I had no idea that Mr. Ed was, in fact, a female zebra.
Here is the Snopes link to prove it.
Am I the only one who didn’t know this?
Megawhoosh!
I suppose you also didn’t know that the California bear flag was meant to be a pear flag, that mobile homes are called that because they were invented in Mobile, Alabama, that the passengers of the Titanic were watching The Poseidon Adventure when their ship struck an iceberg, or things that you’re liable to read on the Internet ain’t ain’t necessarily so.
Oh great…
Ya see, I had my class research websites and I told them that Snopes is the end-all of finding truth to rumors on the Internet.
I can hardly wait to go to that class on Tuesday morning and explain that, well, they were indeed duped by the source I told them would never dupe them.
This ought to be fun…
Wow, did it really take me that long to type that? I guess it’s past my bedtime.
I remember getting into a heated debate with a coworker several years ago over this very issue. I insisted that black and white photo of a zebra would still show the black stripes. He kept insisting, “You never know.” Ugh!
It would be a shame to have been the Zebra Stripe Eraser having to painstakingly edit out each black stripe, by hand, only to make sure that no one ever knew that you had to.
The only source that would nevar dupe you is TEH SSTRAIGHT DOPE MESSsAGE BOARD!!!
Dammit - I hadn’t realized that all those pages where spoofs, not just some of them. I couldn’t buy the zebra one, nor the Blackbeard one.
But I fell for the Poseidon Adventure on the Titanic, and the Mobile homes one. Oops.
giggles madly
I remember the first time someone sent that page to me. We both had the reaction of, “This makes no sense! It can’t be true…but it is on Snopes…”
Then we found the explanation page. Whew.
No, you can turn it into the learning experience that Snopes wanted you to have when they created that page in the first place. It’s all about critical thinking, doing your own research, and never taking any one source as 100% gospel 100% of the time. Ask them what they thought when they read that section. Were they more inclined to push aside any doubts they had and figure that Snopes MUST be right, or were they still skeptical? What reaction do they think they SHOULD have had (or, at least, which reaction is generally better in more situations)?
Heck, pull up some of the politically oriented ULs there. Ask them whether they think the Mikelsons are liberal or conservative, whether they think it has any impact on how they write about and report their findings, whether those of the opposing party (whatever that may be) would think of what’s written there, and how they (the students) would decide whether to “trust” the Snopes writeup or not.
A quiz show on public radio, (I think it was “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”) made the same mistake.
I like Snopes, too, and use it often, but . . . some things you really shouldn’t have to look up. A zebra?
Anybody else think that this is something that a reliable reference site like Snopes shouldn’t do? Whatever gloss you put on it, it’s misinformation. And as for the message it’s supposedly trying to get across, should the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopedia Brittanica, etc insert phony articles just to teach us not to rely on books?
This isn’t fighting Ignorance, it’s rolling over and playing dead for it while winking at the audience. All great fun, but Ignorance is still left sitting on top.
I agree, it is the same as a reputable newspaper publishing fake stories on April Fool’s Day. They should not indulge in “fooling” their readership, no matter how clever it makes them feel.
I think Leaper nailed it. You need to use your critical thinking skills. Disregarding these spoof pages, there are errors in Snopes. IIRC we had a thread on it a few years ago.
Sometimes these errors are deliberate, other times they are just errors. Sometimes these errors (or distortions if you prefer) are pushing an agenda, other times not.
The bottom line is you need to think critically and keep fresh batteries in your BS detector.
The original Snopes link had me going a bit too (about 2 years ago), until it said that you couldn’t see the stripes of a football referee on a black-and-white screen. I then recalled tons of B & W NFL footage I’ve seen of like the 1958 NFL Championship.
Yup. Enough wackos don’t trust Snopes already. This gives them ammo.
I think it’s great that they did it. The best purpose of a site like Snopes, I think, is to encourage skepticism. They don’t want folks mindlessly believing ANYTHING, and putting articles like this in is a way of keeping folks from treating Snopes like a replacement for critical thinking.
Daniel
Some do. They’re called copyright traps, which is probably the same purpose The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL- get it?) pages serve for Snopes (as well as a “don’t believe everything you read” caution- as they point out, various prestigious institutions have fallen for fake news stories. Heck, even the serious entertainment part of satire king The Onion printed another site’s satire as truth.) The New Yorker had a great article about copyright traps in dictionaries and encyclopedias in 2005- “esquivalience” is a great word, and deserves to become real. I like it much more than “procrastination.” My pal Philip Columbo can tell you more. So can Cecil.
Obviously, you’ve never visited San Serriffe. Or the famed spaghetti tree fields of Switzerland.