mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
Any discussion of favorite websites has to include Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages maintained by Barbara and David Mikkelson. Here are some legends they’ve proved are true:
- “A store made good on its offer to sell stereos for ‘299 bananas’ when customers proffered the fruit as payment.”
- “A speeder caught by photo radar mails the police a picture of money to pay his fine.”
- “Thief who tries to rob a gun shop is shot dead by those in the store.”
- “Subway sandwich store tray liners used in Germany depicted a fat Statue of Liberty.”
- “When a Nebraska church exploded in 1950, no one was injured because every member of the choir was late arriving for practice that evening.”
So I’ll start our weekly discussion with two questions. Answer both, answer either. You decide.
1) What’s your favorite urban legend? (And is it true?)
2) What are some of your favorite websites?
By the way, the name “Snopes” comes from William Faulkner:
“The Snopes were a family of characters weaved throughout the works of Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer William Faulkner. When David Mikkelson, creator of snopes.com, first came onto the Internet in the late 1980s, he worried even back in those relatively uncrowded days that no one would remember yet another David. He was thus inspired to adopt a nom-de-Net, selecting one that honored those fictional Faulknerian characters, and began signing his newsgroups posts as ’snopes.’ Over the years snopes established a fearsome online reputation for his ability to thoroughly research and debunk false claims. When it came time to name our domain, www.snopes.com seemed the obvious choice.”
Comments (36)
Comment
My favorite urban legends are in that cokelore section on snopes. Its just amazing what people believe to be true, and the VAST majority are false.
My favorite sites are neatly listed on the right hand side of the mental floss page… really. I discovered about 6 months ago that just about all my favorites were on this page so I just bookmarked mental floss and deleted all the rest.
posted by Scott on 9-14-2007 at 7:43 am
The link for the 5th bullet point is wrong - it links to the Subway story.
posted by caitlen315 on 9-14-2007 at 7:53 am
My favorite websites for information and general knowledge are mentalfloss.com (of course!), fark.com, and slate.com. I’ve never been on snopes.com but I think I will have to check it out.
posted by Suzanne on 9-14-2007 at 7:55 am
Oops, sorry about that. The link has been fixed.
posted by Jason on 9-14-2007 at 8:03 am
(name of city here) has more restaurants per capita than any other city. It’s always wrong. Try doing a Google ™ search on the phrase and see how many cities make that claim or something like it.
I love Snopes for debunking. Mental_floss always gives me some conversational material. I can’t pick a favorite.
posted by Going Like Sixty on 9-14-2007 at 8:04 am
A co-worker sent me one about how putting tupperware in the microwave would give you cancer. It seemed made up to me so I debunked it on snopes. He was mad at me for awhile.
As for my favoriate website check out www.waynecast.com. If you are up for about half an hour of nonsense a month check it out, it cracks me up.
posted by Witty Nickname on 9-14-2007 at 8:10 am
Gotta have mental_floss as my favorite, naturally. Snopes is my first response anytime I get emailed one of those ridiculous emails.
My favorite legend is getting drugged at some party, waking up in a strange bathroom, in the tub, filled with ice, hooked up to an IV, and some vital organ is missing (usually a kidney). To top it off, these organ scallywags are nice enough to leave a note explaining everything and how to get help so you don’t die. Nicest thieves I ever heard of.
posted by Pierre on 9-14-2007 at 8:14 am
I couldn’t find it on snopes, but has anyone heard the legend of the kids jumping into a river off of train tressles, and a guy ends up jumping right through a bloated cow floating down the rivier? I thought this happened in my hometown but it ends up other people have heard the same story, also happening in their town. (in Washington State)
Uh, more of a rural legend, I guess.
posted by nardwar on 9-14-2007 at 8:40 am
My favorite urban legends are anything directly related to UFO’s, aliens or freaks of nature…
My favorite websites are icanhascheezburger.com, fark.com, wikipedia.org and my guilty pleasure:
www.dlisted.com
posted by Sarah on 9-14-2007 at 8:42 am
Being a makeup artist part time, I have to say I just love the “lead in lipsticks” scare. I still get it forwarded to me all the time, and people ask me about it all the time. Funny how the people who are terrified at stuff like are always the same folks who aren’t afraid of cigarettes and tanning beds. Yeesh.
posted by Allison on 9-14-2007 at 8:48 am
i love snopes. i have an uncle who forwards ridiculous political e-mails. i snopes it up and send him a link– and i hit ‘reply all’. he keeps forwarding them, though. he’ll never learn.
posted by Richel on 9-14-2007 at 8:51 am
1) the high babysitter putting the baby in the oven thinking it was a turkey is one urban legend that has always stuck in my mind
2) mentalfloss.com is one of my favorites and also marmadukeexplained.blogspot.com, which is halarious
posted by Susan on 9-14-2007 at 8:55 am
Favorite sites: MentalFloss, Woot.
