milohimself
RIP CITY
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Urban Myth Countdown
- Thread starter BeltwayVol
- Start date
GenNeyland9
Keeper of The Game Maxims
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TitanVol
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Milo are you implying that McNeal had a good day? He did put up 240 yards but he was not that impressive. They moved the ball on that first drive but after that the best drive in the first half was 7 plays for 25 yards. We were up early in that game, 28-0 by halftime. I am sure we were willing to give up some short passing yards.
Granted if you want to compare him to the rest of the A&M team then yes, he had a good game.
Ah yes, if the A&M Boys were running the Mythical Myers Offense were able to complete some passess. But completing passes between the 20 yard line does not an offense make. Please note the final score and then the inherenent deception in the Myers Offensive Scheme fades into oblivion. The success of an offensive scheme is best evaluated by its ability to put points of on the board. Texas A&M simply had no offense to speak of irrespective of whose or which offense they were running.
The Myers Myth is exactly that and will remain a Myth until he proves himself and his system in a league comprised of more than one competitive NATIONAL program. I am not saying that he is not a great coach but the competition level he will face this year is several tiers above anything he saw with his previous years at "what was the name of that great football power?"
Lest we all forget, Defenses win football games. Does Myers also have a Mythological Defensive Scheme? If so, was that the one that Texas A&M used against us last year too?
BeltwayVol
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Claim: Pot scrubbing sponges manufactured by Procter & Gamble contain a dangerous derivative of Agent Orange.
Origins: If AIDS is the bogeyman of the 1990s, then surely Agent Orange was the bogeyman of the 1980s. The herbicide used by the U.S. military in the late 1960s was blamed for a raft of ailments suffered by Vietnam veterans in the 1980s. The point here isn't to debate whether or not Agent Orange was really responsible for all the suffering attributed to it, but to highlight that someone who wants to make us stand up and take notice of a "serious health hazard" need merely invoke the name Agent Orange to get our attention. The message need not be accurate or even plausible; it just has to scare us into thinking that an entity of evil intent has unleashed the scourge known as "Agent Orange" against us.
Look at what we're being warned about: "It seems the fungicide is a derivative of the systemic pesticide-herbicide, 2-4-D, more popularly known as Agent Orange . . ." First of all, 2,4-D isn't Agent Orange in itself; it's one of the compounds that make up Agent Orange. Secondly, we're told that whatever terrible thing is in these sponges is a "derivative" of the substance the writer just misidentified. What sort of "derivative"? Given the average understanding of chemistry, many people could probably be convinced that water (H2O) is a "derivative" of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and is therefore unsafe to drink. Lacking specific information, this portion of the warning is next to meaningless.
We're also supposed to be alarmed that these ominous pot scrubbers state that they're not for use in aquariums and should be kept away from pets, and as proof that the warning should be taken seriously we're offered the real-life example of an anonymous correspondent's friend who inadvertently killed his tropical fish by using one of the offending sponges to clean their tank. Tropical fish are often difficult to keep alive under the best of conditions, and introducing any strange chemical into an aquarium can have disastrous results. Common household cleanser will kill tropical fish, but that doesn't mean the cleanser is inherently dangerous for household use.
So, should we stand up and take notice of health hazards posed to us by pot-scrubbing sponges? Certainly not for sponges produced by everybody's favorite corporate whipping boy, Procter & Gamble, as they manufacture no such product. (They make bleach, dishwashing detergent, cleansers, and laundry soap, but not sponges.) We have to wonder how the writer of this piece called Procter & Gamble to "register a complaint" without learning that Procter & Gamble doesn't even make the product he was complaining about. Did Procter & Gamble fail to mention that fact, or is the writer perhaps engaging in a little creative fabrication to make a point?
Okay, maybe the facts are a little garbled here. Maybe it's some other manufacturer's product we're being warned about. Which manufacturer? Who makes the product, and what is its brand name? What, exactly, is the allegedly harmful "fungicide" used in these sponges? Spewing warnings like shotgun pellets, hoping you'll hit the right target even if some unintended victims are injured as well, is an approach that does far more harm than good.
A little checking with some companies that do manufacture these sponges reveals that some sponges are indeed treated with an anti-bacterial. Why? Because the sponges are packaged wet. Why isn't the anti-bacterial listed on the packaging? Because it isn't considered a "toxic" substance by the FDA and therefore doesn't have to be included on the product label.
Bottom line: If you want to warn us of a serious health hazard, try to get the important facts right. Heck, just try to get the minor facts right. It looks kind of silly when you not only misspell the name of the company responsible for the alleged hazard, but you also threaten to boycott them because you "can't trust what they put in" a product they didn't manufacture in the first place. You can only cry "Agent Orange" so many times before people stop listening.
