That reminds of the time back in college (1980-ish) when I was walking through the lobby of the dorm and noticed that on the dorm TV, Phil Donahue (on his original TV show) had as his guest the head of FermiLab.
I kid you not.
I immediately dropped all my other plans and grabbed a seat.
The spectacle of Phil trying to ask intelligent questions about the sort of physics research that goes on at a world-class particle accelerator was entertaining enough. But then it came time for the audience-participation segment of the show, and the middle-aged housewives in the audience started groping for what they hoped were intelligent questions. "So, um, when you finally count all these quark-thingies, um, then what?"
The capper was the "phone calls from the TV audience". To this day I still chuckle at the memory of the conspiracy-theory lady who accused FermiLab of keeping a herd of buffalo on the grounds of their facility "because everyone knows that buffalo are very sensitive to radiation".
The head of the lab just patiently replied, "no, we have a lot of open land we're not using for anything else, and we just like buffalo."
(Sort of reminds me of some of the conversations on this thread.)