is really difficult for people, like me, who suffer from atelophobia which is the fear of being wrong or rather the fear of being told we’re wrong. In anticipation of this holiday, I thought it would be helpful to point out some things that we tend to think are true but aren’t.

March 15 is also the Ides of March which is the day in 44 BC that Julius Caesar was assassinated. This brings me to the first fact that we understand to be true but isn’t. Caesar’s last words were not “Et Tu Brute.” Shakespeare made that up. No one knows the last thing that Caesar said while being stabbed by Brutus et al. It probably was, “Eeeyyaaauuugghhh” which means the same thing in Latin and English.

It also wasn’t the case that the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, died while trying to mate with a horse. The Empress did enjoy a good roll in the hay and did a lot of horsing around, but with men, not barnyard animals. She was an avid rider who mounted many horses but was never mounted by any.

American history is also filled with myths. For instance, on his midnight ride, Paul Revere didn’t warn the Colonists by yelling, “The British are coming, The British are coming.” Why? Because until the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Colonists were technically British too. Longfellow made that up. By the way, although we think of Revere as a hero of the American Revolution, he didn’t even finish the ride as he was captured by British soldiers. Some prefer heroes that weren’t captured.

Other things that didn’t happen the way you think they did include:

• There is no evidence that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started the Great Chicago Fire by kicking over a lantern.
• Witches in Salem MA were not burned at the stake. They were hanged.
• Marie Antoinette didn’t proclaim “Let them eat cake.”
• Nero didn’t fiddle while Rome burned. The fiddle wasn’t invented until 1,000 years after the fire.
• Pocahontas (the original one, not Elizabeth Warren) didn’t save John Smith, nor did they fall in love. She married a different English bloke, and
• Thomas Crapper didn’t invent the flush toilet.

It isn’t just in history that we are so misguided. We are wrong about things in everyday life as well. For instance, all men believe in the five-second rule (three-seconds for the more fastidious). This rule maintains that if you drop food on the floor there is a brief window where it is safe to pick it up and eat it. Unfortunately, scientists have determined that the five -second, or even the three-second rule doesn’t hold water. Studies show that bacteria can contaminate food that falls on your kitchen floor instantaneously. But try telling that to the hungry guy who just dropped his French fries on your not so clean floor.

Another thing that people believe is that we only use 10% of our brain and that awakening the other 90% would allow us to display extraordinary mental abilities not unlike what Stephen Hawking possessed. Given that Mr. Hawking clearly used 100% of his brain, and since most of us can only understand 10% of the things he wrote, it makes sense that the vast majority of us are only using 10% of our brain. But neurologists disagree. They say that we use virtually every part of our gray matter. Well not everyone.

This sounds like goods news until you remember that drinking alcohol kills brain cells. I’ve heard that drinking three beers kills 10,000 brain cells which means that on Monday morning we are a lot dumber than we were Saturday evening when we started consuming those three beers.

But PRAISE THE LORD, this is also incorrect. Despite that fact that we do embarrassing things and act like idiots when we have had too much of the hootch, scientists have concluded that drinking causes no long-term harm to our intellect. And even if it did, we have 86 billion brain cells, so losing a few, now and then, should be ok. If three beers killed 10,000 brain cells it would take over 25 million beers to kill them all. Let’s not consider what alcohol does to our other internal organs.

These are just a few examples of how wrong we are about history and the world. And it isn’t just on March 15 that we are wrong about things. We are wrong about most things on most days.

Don’t get too discouraged knowing that everything you think on March 15 is wrong because Sunday March 16 is Everything You Do is Right Day.

Spoiler Alert: Everything you do on Sunday March 16th will not be right. You will just think everything you do on that day is right but remember, everything you think is probably still wrong.

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JC Wade

J. Wade is a retired Chief Financial Officer from Missouri. He has had humor articles published in the Humor Times, USA Today, The Journal of Irreproducible Results and Unhinged Magazine, which is now defunct (not his fault).