36 More Days Until Fulmer and His "Orange Agents" Destroy Florida's Urban Myth!
Origins: If AIDS is the bogeyman of the 1990s, then surely Agent Orange was the bogeyman of the 1980s. The herbicide used by the U.S. military in the late 1960s was blamed for a raft of ailments suffered by Vietnam veterans in the 1980s. The point here isn't to debate whether or not Agent Orange was really responsible for all the suffering attributed to it, but to highlight that someone who wants to make us stand up and take notice of a "serious health hazard" need merely invoke the name Agent Orange to get our attention. The message need not be accurate or even plausible; it just has to scare us into thinking that an entity of evil intent has unleashed the scourge known as "Agent Orange" against us.
Look at what we're being warned about: "It seems the fungicide is a derivative of the systemic pesticide-herbicide, 2-4-D, more popularly known as Agent Orange . . ." First of all, 2,4-D isn't Agent Orange in itself; it's one of the compounds that make up Agent Orange. Secondly, we're told that whatever terrible thing is in these sponges is a "derivative" of the substance the writer just misidentified. What sort of "derivative"? Given the average understanding of chemistry, many people could probably be convinced that water (H2O) is a "derivative" of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and is therefore unsafe to drink. Lacking specific information, this portion of the warning is next to meaningless.
We're also supposed to be alarmed that these ominous pot scrubbers state that they're not for use in aquariums and should be kept away from pets, and as proof that the warning should be taken seriously we're offered the real-life example of an anonymous correspondent's friend who inadvertently killed his tropical fish by using one of the offending sponges to clean their tank. Tropical fish are often difficult to keep alive under the best of conditions, and introducing any strange chemical into an aquarium can have disastrous results. Common household cleanser will kill tropical fish, but that doesn't mean the cleanser is inherently dangerous for household use.
So, should we stand up and take notice of health hazards posed to us by pot-scrubbing sponges? Certainly not for sponges produced by everybody's favorite corporate whipping boy, Procter & Gamble, as they manufacture no such product. (They make bleach, dishwashing detergent, cleansers, and laundry soap, but not sponges.) We have to wonder how the writer of this piece called Procter & Gamble to "register a complaint" without learning that Procter & Gamble doesn't even make the product he was complaining about. Did Procter & Gamble fail to mention that fact, or is the writer perhaps engaging in a little creative fabrication to make a point?
Okay, maybe the facts are a little garbled here. Maybe it's some other manufacturer's product we're being warned about. Which manufacturer? Who makes the product, and what is its brand name? What, exactly, is the allegedly harmful "fungicide" used in these sponges? Spewing warnings like shotgun pellets, hoping you'll hit the right target even if some unintended victims are injured as well, is an approach that does far more harm than good.
A little checking with some companies that do manufacture these sponges reveals that some sponges are indeed treated with an anti-bacterial. Why? Because the sponges are packaged wet. Why isn't the anti-bacterial listed on the packaging? Because it isn't considered a "toxic" substance by the FDA and therefore doesn't have to be included on the product label.
Bottom line: If you want to warn us of a serious health hazard, try to get the important facts right. Heck, just try to get the minor facts right. It looks kind of silly when you not only misspell the name of the company responsible for the alleged hazard, but you also threaten to boycott them because you "can't trust what they put in" a product they didn't manufacture in the first place. You can only cry "Agent Orange" so many times before people stop listening.
36 More Days Until Fulmer and His "Orange Agents" Destroy Florida's Urban Myth!
GenNeyland9
Keeper of The Game Maxims
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BeltwayVol
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Claim: A man sneaked his way onto a Titanic lifeboat by donning a woman's dress.
Origins: Many of the legendary tales associated with the Titanic's sinking deal with human acts of courage, heroism, and sacrifice in the face of certain death, tales all the more remarkable because most of them were true. One legend stands in stark counterpoint to those chronicles of bravery: the claim that an adult male passenger secured a place in a lifeboat by disguising himself as a woman.
If we imagined a disaster similar to the Titanic occurring today, we would likely picture it as an "every man for himself" free-for-all in which faster and stronger passengers shouldered aside the slow, weak, and elderly to secure places for themselves in the available lifeboats. No such melee took place on the decks of the Titanic, however, even though "women and children first" was not a regulation specified by maritime law. In 1912, it was a rule men followed by standing aside for women and children primarily because doing so was a social imperative; it was, as a Titanic officer would later testify, "a law of human nature." In a very real sense, violating this social rule was worse than breaking the law: The criminal who stole money might "pay his debt to society" and rehabilitate himself by spending time in prison or making restitution to his victim, but the man who pushed his way into a lifeboat while women remained on board was an irredeemable coward. (Many men did end up in Titanic lifeboats without shame because they did not obtain their seats by displacing women; they were allowed into boats ready to be launched but under-filled when no more women could be coaxed into them.) To cast a man (especially a "gentleman," which is why this story so often specifies a First Class passenger) as a coward who would clothe himself in women's garb to save himself ahead of others was to stigmatize him for life, a fate that befell several of the Titanic's survivors, all falsely accused.
