Sorry if these have been asked before. Double sorry if I’m in the wrong forum. I got a stupid e-mail with these claims:
A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
The term “the whole 9 yards” came from W.W.II fighter pilots in the Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got “the whole 9 yards.”
The phrase “rule of thumb” is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn’t beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the “General Purpose” vehicle, G.P.
Cecil’s already covered those, proving that there’s a long way to go in the fight angainst ignorance. But I couldn’t find these. Any truth to them?
The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building. (If this is true, seems like there’s something they could do.)
Cat’s urine glows under a blacklight. (Sorry. Allergic to cats or I’d do this one myself.)
Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously. (Who the f**k figured this one out?)
In Cleveland, Ohio, it’s illegal to catch mice without a hunting license. (This just sounds stupid.)
Anybody know?
These were all discussed extensively at the Urban Legends forum at About.com. Plus more. I can’t remember the answers to them all, but I’m pretty sure that the cat urine one is true, but other than that…
The best I can suggest is to do a search at the forum itself.
Aaahhh! The websites restricted. I’ll have to look when I get home. Stupid software. Currently the MLB Player’s Association web site is restricted because it’s listed as a sex site. I think I’ll go vent in the Pit. Thanks, though.
The library one is definately an UL; Snopes lists it here. Of course, since it’s probably been told about libraries at every single university in the US, it’s probably hard to get a positive denial about this particular one, but I’d bet a substantial sum of money that no library anywhere is sinking.
Dunno about the others, but I’d try searching Snopes also.
This seems fishy. Can’t back it up or not. It seems that it is facetious, because the foundations on buildings are usually very stable.
I can assure that at least some animals do this. A grad student was telling me about an experiment about mice and their patterns. They laid down butcher paper, and they tracked their urine and patterns with a black light.
Duh. Just about everything injected intravenously is dangerous.
Can’t prove or disprove, but it’s Cleveland. Remember, the city that cought it’s river on fire?
Reminds me (and this is true) that the drill field at Virginia Tech, my alma mater, is sinking at the rate of about an inch a year. Has little to do with weight, though–the field sits atop a pair of underground streams that are slowly eroding the area.
It was the Cuyuhoga river in Cleveland that supposedly caught fire. Pittsburgh, being quite a ways upstream in it’s own river system is probably much cleaner than Cleveland. Not that Pittsburgh is that clean of a city, but there’s not much upstream of Pittsburgh to accumulate in the river other than clean nature. The Cuyuhoga goes through some pretty industrialized areas for a while before reaching Cleveland, and lots of crap is dumped into it (or was…)
For the record, the Cuyahoga river isn’t the only river to have ever burned.
It’s just the only one to have ever spontaneously combusted.
As for the hunting mice thing, I believe that the actual law is that it’s illegal to hunt any animal within city limits. “Any animal” includes, of course, mice, but they don’t have their own specific law. I suspect that a lot of “goofy laws” you’ll see are the same sort of thing, i.e., a silly specific example of a reasonable, general law.
about the library sinking thing, it mademe think of this tangent:
In Wellington, New Zealand (my place) just about all of the large important buildings are either made on wheels or on rubber platforms in case of earthquakes. Therefore, whilst they don’t actually sink, they are all capable of moving between a few feet and a couple of yards in any direction (including a sky-scraper or two). There, that’s my tangent.
The Ryan: In the version of the e-mail I saw, it said “hunting”-- Presumably a typical UL-ish mutation. I know myself, my Mom, and my sister all joked about our cats being arrested.
Apparently not true, at least not on a national level. People who’ve checked don’t find any correlation between the rider’s fate and the horse’s feet.
Don’t know. The way I heard it, the phrase went back to Levi Strauss’ original shop.
A totally bogus peice of feminist mythology. “Rule of Thumb” refers to carpenters, who even today will use their thumb as a measuring tool if a tape measure isn’t handy.
I’ve heard several theories about this. None have sounded convincing to me.
This is an old UL, said of several libraries.
???
I agree with the previous discussion. FYI: According to a highly reliable source (an old GI Joe episode :)) apple seeds contain a small amount of poison, too.
I agree with the previous discussion. Probably a silly example of a reasonable law.