To check validity of legend types stuff I also use Truthorfiction.com as well as the ones previously mentioned.
posted by JaneM on 9-14-2007 at 8:58 am
The most influential snopes story to me is a true one about loading knives & forks pointy-side up in the dishwasher. Seems the mother was loading the machine when her child ran through the kitchen, someone fell on the open door/rack, and died from the cursed cutlery. I always load them points down now.
Aside from mental_floss I am a devoted fan of The Comics Curmudgeon
joshreads.com
posted by Johnny Cat on 9-14-2007 at 9:44 am
Susan,
The marmaduke blogspot is a riot!!! Almost fell off my chair laughing. Thanks
posted by JaneM on 9-14-2007 at 9:55 am
My favorite urban legend is the rocket car.
My favorite websites are mentalfloss (of course), fark, and drudge.
posted by Anthony on 9-14-2007 at 10:42 am
I like disney urban legends. like whether Walt Disney had himself (or just his head, or not at all) cryogenically frozen.
posted by me on 9-14-2007 at 11:19 am
My all time favourite urban legend is the one about the gangs who drive around at night with their headlights off and then follow & shoot anyone who flicks their lights at them - probably because I totally believed it when I was a teen & I still feel stressed when I see a car driving around without their headlights on, even though it’s totally untrue.
My favourite websites…well mentalfloss of course, metroblogging Porltand, ravelry.com, flickr.com, and way too many blogs to count!
posted by Stacey on 9-14-2007 at 11:49 am
Various family members forwarded the “anti-perspirant gives you cancer” email to me, wherein some genius explains that since anti-perspirants and some deodorants block pores from sweating, the sweat will build up inside the glands/lymph nodes and become toxic. Lovable fools they are.
And if I could marry a piece of the internet, it would be gofugyourself.com.
posted by Jess on 9-14-2007 at 11:53 am
1) The most disturbing legend for me would be the Shanghai’d Bride
snopes.com/weddings/horrors/shanghai.asp
2) Most visited websites are mentalfloss, neatorama, fark, and the incomprable canofzebras.com
posted by Jeremiah on 9-14-2007 at 11:57 am
Before there was snopes.com, there was a usenet group named alt.folklore.urban. This group was dedicated to the discussion and debunking of urban folklore.
It had the secondary role of being a place to practice trolling, with points being awarded for reeling in some of the experts (aka Old Hats) in the group. The best troll of all time was when someone named snopes went into a hockey usenet group and authored a post named “Canada is a pathetic piece of shit”. This thread metastasized all over usenet and lasted for years as outraged new readers gobbled the bait.
Favorite UL: Eddie Haskell is Alice Cooper
Websites: metafilter, toolmonger, war nerd columns at exile.ru
posted by Loomis on 9-14-2007 at 11:57 am
Ahh where to begin? Have a bus-load of fav websites, but these are must visits in my opinion, I’m sure you lot will agree (hopefully):
boingboing.net
neatorama.com
yesbutnobutyes.com
misscellania.com
arbroath.blogspot.com
lazylaces.com
makezine.com/blog
And last but by no means least!
ursispaltenstein.ch/blog/weblog.php
All truly class i think :)
posted by soops on 9-14-2007 at 12:09 pm
Favourite urband legend: Throwing rice at weddings will is bad for birds, false, but still confirmed as true by Ann Landers.
Favourite websites: this one, snopes, albinoblacksheep, bbc (especially for the hys columns), wikipedia
posted by TerryS on 9-14-2007 at 1:55 pm
favorite website:
presurfer.blogspot.com
Always something interesting
posted by quix on 9-14-2007 at 2:20 pm
I want to know if the myth that a kid ate so much hand sanitizer that he died and the teacher got in trouble for providing it to the class is true.
posted by Kim on 9-14-2007 at 3:31 pm
The information in the message is basically true*. According to a May 14 2007 Fox23 News report, four-year-old Halle Butler of Okmulgee, Oklahoma became very ill after eating hand sanitizer. Halle’s pre-kindergarten teacher applied hand sanitizer to the child’s hands before she ate lunch. However, Halle apparently licked the sanitizer off her hands rather than rubbing it in. The child soon became ill and was rushed to hospital where she showed signs of intense intoxication. Typical hand sanitizer contains 62-percent alcohol, significantly more than most hard liquor. Even a small amount would therefore be enough to make a small child drunk or ill. Thankfully, the child recovered after the alcohol left her system and is now doing well.