The man most victimized by this rumor was William T. Sloper of New Britain, Connecticut, who was publicly identified in the New York Journal as "the man who got off in woman's clothing." Sloper actually left the Titanic in lifeboat No. 7, the first boat lowered into water; at the time No. 7 was launched, many passengers did not comprehend the gravity of the situation and were unwilling to trade the warmth and (apparent) safety of their berths for a seat in an open boat on the freezing Atlantic in the middle of the night. Sloper was invited into the boat by Dorothy Gibson (a motion picture actress) and her mother, who had been his bridge companions earlier that evening, and since it was filled to only about a third of its 65-passenger capacity, the officer in charge of its loading allowed him in. (Boat No. 7 was eventually launched with fewer than 30 occupants, so no man willing to take a seat would have had to disguise himself as a woman to sneak on board.)
When the rescue ship Carpathia docked in New York four days later, Sloper was whisked away by his father and brother and taken to the Waldorf-Astoria. Reporters soon gathered outside his hotel room door to press him for a story, but Sloper had already promised an exclusive to the editor of his hometown newspaper. A reporter for New York Journal felt Sloper was acting a bit too disrespectful of members of the fourth estate and exacted revenge by writing a story that named Sloper as the "the man who got off in woman's clothing." Sloper was talked out of suing the Journal for libel by his father, and he spent many years living down the reputation he had unfairly gained.
Two other men, William Carter and Dickinson Bishop, were also spitefully tagged as having disguised themselves as women to escape from the Titanic; in both cases the rumors were lent additional credence when the men's wives divorced them and cited their alleged less-than-honorable behavior the night the Titanic went down as one of the reasons. In the case of Dickinson Bishop, there seems to be little support for the accusation. Bishop reportedly "fell into the boat" his wife had entered, and "accidentally" falling into lifeboats was a scheme more than few men employed to try to secure seats. However, Bishop and his wife left the Titanic in Boat No. 7 (the same as William Sloper), a boat that was launched early and underfilled; as noted above, no man need have dressed as a woman to gain a spot in that lifeboat. William Carter's case may have had at least a little something to it, though. In 1915 Mrs. Carter's testimony from her divorce case (based on grounds of "cruel and barbarous treatment and indignities to the person") was leaked to the press, and a portion of that testimony read as follows:
When the Titanic struck, my husband came to our stateroom and said, "Get up and dress yourself and the children." I never saw him again until I arrived at the Carpathia at 8 o'clock the next morning, when I saw him leaning on the rail. All he said was that he had had a jolly good breakfast, and that he never thought I would make it.
Whatever the truth of Mr. Carter's behavior, rumors about his dressing as a woman may have been fueled by an incident involving his ten-year-old son, Billy Jr. It began when millionaire John Jacob Astor was denied permission to accompany his pregnant young wife on Boat No. 4 and then saw a thirteen-year-old boy almost turned away as well:
[Lord, 1955]
John Jacob Astor helped Mrs. Astor across the frame, then asked if he could join her, She was, as he put it, "in delicate condition."
"No, sir," [Second Officer] Lightoller replied. "No men are allowed in these boats until the women are loaded first."
When Mrs. Ryerson led her son Jack to the window, Lightoller called out, "That boy can't go!"
Mr. Ryerson indignantly stepped forward: "Of course that boy goes with his mother he is only thirteen." So they let him pass, Lightholler grumbling, "No more boys."
According to legend, Astor then placed a woman's hat on little Billy's head, claiming over objections, "Now he's a girl and he can go," an act that (real or not) might later have become associated with Billy's father instead.
Only one verified case of an adult male passenger's using an article of women's clothing to sneak onto a lifeboat turned up in the lengthy inquiries about the Titanic disaster conducted by both American and British authorities. During the American inquiry, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe testified about an incident that took place when he attempted to transfer passengers from his lifeboat (No. 14) to other boats so that he could row back towards the spot where the Titanic had gone down and pick up survivors:
I waited until the yells and shrieks had subsided for the people to thin out, and then I deemed it safe for me to go amongst the wreckage; so I transferred all my passengers, somewhere about fifty-three, from my boat and equally distributed them among my other four boats. Then I asked for volunteers to go with me to the wreck, and it was at this time that I found the Italian. He came aft and had a shawl over his head, and I suppose he had skirts. Anyhow, I pulled the shawl off his face and saw he was a man.
