[QUOTE=Dung Beetle]
I don’t know if this would be called an urban legend, and I have not tried to verify or debunk it myself, but I get a lot of Jesusy glurge from people at work, and a lot of them contain something along the lines of: If you agree, please pass this on. It is said that 86% of American people believe in God. Why don’t we just tell the other 14% to be quiet and sit down??? If you agree, pass this on, if not delete.
These also piss me off because of that last line. If you agree with me, tell everyone, if you don’t, shut up. :rolleyes:
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Okay, so I finally snopesed it, and it is false. At least in the form in which I usually receive it, which is the NBC poll story. I actually got one the other day that claimed to include England and Canada in that 86/14% statistic.
[QUOTE=pulykamell]
flat, I would take them to the kitchen and then the bathroom, where one sink drained clockwise, the other counter. So, you can draw one of two conclusions: either the Coriolis effect theory is flawed, or the equator bisects my flat.
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Now if you lived on a time zone border you could have all the clocks on one side of the house set an hour different from the other side and all of them be correct!
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
The soda-tabs were such a constantly forwarded U.L. that a couple of places actually now really do collect them. There’s a Ronald McDonald House receptacle (from the McDonald’s Foundation itself) in the breakroom where I work.
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This one always makes me laugh, because if they wanted to raise more money, it might be better to, you know, save the whole can.
About the “Obama is a Muslim”-UL. As people like Limbauch keep saying that with the clear intent to harm Obama, and it clearly isn’t true, isn’t that legally, slander?
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I notice you said “people like Limbauch” (actually, Limbaugh), because AFAIK, whatever other criticisms & jokes Limbaugh has made about Obama, he’s never actually said he was Muslim.
[QUOTE=Hampshire]
Every year around Halloween when the topic of novelty haunted houses comes up among friends my wife would always tell everyone about the one in Chicago (where she grew up) that was in an old warehouse that was was so scary that if you could make it all the way through to the roof there was a party with a live band waiting for you.
I always thought it sounded cool till years later when I found it to have never exsisted on Snopes.
Me: “Remember that warehouse haunted house in Chicago?”
Her: “Yeah, it was really cool. A band and everything.”
Me: “Did YOU actually go to it?”
Her: “Well, uh, no, but I know people that did…”
Me: “Well, uh, no they didn’t because it never exsisted (link)”
Her: :mad:
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Hahaha, if I ever was to win the Powerball lotto that’s one of the things that I planned on opening, just so that it would actually exist because it sounded so cool.
I remember one from when I was a kid that came home on a letter from school at least once a year warning parents that teenagers or hippies or someone was putting LSD into temporary tattoos or on blotter paper that had cartoons on them so as to trick the unsuspecting youngsters into becoming addicted to the dread LSD!! Which of course is 10% truth (LSD often comes on blotter paper with toons on them) and 90% WTF. I wonder if that letter still makes the rounds.
Just reading the thread title I immediately thought of poor little baby Shithead. I’m so tired of hearing that story. Everyone knows that I’m interested in interesting names, so they MUST report this one to me. I hear it constantly!!! (Now I really did see Jehovah on a class list one time when I was subbing, but he was absent so I haven’t actually met him.)
Several of my friends seem to have (hopefully!) stopped forwarding me emails after I replied with snopes links to their whole address book. This Obama is a Muslim is driving me crazy – I mean vote for the man or don’t vote for him based on his politics, not some stupid email.
The biggest thing I hate is “I don’t know if this is true, but I’ll forward it on just in case…” at the beginning of an email. I always send back a link and say “Well it only took me less than a minute to check if it was true.”
The Rod Stewart semen one, which is hilariously dumb because why would you need to have you stomach pumped if it was filled with semen- semen isn’t toxic. You wouldn’t pump someone’s stomach if it was filled with burgers, why semen?
Another odd hospital name one is Nosmo King.
And Elvis may not have been racist, but he did have the infamous catfish incident.
[QUOTE=Crocodiles And Boulevards]
One I hear all the time is that the average American swallows 2 spiders every year in their sleep.
This, of course, is not true.
