They’re just really horrible spellers.
“You mean you changed your name to Latrine?”
“Yeah, it used to be Shithouse!”
Oh… so that’s what really happened to Lenny.
My late mother believed the story about a young mother in a home for wayward girls who named her child after “that nice name on the bracelet you gave me”: ‘positive Wasserman’. (Named after a German bacteriologist, the Wasserman test detects syphillis).
Not a UL, but I always loved the satirical author’s dust-cover resume (from Patrick Dennis I think) that claimed the subject had received, “… a Pulitzer, a Peabody, and a Wasserman”.
I often hear that southerners are not as bright as other people.
One that I still hear occasionally and, to my embarassment, used to repeat (it was actually the Dope that corrected me in my earliest visits) was that African-American hematology pioneer Charles Drew died from a car wreck because the whites-only E.R. either wouldn’t treat him at all or wouldn’t give him a blood transfusion of blood taken from a white person. This one was famously repeated on an episode of MAS*H and has even made its way into some reputable seeming non-fiction books. The truth is that his injuries were just too severe to be saved (the car accident snapped his neck). While Jim Crow south was undeniably horrible there were actually few whites-only hospitals in small towns (though there were in big cities, where other hospitals for blacks or whites only were nearby), though it is true that one of Drew’s biggest frustrations was that many hospitals continued to segregate blood by the race of the donor long after it was conclusively proven there was absolutely no difference.
An almost identical tale is told about blues great Bessie Smith which inspired an Edward Albee play. As with Drew, Smith died because her injuries were simply too great (and in fact one of the first people on the scene was a white surgeon who happened to be driving down the same road just after the accident and who treated all of the injured without regard to color). This U.L. was repeated by Smith’s half-sister “Diamond Teeth” Mary McClain , also a blues singer, more than half a century after Smith’s death, who even claimed to be present at the time.
There was a reported scam in the UK a while back where a company would supposedly call you with an automated message while you’re charged £10/min for the call. The student’s union posted messages all over the place about it and I got a few emails from a friend (who is admittedly a bit of a spammer).
I googled it to see what was up and ICSTIS said it was all a hoax.
This one features in The Human Stain by Phillip Roth. It’s hard to tell whether Roth believes/believed it or he just knows his character would believe and repeat the story. If ever called on it he can claim the latter.
Interestingly, I spent some time looking at newspaper accounts of this UL. The ironic thing is that it was perpetuated(not started), in large part by the rise of Black awareness in the late 1960’s/early-mid 1970’s. You see people like Dick Gregory writing newspaper columns repeating it.
Or Chlymidia.
That’s no urban legend. Toilets do indeed flush the other way on the other side of the hemisphere. I believe there was a podcast about it where one guy from the US flushed his toilet, and another guy on the same show flushed his toilet in Australia, and indeed, it flushed the other way.
Gee, one data point so it must be true! :dubious:
Look here. Or here. Or this idiot here, voted “best answer”, who says the Coriolis effect will swirl toilets clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. (Coriolis actually says the opposite: clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere, counter/anticlockiwse in the Northern.) Here’s a Wikipedia site that gets the directions right.
Also, explain to me why (and I just checked this out of curiosity–luckily they drain in opposite directions, like my sinks), my basement toilet drains counterclockwise, and my upstairs toilet drains clockwise.
Sorry, this one just really grates on my nerves for some reason. It’s so idiotic and so easily testable, that I don’t understand why so many people fall for it. Go ahead, try it. Go around and observe which direction the toilet water spins for every toilet you flush. I guarantee you will not see uniformity in the results. One result may be biased, but that would be because of the dominant manufacturer and the direction in which the nozzles are pointed in the toilet.
Presumably your house is lying sideways across the equator.
The thing is, toilets in Australia work completely differently to toilets in the US; in that they basically unleash a torrent of water from the cistern and when it subsides, the waste is gone- unlike US toilets which seem to have some sort of swirly/disappearing water thing happening.
I think the one I have heard repeated as fact the most times in person is the one about a Taco Hell employee taking a dump in the refried beans. I’ve heard that one from a few different people who have worked at different Taco Hells in both Ohio and Florida. They all have worked with someone, who at some point decided it would be funny to drop a deuce in there. Apparently, at every Taco Hell in the country, there are employees pooping in the beans.
Judging by taste, that one may be true. :eek:
I was so sure that someone would bring this up that I word-searched for it in the thread. I didn’t catch it at first, but that probably was ony because I was a bit too early that day (the 9th). And at the same time, I didn’t have the opportunity to offer it myself.
I first heard of this, outside of a circa '65 GL comic book(Gil Kane art!), in a letter-of-comment to Life Magazine, in the late 70’s. There had been an article about William Shockley, and said Nobel Prize inventor’s claim that AA’s AVERAGE 15 IQ points below whites. He advocated that incentives for their (AA’s) brightest to reproduce more, and incentives for their least bright to reproduce less would catch them up and the general quality of life for everyone.
Naturally, not everyone was enthused, and many considered this a merely less ferocious form of racism, and his measurements suspect to say the least. By his own lights, however, he was just being nobel about the whole thing.
But in the letter one woman claimed that the solution was really for everyone to go beyond the 10% barrier, which would swamp the mere 15 point average difference and make it trivial.
Years later, one a street corner I encountered a “soapbox” boob who was espousing One World under God, a global-America movement that was really a front for the Unification Church.
Long story short, he felt that if America and the world were to stop being so self-indulgent and vice-oriented, tremendous progress of all kinds would be made. (He launched into the subject of child pornography as soon as I mentioned Freedom of Speech.) Getting to that extra 90% was one of the many accomplishments that would be facilitated by his idea of moral reform, which involved the government eliminating personal freedom wherever such meant allowing people to indulge in “vice.” (I gathered that this, in his opinion, included of course, but was not limited to, child pornography.)
Of course, any attempt to point out that the 10%/90% jazz was just an “old chestnut” (as I called it) was balked. I even tried to explain the origin of the misconception, but he wasn’t interested in a history lesson either. Just the facts. :rolleyes:
[ :eek: I-am-losing-the-will-to-live Department. :eek:]
Finally just a few years back I was involved in what could be vaguely described as continuing education courses, and in the hallway a not-very-impressive guy informed me of this great truth. I explained how it was a misconception, and he seemed to be listening to me and also not kicking up a fuss. Which didn’t stop him from repeating it all over again when it seemed germane to the discussion in the classroom and class that we shared just then. He had the exact same kind of rather bland enthusiasm, without the slightest sign that he was being insistent, defiant, or snarky in the wake of my statement. In one ear…
Getting back to the GL comic, it seems to me that on this one planet GL encountered, folks were very similar to us Earth humans, what with the missing 90% brain power (originally) but had developed a high-tech way of getting to all 100% - and then they did possess telekinesis, IIRC.
exclamation!, I wonder whether that could have possibly been the source of what your acquaintance said. Granted, the comic was a lonnnnng time ago, but maybe such gems are passed down a generation or two. Sort of a Bizarro Word version of heirlooms…
Or not. Never mind.
Me
That there is a tribe of Pygmies living in the UK in Devon. And Cliff Richard is their masthead.
Please watch this: http://www.glumbert.com/media/global
Deleted. Addressed already.