The "Italian" (a generic term used by Lowe to represent a foreigner of despicable behavior) was actually Irish, a scared eighteen-year-old Third Class passenger named Daniel Buckley who admitted he had indeed thrown a shawl over his head and sneaked onto Boat No. 14 just after Fifth Officer Lowe had brandished his revolver and threatened another young man who had tried to hide among the women. But contrary to Lowe's testimony, Buckley had only thrown a shawl over his head, not donned "skirts."
The Titanic's lifeboats held a boy in a woman's hat and a young man with a woman's shawl over his head, but the man who allegedly escaped in full female regalia remains elusive.
Sightings: A memorable episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery ("Lone Survivor," original air date 13 January 1971) deals with the fate of a Titanic passenger who seemingly escaped his destiny by dressing as a woman.
35 For Days Until The Urban Myth Dressed Up As A Big Time College Head Coach Get's Debunked.
Origins: Many of the legendary tales associated with the Titanic's sinking deal with human acts of courage, heroism, and sacrifice in the face of certain death, tales all the more remarkable because most of them were true. One legend stands in stark counterpoint to those chronicles of bravery: the claim that an adult male passenger secured a place in a lifeboat by disguising himself as a woman.
If we imagined a disaster similar to the Titanic occurring today, we would likely picture it as an "every man for himself" free-for-all in which faster and stronger passengers shouldered aside the slow, weak, and elderly to secure places for themselves in the available lifeboats. No such melee took place on the decks of the Titanic, however, even though "women and children first" was not a regulation specified by maritime law. In 1912, it was a rule men followed by standing aside for women and children primarily because doing so was a social imperative; it was, as a Titanic officer would later testify, "a law of human nature." In a very real sense, violating this social rule was worse than breaking the law: The criminal who stole money might "pay his debt to society" and rehabilitate himself by spending time in prison or making restitution to his victim, but the man who pushed his way into a lifeboat while women remained on board was an irredeemable coward. (Many men did end up in Titanic lifeboats without shame because they did not obtain their seats by displacing women; they were allowed into boats ready to be launched but under-filled when no more women could be coaxed into them.) To cast a man (especially a "gentleman," which is why this story so often specifies a First Class passenger) as a coward who would clothe himself in women's garb to save himself ahead of others was to stigmatize him for life, a fate that befell several of the Titanic's survivors, all falsely accused.
The man most victimized by this rumor was William T. Sloper of New Britain, Connecticut, who was publicly identified in the New York Journal as "the man who got off in woman's clothing." Sloper actually left the Titanic in lifeboat No. 7, the first boat lowered into water; at the time No. 7 was launched, many passengers did not comprehend the gravity of the situation and were unwilling to trade the warmth and (apparent) safety of their berths for a seat in an open boat on the freezing Atlantic in the middle of the night. Sloper was invited into the boat by Dorothy Gibson (a motion picture actress) and her mother, who had been his bridge companions earlier that evening, and since it was filled to only about a third of its 65-passenger capacity, the officer in charge of its loading allowed him in. (Boat No. 7 was eventually launched with fewer than 30 occupants, so no man willing to take a seat would have had to disguise himself as a woman to sneak on board.)
When the rescue ship Carpathia docked in New York four days later, Sloper was whisked away by his father and brother and taken to the Waldorf-Astoria. Reporters soon gathered outside his hotel room door to press him for a story, but Sloper had already promised an exclusive to the editor of his hometown newspaper. A reporter for New York Journal felt Sloper was acting a bit too disrespectful of members of the fourth estate and exacted revenge by writing a story that named Sloper as the "the man who got off in woman's clothing." Sloper was talked out of suing the Journal for libel by his father, and he spent many years living down the reputation he had unfairly gained.
Two other men, William Carter and Dickinson Bishop, were also spitefully tagged as having disguised themselves as women to escape from the Titanic; in both cases the rumors were lent additional credence when the men's wives divorced them and cited their alleged less-than-honorable behavior the night the Titanic went down as one of the reasons. In the case of Dickinson Bishop, there seems to be little support for the accusation. Bishop reportedly "fell into the boat" his wife had entered, and "accidentally" falling into lifeboats was a scheme more than few men employed to try to secure seats. However, Bishop and his wife left the Titanic in Boat No. 7 (the same as William Sloper), a boat that was launched early and underfilled; as noted above, no man need have dressed as a woman to gain a spot in that lifeboat. William Carter's case may have had at least a little something to it, though. In 1915 Mrs. Carter's testimony from her divorce case (based on grounds of "cruel and barbarous treatment and indignities to the person") was leaked to the press, and a portion of that testimony read as follows:
When the Titanic struck, my husband came to our stateroom and said, "Get up and dress yourself and the children." I never saw him again until I arrived at the Carpathia at 8 o'clock the next morning, when I saw him leaning on the rail. All he said was that he had had a jolly good breakfast, and that he never thought I would make it.
