Here’s the latest bit of stupidity I’ve heard, which comes second-hand from the John Boy & Billy Big Show:
Terry Bradshaw was in Las Vegas last night, waiting to get in to his hotel after some kind of curfew was announced. (WTF?) Anyhow, five “ragheads” came down the street singing, cheering, and dragging an American flag across the pavement. Bradshaw clotheslined three of them and was arrested.
Now, I heard this at about 7:30 Eastern this morning. As yet, the broadest Google search for “Terry Bradshaw” comes up with nothing, let alone anything more specific.
I’ve been spared the Gordon Sinclair thing, but I’ve gotten at least ten copies of the ‘light the candle’ thing. And my copy didn’t have a time zone either. (Duh, folks, this is the Internet…not everyone lives in one time zone.) That is tied with editorials from a couple of papers, which I have received multiple times and which I am now simply discarding without comment.
The second biggest thing I’ve been sent and/or subjected to has been the fake Nostradomus quote. I have politely but firmly directed everyone to Snopes (which I do at most UL glurge.) Other than my dad, who is quite a rational person but reasonably new to what’s being passed on the e-mail rounds, I don’t know of anyone who’s actually checked out the link to debunk their shlock. (He now gets more glee out of debunking UL’s than I do. I love this guy. )
The third thing I’ve seen passed around is some bit about how tomorrow is ‘Flags over America’ or some such day and we should all wear a flag. Closely associated with that is another e-mail asking us to all wear red, white and blue. My youngest stepson’s art teacher is having the kids draw a picture and sending it to Bush. (I wussed out on that one. I just wasn’t heartless enough to tell him what I really thought about that one. I’m storing the comments to the teacher for P/T conferences.)
I understand that this is intended to be a morale booster…but I didn’t find that this kind of stuff ‘boosted my spirit’ when we did it for pep rallies in school, and it’s not lessening my outrage or firming my resolve now. Maybe I’m the one sounding cold and hard-hearted, but geez, people! If you’re going to pass something around, pass around links to organizations that are taking charity donations or volunteers or something USEFUL!
I suppose the easiest way to debunk the Bradshaw story would be to call the Las Vegas police department and ask if any odd curfews had been enacted. No curfews, part of the story is down the tubes, and most likely the rest of it as well.
Is the Gordon Sinclair thing the one that starts out
If so, oh, good, I’m glad I’m not the only one afflicted with that. Someone posted it on one of my favorite hobbyist message boards this morning, with the thread title, “Totally off topic, I know, but please read”, as if that excuses it. It’s a “help” forum and it was so off-topic as to not even be in the same galaxy. And I can’t even post a “hey, asshole” flame 'cause it’s a polite little MB.
So I’d like to take this opportunity to say FUCK YOU. You know who you are. You’ve been there long enough to know the forum descriptions. Go over to the general chitchat forum with your glurge.
Yep, that’s the one DDG. The friend I was speaking about before has “forgiven me” for correcting her. I sent her the links Beeblebrox posted, and she plans to start e-mailing the link to Sinclair’s speech instead of the deliberately misleading and glurge-y hoax. Um, yay?
That name “Gordon Sinclair” has always made me sort of suspicious. Was he a real person? I mean I think it’s a pseudonym engineered to be as Anglo-Canadian as possible. I half expect to see a moving speech from a “Lord Nigel Windsor-Davies” extolling American values to his fellow Britons in my E-Mail box someday.
Yes, he was. In addition to his radio work, he appeared as a panelist on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s TV show Front Page Challenge for many years.
He was the subject of a few books as well–two that come to mind are Will The Real Gordon Sinclair Please Stand Up? and Sinc, Betty, and the Morning Man, which was about the radio station where he worked. (He was known by many in Toronto radio simply as “Sinc.”) Unfortunately, I cannot recall the authors, but I’m sure I can find my copy of Will The Real… somewhere, if anybody really wants to know.
As a Toronto-based broadcaster, his face was familiar to many Torontonians, who would see it in advertisements in local papers and the subway. Heck, if you rode the subway through St. Clair Station daily, you’d probably run into him on his way to or from radio station CFRB, which was at St. Clair and Yonge. I saw him in person many times this way.
Ugh. I just got my first one. I had already asked these people to stop glurging me–and they did. I guess this one was too much to resist.
I sent them the snopes link and the link to this thread. So, if you are reading this, C&M, please remember that J and I love you. I just don’t want you to continue to look like fools by sending out a ton of unsubstantiated crap.
I am glad I am not the only one. Receiving it once was nice, but I received it 18 times yesterday. And in each case I’ve responded with the Snopes website. No snide remarks back yet, though. (At least to my face.)
Criminitly!!! And you think anyone forwarding it would at least take out the extra spaces and arrowheads (whatever they’re called!).
At this point, the damned thing looks like it’s a haiku.
BTW, has Paul Harvey read this on his show yet, or has it appeared in the Abby/Landers columns yet?
There’s a new one going around that I hesitate to call glurge.
There are a few versions out there, but most of them are PowerPoint slide shows of still photos of the attacks and the debris afterwards.
Yes, they are amazing pictures.
Yes, they make my blood boil.
Yes, I like the cute little animated “God Bless America” at the end.
But do they need to be sent to everyone you know? The attachments are running 900K. If you send this to everyone in your address book you’re going to slow down email everywhere.
And how about a warning? One of the ones I got had several up close and personal pictures of human beings falling to their deaths. I don’t need to have this kind of Faces of Death photojournalism thrust in my face to appreciate how awful Tuesday was.
I know they were sent by well-meaning people, but think before you hit that send button. Please?
Jeez, you’re right. It’s right there in the link I sent out.
<bangs head against the wall>
To date, I have received the Gordon Sinclair thing twice, the Leonard Pitts editorial in the Miami Herald three times (damn fine piece, but come on, quit e-mailing it to me) and the “let’s everybody light a candle at 7 Pm to show the terrorists that we…that we…that we are united or something” thing only once. What’s that supposed to show anyway?
Hell, It’s not even dark yet at 7 PM EST on the EAST coast. How stupid are people going to look walking around in the bright southern Californian sunshine with lit candles at 4 PM?
Oh my God. My sister just e-mailed me that speech. I read the first line and realized what it was. Hey, gotta love those incredibly annoying things your siblings do. I think my mom had an affair with the milk man.
Well, I don’t know about Californians, but my fiancee and I stood out with out candles from 7:00-7:15. We prayed together and reflected on the weeks events. I estimate that over half of the units in my complex had tenents doing the same thing. News footage that I just saw showed hundreds of people across the DC area (where I live) doing the candle thing, and credited it to the internet e-mail.
I’m glad not everyone is as cynical as some on these boards. That’s one of the reasons I don’t hang around here much any more.
According to today’s Washington Post, this “song” was recorded soon after the piece was written, and seems to be in the archives of several oldies stations.
Also according to the Post article, Sinclair only agreed to allow the release as a vinyl single if the proceeds went to the Red Cross. The Red Cross reportedly received over $2 million.
I’m just putting things into historical perspective in case someone got the impression that this was something put together in the wake of this week’s events.
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