So - not dead, but not fun! :)
posted by lazaurra on 9-14-2007 at 5:04 pm
I love Snopes. When I was teaching, my students would bring in some of the most outrageous rumors–Tommy Hilfinger said he didn’t want black people to wear his clothes, Snapple was backed by the Klan, and the ship was a slave ship. Snopes was a great adjunct educational tool.
posted by Barbara on 9-14-2007 at 7:54 pm
“If you pick up a guinea pig by it’s tail, it’s eyes will fall out”. I beleived that one for too many years.
And I get nervous, too when I see a car driving with it’s headlights out.
And then there’s “Never run over a paper bag on the road - it might have a baby in it”, since the people I heard it from were deadly serious in their belief that this was a common practice.
posted by ann minor on 9-14-2007 at 10:27 pm
My absolute favorite is about the trombonist who put a firecracker n his mute ton liven up the end of the 1812 overture and ended up sending the slide of his trombone into the conductor. Anyone who used to play in an orchestra and had a mean orchestra conductor will know why that made me happy.
Also, any myth that has to do with Disney or some kind of secret that’s found in everyday media (subliminal messages in Beattles tunes and such) are fun.
Mentalfloss.com is my ultimate fave for random fun info and myth debunking, and how could anyone forget discovery.com/mythbusters? I’ve got to check out snopes.com now, everyone seems to love it and I’m just out of the loop.
posted by heather on 9-14-2007 at 11:29 pm
The “Never run over a paper bag on the road” possibly started with a “true?” story from the 1950’s. A truck driver who would occasionally run over bags or boxes that were in the road decided one day to stop and move a box off a road instead. When he picked up the box, a small boy was under it. The boy had been crawling around with the box over him, and had crawled onto the road. It was reported by Bishop Fulton Sheen as an example of Divine Intervention.
posted by Tdave on 9-15-2007 at 3:34 am
My favorite is still the neverending story of Craig Shergold. I had thought this (semi-true) UL was finally dead, when a co-worker came to our office asking for business cards to send to a child with cancer.
I referred her to Snopes.com for the history of this meme, possibly saving her from further embarrassment.
Hmmm . . . favorites? Well, I love mentalfloss and Neatorama. One not yet mentioned here is Arts and Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com)
posted by Daniel Kim on 9-15-2007 at 4:34 am
1. Love the one where an attorney insures Cuban cigars, smokes them, files a claim, wins in court, gets charged with arson, and sent to jail.
2. Fave websites have to be Linkedin.com, fastcompany.com and Wired.com.
posted by Lalita on 9-16-2007 at 9:20 am
my friends and i save our funky bad forwards (typically either an urban legend or something involving cute cats-bleh) all week, then we send them to each other for ‘vote for the worst forward of the week’. (it’s a small group of us.) anyway, my aunt, thankfully, has helped me win more than once.
keep sending the crappy kittens and the crazy crap auntie.
i love thesneeze.com, defectiveyeti.com, and today, i’ve been addicted to clips of robot chicken on youtube.
posted by amywithlemon on 9-17-2007 at 1:03 am
Almost everyone I work with believes that all spiders are Brown Recluses (aka Fiddlebacks), and that all Brown Recluses (and therefore, all spiders to them) are predatory toward humans, willful and capable of great injury. The “recluse” part is - to them - a misnomer. My boss believed her shingles were caused by spiders. When I asked if she had seen or felt the army of spiders that attacked only her right leg, she just stared, unfazed. Apparently they drugged her first - the clever devils!
Snopes should be mandatory reading for anyone who forwards stories that do not involve anyone they personally know. Just a thought.
posted by elizabutt on 9-18-2007 at 1:28 pm
MentalFloss.com is of course my favorite. aside from facebook.com, myspace.com, & gmail.com, it’s where i spend all my time.
i also check out postsecret.com every sunday
as well as making all sorts of lists on 43things.com, 43places.com, allconsuming.net, listofbests.com, 43people.com …
but i’m glad for these comments - now i have all sorts of other places to visit!
posted by sd on 9-18-2007 at 3:48 pm
oh! i also love the videos on liamshow.com
posted by sd on 9-18-2007 at 3:48 pm