Whatever the truth of Mr. Carter's behavior, rumors about his dressing as a woman may have been fueled by an incident involving his ten-year-old son, Billy Jr. It began when millionaire John Jacob Astor was denied permission to accompany his pregnant young wife on Boat No. 4 and then saw a thirteen-year-old boy almost turned away as well:
[Lord, 1955]
John Jacob Astor helped Mrs. Astor across the frame, then asked if he could join her, She was, as he put it, "in delicate condition."
"No, sir," [Second Officer] Lightoller replied. "No men are allowed in these boats until the women are loaded first."
When Mrs. Ryerson led her son Jack to the window, Lightoller called out, "That boy can't go!"
Mr. Ryerson indignantly stepped forward: "Of course that boy goes with his mother he is only thirteen." So they let him pass, Lightholler grumbling, "No more boys."
According to legend, Astor then placed a woman's hat on little Billy's head, claiming over objections, "Now he's a girl and he can go," an act that (real or not) might later have become associated with Billy's father instead.
Only one verified case of an adult male passenger's using an article of women's clothing to sneak onto a lifeboat turned up in the lengthy inquiries about the Titanic disaster conducted by both American and British authorities. During the American inquiry, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe testified about an incident that took place when he attempted to transfer passengers from his lifeboat (No. 14) to other boats so that he could row back towards the spot where the Titanic had gone down and pick up survivors:
I waited until the yells and shrieks had subsided for the people to thin out, and then I deemed it safe for me to go amongst the wreckage; so I transferred all my passengers, somewhere about fifty-three, from my boat and equally distributed them among my other four boats. Then I asked for volunteers to go with me to the wreck, and it was at this time that I found the Italian. He came aft and had a shawl over his head, and I suppose he had skirts. Anyhow, I pulled the shawl off his face and saw he was a man.
The "Italian" (a generic term used by Lowe to represent a foreigner of despicable behavior) was actually Irish, a scared eighteen-year-old Third Class passenger named Daniel Buckley who admitted he had indeed thrown a shawl over his head and sneaked onto Boat No. 14 just after Fifth Officer Lowe had brandished his revolver and threatened another young man who had tried to hide among the women. But contrary to Lowe's testimony, Buckley had only thrown a shawl over his head, not donned "skirts."
The Titanic's lifeboats held a boy in a woman's hat and a young man with a woman's shawl over his head, but the man who allegedly escaped in full female regalia remains elusive.
Sightings: A memorable episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery ("Lone Survivor," original air date 13 January 1971) deals with the fate of a Titanic passenger who seemingly escaped his destiny by dressing as a woman.
35 For Days Until The Urban Myth Dressed Up As A Big Time College Head Coach Get's Debunked.
NCGatorBait
VN GURU
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NCGatorBait
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milohimself
RIP CITY
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BeltwayVol
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Claim: A groom was suffocated by a stripper's massive breasts.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
Groom Killed By Stripper's Boobs
Wednesday January 16, 2002
GENEVA - A fun-filled bachelor party at a strip club turned deadly when a 32-year-old groom-to-be who was enjoying the attentions of a well-endowed stripper suffocated while his face was buried in her breasts.
The mind-boggling drama unfolded, say cops, while Daniel Greene was attending his bachelor party at the Pretty Kitty strip club.
The club had been rented out for the private affair.
According to investigators, Greene was enjoying a lap dance when disaster struck: One of the strippers, Kandy Kane, got too into her performance and suffocated the man between her 72-DD breasts.
Witnesses said that Greene had had his fair share of beer, but didn't seem out-of-control.
When the song "I'm Too Sexy" began to play, Greene became excited and began to dance on the tabletop, hooting and hollering, pals said, "like an idiot."
Miss Kane, apparently pleased to see someone enjoying her choice in music, moved in closer.
When Greene took his seat, she began giving him a lap dance, shaking her breasts in his face.
The more she shook, the deeper Greene got lost in her cleavage.
"Daniel was having so much fun," partygoer John Gillman said. "We all thought he loved being in that gal's chest.
"Who could have known that when he was waving his hands around, he was signaling for help?"
Cheering onlookers eventually realized that Greene was no longer moving, and pulled him from between Miss Kane's breasts.
Now Greene's family is suing Miss Kane and the Pretty Kitty for wrongful death.
Greene's father, George, won't specify the amount they are suing for, but claims that it isn't about the money.
"Those breasts were lethal weapons," he told reporters.
"The Pretty Kitty should not have allowed Miss Kane to have her bust enhanced to the size that she did.
"We hope that by filing this lawsuit, we can send a message to other strippers: keep your bra size within a reasonable range."
Kandy Kane made a statement through her attorneys: "I thought he liked it in there. "
The Pretty Kitty declined comment.