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Right. When people say that, I always ask, “How do you know that to be true? Did somebody set up a monitoring system that counts the number of spiders that are drawn into people’s mouths as they sleep?” It’s the sort of claim that defies common sense, yet it’s incredibly common.
More recently. . . . well the one I got forwarded to me most recently was the warning that the plastic from the water bottles will give you cancer.
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[QUOTE=lieu]
Do they have a tangible, concrete reason for this belief or is it merely speculative? The reason I ask, I was dating the administrator of Cedars-Sinai Hospital’s daughter shortly after this story came out. She was pre-med herself and we were pretty serious at the time. She asked him if it was true and he said yes.
Now this story puzzles me to no end. On the one hand, a couple of reputable people, one of whom would definately be in the know, say it’s true. On the other, I simply can’t imagine this procedure being a thrill for anyone. It’s gross, immoral and I can’t imagine it would be thrilling even for the most perverse of deviants.
I suppose it’ll always remain a myth. There are those who want it to be true but no reputable source will ever come forth publicly and demonstrate that a hospital willingfully divulged confidential and embarrasing information about a patient, celebrity or not. (A private conversation between father and daughter is worlds away from a public confirmation… yes?) And Richard Gere? He’ll neither confirm nor deny.
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See, this is what keeps this dumb thing going! You say this- “On the one hand, a couple of reputable people, one of whom would definately be in the know, say it’s true.” Are you kidding? Every single person who retells this thing claims that their mom/dad/friend/aunt was in attendance at the gerbil removal, and they are all lying.
Sampiro, I hate to break it to you, but I really did work with a Hispanic lady whose name was Femále. She said it had northing to do with confusion at a hospital as she was not born in the US. I have no clue if this was a popular Hispanic name, but I did know this one lady who had it. It came close to rhyming with tamale.
We also had a Dr. Tepper that sounded like Dr. Pepper over the paging system.
A Dr. Bohzous that always sounded like Dr. Bozo and an older black lady whose first name Alphanet. So this hospital had a good share of odd sounding or spelled names.
Jim
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I haven’t known any Lemonjellos or Orangellos, but my mother did go to high school with a girl named Godzilla.
Also, I knew a girl named Female several years ago. Her parents weren’t illiterate, they just liked the name.
The maddening thing about the Tommy Hilfiger on Oprah thing is people actually claim to have seen it, yet this was in the age of VCR’s, and no one in the world happened to tape Oprah that day as proof it happened? :rolleyes:
I’m not nearly as annoyed by urban myths as some of you. As long as they are neither defamatory nor racist, they are often harmlessly amusing in their own right - which is why people spread 'em. Debunking is only necessary where wrong advice is provided - you don’t want people actually believing Coca-Cola is a good form of birth control, but what’s the harm in someone retelling the “phantom hitchiker”?
Well, EJsGirl, that’s the conundrum in a nutshell now, isn’t it? I can think of no reason he or she would lie about this one way or the other and his (father’s) position at CS was undeniable. A yea or a nay serves no benefit to them so I rely on their basic honesty which was very much intact.
But the whole prospect is just so bizarre. It’s beyond what someone could make up so I’ve little recourse but to scratch my head and hope someday something definitive comes forth. Another one of those times that thankfully it’s of no consequence one way or the other.
That’s your experience though… everyone that’s told you of this claims an intimate relation to the event? That I find strange, as I’ve just heard it once.
[QUOTE=freekalette]
What the glitter/gynecologist visit? The only one I know about glitter involves a man, and it’s true! eep!
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A woman sprayed her nether regions with body spray before her gyn visit. Her doctor said that it was nice that she got all spruced up for him. Turns out that she had grabbed glitter spray instead of body spray.
When I was in high school, my mom warned my dad that under no circumstances should he ever flash his headlights at a driver who has his headlights off at night, lest he be killed by gang trainees.
An email that I got from my aunt (who I love, and who is generally a smart woman) a couple months ago absolutely floored me.
Apparently, every school in the United Kingdom has banned teachers from teaching students anything about the Holocaust! And it’s all the Muslims’ fault!
How the hell could anyone for one minute think that this was even remotely true? That every school in fucking England was denying the Holocaust? I don’t usually reply with Snopes, but I fired off a “reply all” on that one immediately.