Origins: This story was first reported by the Weekly World News in a 16 January 2002 article entitled "Groom Killed By Stripper's Boobs at His Bachelor Party!" A reprint of this article appeared on Yahoo!'s Entertainment News site that same day under the title "Groom Killed By Stripper's Boobs."
That it appeared on Yahoo!'s site shouldn't fool anyone into believing this tale. The Weekly World News is a sensationalistic tabloid known for making up its stories when there's a dearth of actual wackiness to report upon. Yahoo! has for some unfathomable reason chosen to present tabloid findings on its entertainment page, perhaps in the wide-eyed but unspeakably naive belief that discerning readers will perceive that they are entertainment and not news offerings and will thus derive amusement from them rather than take them as gospel. (A tour of our inbox would have quickly disabused Yahoo! of this notion.)
In the simplest of all terms, there is no 72-DD Kandy Kane, no Pretty Kitty club, and no boob-suffocated Daniel Greene. We checked other news sources, and nothing in this tale of freakish demise stood up to scrutiny. As fake as it is, we still love this article, if only for its "Who could have known that when he was waving his hands around, he was signaling for help?" Such mental images were meant to live forever.
(Whoever penned this piece obviously isn't too familiar with how bra sizes are determined DD is a large cup size, but the DD designation simply indicates that the difference between a measurement taken just below a woman's bust and one taken around the fullest part of her bust is 5 inches. Therefore, a woman with a 72-DD bra size would be someone with moderately large boobs and a gargantuan ribcage.)
A former porn star (now a blues singer) who goes by the name of Candye Kane boasts a 54G bust, but she has yet to kill anyone with it.
In 1998, Paul Shimkonis, a 38-year-old Florida man, sued the Diamond Dolls club, claiming his being buffeted with stripper Tawny Peaks' 60-inch HHH bosom had caused him to suffer whiplash. The parties agreed to litigate their dispute in The People's Court (an American television show), where Shimkonis lost his case.
34 Days Until Florida's Boob of an Urban Myth Gets Smothered By Tennessee, and exposed.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
Groom Killed By Stripper's Boobs
Wednesday January 16, 2002
GENEVA - A fun-filled bachelor party at a strip club turned deadly when a 32-year-old groom-to-be who was enjoying the attentions of a well-endowed stripper suffocated while his face was buried in her breasts.
The mind-boggling drama unfolded, say cops, while Daniel Greene was attending his bachelor party at the Pretty Kitty strip club.
The club had been rented out for the private affair.
According to investigators, Greene was enjoying a lap dance when disaster struck: One of the strippers, Kandy Kane, got too into her performance and suffocated the man between her 72-DD breasts.
Witnesses said that Greene had had his fair share of beer, but didn't seem out-of-control.
When the song "I'm Too Sexy" began to play, Greene became excited and began to dance on the tabletop, hooting and hollering, pals said, "like an idiot."
Miss Kane, apparently pleased to see someone enjoying her choice in music, moved in closer.
When Greene took his seat, she began giving him a lap dance, shaking her breasts in his face.
The more she shook, the deeper Greene got lost in her cleavage.
"Daniel was having so much fun," partygoer John Gillman said. "We all thought he loved being in that gal's chest.
"Who could have known that when he was waving his hands around, he was signaling for help?"
Cheering onlookers eventually realized that Greene was no longer moving, and pulled him from between Miss Kane's breasts.
Now Greene's family is suing Miss Kane and the Pretty Kitty for wrongful death.
Greene's father, George, won't specify the amount they are suing for, but claims that it isn't about the money.
"Those breasts were lethal weapons," he told reporters.
"The Pretty Kitty should not have allowed Miss Kane to have her bust enhanced to the size that she did.
"We hope that by filing this lawsuit, we can send a message to other strippers: keep your bra size within a reasonable range."
Kandy Kane made a statement through her attorneys: "I thought he liked it in there. "
The Pretty Kitty declined comment.
Origins: This story was first reported by the Weekly World News in a 16 January 2002 article entitled "Groom Killed By Stripper's Boobs at His Bachelor Party!" A reprint of this article appeared on Yahoo!'s Entertainment News site that same day under the title "Groom Killed By Stripper's Boobs."
That it appeared on Yahoo!'s site shouldn't fool anyone into believing this tale. The Weekly World News is a sensationalistic tabloid known for making up its stories when there's a dearth of actual wackiness to report upon. Yahoo! has for some unfathomable reason chosen to present tabloid findings on its entertainment page, perhaps in the wide-eyed but unspeakably naive belief that discerning readers will perceive that they are entertainment and not news offerings and will thus derive amusement from them rather than take them as gospel. (A tour of our inbox would have quickly disabused Yahoo! of this notion.)
In the simplest of all terms, there is no 72-DD Kandy Kane, no Pretty Kitty club, and no boob-suffocated Daniel Greene. We checked other news sources, and nothing in this tale of freakish demise stood up to scrutiny. As fake as it is, we still love this article, if only for its "Who could have known that when he was waving his hands around, he was signaling for help?" Such mental images were meant to live forever.
(Whoever penned this piece obviously isn't too familiar with how bra sizes are determined DD is a large cup size, but the DD designation simply indicates that the difference between a measurement taken just below a woman's bust and one taken around the fullest part of her bust is 5 inches. Therefore, a woman with a 72-DD bra size would be someone with moderately large boobs and a gargantuan ribcage.)
A former porn star (now a blues singer) who goes by the name of Candye Kane boasts a 54G bust, but she has yet to kill anyone with it.
In 1998, Paul Shimkonis, a 38-year-old Florida man, sued the Diamond Dolls club, claiming his being buffeted with stripper Tawny Peaks' 60-inch HHH bosom had caused him to suffer whiplash. The parties agreed to litigate their dispute in The People's Court (an American television show), where Shimkonis lost his case.
34 Days Until Florida's Boob of an Urban Myth Gets Smothered By Tennessee, and exposed.
BeltwayVol
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- Apr 29, 2005
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Claim: Marking 'Jedi' as your religion on census forms will force your government to grant it official status.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]
As some of you may know there is a census coming around on August the 7th. For those who dont know, a census is where the government collates general information about its residents (number of people living in your house, religion, etc) If there are enough people in Australia, who put down a religion that isnt mentioned on the census form it becomes a fully recognised and legal religion. It usually takes about 10,000 people to nominate the same religion.
It is for this reason that it has been suggested that anyone who does not have a dominant religion to put "Jedi" as their religion.
Send this on to all your friends and tell them to put down "Jedi" on their census form.
And remember . . . If you are a member of the Jedi religion then you are by default a 'Jedi Knight'.
So If this has been your dream since you were 4 years old . . . Do it cos you love Star Wars, If not . . . then just do it to annoy people.
"May the Force be with you!"
Origins: The 7 August 2001 Australia and 29 April 2001 United Kingdom censuses have afforded pranksters an opportunity to wreak a little mayhem by messing with the official results. E-mailed incitements to list "Jedi" as one's personal religion began appearing in inboxes in March 2001 with the incentive to do so offered as the living out of one's childhood dream of fighting for interstellar justice, light saber in hand.
Truth is, marking down "Jedi" isn't going to change a thing, least of all what officially gets considered a religion. It is not up to the Office of National Statistics to decide such a question. They may be an arm of the government, but it doesn't fall within their province to confer official status (whatever that might be) on a religion any more than it would be up to the Boy Scouts to designate New York City a national wildlife preserve.
The situation for hopeful Jedis in Australia is even more forbidding than it is in the U.K. Not only won't marking "Jedi" in the appropriate box gain official recognition for a non-existent religion, but the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics census program, John Struik, has stated that anyone who falsely provides information on a census faces a $1,000 fine.
Mr. Struik said that a putative religion must demonstrate a formal organizational structure and a belief system to be recognized. "If we get 10,000 Jedis, they will go down as no official religion," he said. They might lose a thousand bucks each as well.
New Zealand weathered a similar Jedi incitement during its 6 March 2001 census. In an e-mail reportedly sent to thousands, Star Wars buffs encouraged New Zealanders to declare their religion as "Jedi", claiming if 8,000 did so it would be officially recognized, along with the others listed: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish. Once again, wishful thinking met up with cold reality: According to New Zealand census office representative Elizabeth Clements, there is no magic number that will put any religion on the list for official recognition.
So why are people so hot to participate in such a scheme? On the plus side, there's the fleeting joy of tweaking bureaucracy's nose and the possibility of momentarily revisiting childhood fantasies about saving the galaxy from the evil Darth Vader. The other side of the ledger, however, is considerable:
The premise of the call to arms is flawed; there is no official status to be gained. That part was purely the invention of the prankster who wrote the original letter.
Even if there were official status to be gained, none of these governments would be swayed by a number of yahoos writing "Jedi" into a blank space on their census forms. They'd want to see tangible proof of an organized and thriving religion before they handed out the brass ring.
At least in Australia, those who decide to take part in the leg pull are risking a $1,000 fine.
Demographic information gleaned from censuses is used to allocate funds in such a way that the identified needs of taxpayers are met, thus providing false information does everybody a disservice in that the funds don't go to the right places.
Marking "Jedi" on a form doesn't make anyone a Jedi any more than writing "I can fly" will turn that person into a bird. Religious belief is a matter of what's in your heart, not what you jestingly inscribe on an official-looking piece of paper.
It's natural that the very human resentment against having to provide a wealth of personal information to the deeply mistrusted government would spark a desire to screw with the process. Our chafing at having to be part of this enumeration finds expression in this "Let's all be Jedis!" nonsense; it's a way of at least feeling we're asserting a measure of control over a situation that otherwise makes us feel powerless. The census, as well, is seen as dehumanizing in that it appears to reduce each person's hard-won reality into a series of impersonal numbers and checkmarks. Messing with it thus becomes a way of taking back a measure of one's humanity.
But at what price? Accurate census information is vital if social programs are to be properly administered or even to determine where a particular service should be located. Giving whimiscal responses as a form of protest over feeling like a number might provide a momentary sensation of empowerment, but the long-term cost of such unthinking behavior is almost beyond reckoning, if enough people choose to engage in this form of acting out.
Luke Skywalker would not approve.
33 Days Until Florida's Urban Myth Is Debunked, It Is. Yeah.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]
As some of you may know there is a census coming around on August the 7th. For those who dont know, a census is where the government collates general information about its residents (number of people living in your house, religion, etc) If there are enough people in Australia, who put down a religion that isnt mentioned on the census form it becomes a fully recognised and legal religion. It usually takes about 10,000 people to nominate the same religion.
It is for this reason that it has been suggested that anyone who does not have a dominant religion to put "Jedi" as their religion.
Send this on to all your friends and tell them to put down "Jedi" on their census form.
And remember . . . If you are a member of the Jedi religion then you are by default a 'Jedi Knight'.
So If this has been your dream since you were 4 years old . . . Do it cos you love Star Wars, If not . . . then just do it to annoy people.
"May the Force be with you!"
Origins: The 7 August 2001 Australia and 29 April 2001 United Kingdom censuses have afforded pranksters an opportunity to wreak a little mayhem by messing with the official results. E-mailed incitements to list "Jedi" as one's personal religion began appearing in inboxes in March 2001 with the incentive to do so offered as the living out of one's childhood dream of fighting for interstellar justice, light saber in hand.
Truth is, marking down "Jedi" isn't going to change a thing, least of all what officially gets considered a religion. It is not up to the Office of National Statistics to decide such a question. They may be an arm of the government, but it doesn't fall within their province to confer official status (whatever that might be) on a religion any more than it would be up to the Boy Scouts to designate New York City a national wildlife preserve.
The situation for hopeful Jedis in Australia is even more forbidding than it is in the U.K. Not only won't marking "Jedi" in the appropriate box gain official recognition for a non-existent religion, but the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics census program, John Struik, has stated that anyone who falsely provides information on a census faces a $1,000 fine.
Mr. Struik said that a putative religion must demonstrate a formal organizational structure and a belief system to be recognized. "If we get 10,000 Jedis, they will go down as no official religion," he said. They might lose a thousand bucks each as well.
New Zealand weathered a similar Jedi incitement during its 6 March 2001 census. In an e-mail reportedly sent to thousands, Star Wars buffs encouraged New Zealanders to declare their religion as "Jedi", claiming if 8,000 did so it would be officially recognized, along with the others listed: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish. Once again, wishful thinking met up with cold reality: According to New Zealand census office representative Elizabeth Clements, there is no magic number that will put any religion on the list for official recognition.
So why are people so hot to participate in such a scheme? On the plus side, there's the fleeting joy of tweaking bureaucracy's nose and the possibility of momentarily revisiting childhood fantasies about saving the galaxy from the evil Darth Vader. The other side of the ledger, however, is considerable:
The premise of the call to arms is flawed; there is no official status to be gained. That part was purely the invention of the prankster who wrote the original letter.
Even if there were official status to be gained, none of these governments would be swayed by a number of yahoos writing "Jedi" into a blank space on their census forms. They'd want to see tangible proof of an organized and thriving religion before they handed out the brass ring.
At least in Australia, those who decide to take part in the leg pull are risking a $1,000 fine.
Demographic information gleaned from censuses is used to allocate funds in such a way that the identified needs of taxpayers are met, thus providing false information does everybody a disservice in that the funds don't go to the right places.
Marking "Jedi" on a form doesn't make anyone a Jedi any more than writing "I can fly" will turn that person into a bird. Religious belief is a matter of what's in your heart, not what you jestingly inscribe on an official-looking piece of paper.
It's natural that the very human resentment against having to provide a wealth of personal information to the deeply mistrusted government would spark a desire to screw with the process. Our chafing at having to be part of this enumeration finds expression in this "Let's all be Jedis!" nonsense; it's a way of at least feeling we're asserting a measure of control over a situation that otherwise makes us feel powerless. The census, as well, is seen as dehumanizing in that it appears to reduce each person's hard-won reality into a series of impersonal numbers and checkmarks. Messing with it thus becomes a way of taking back a measure of one's humanity.
But at what price? Accurate census information is vital if social programs are to be properly administered or even to determine where a particular service should be located. Giving whimiscal responses as a form of protest over feeling like a number might provide a momentary sensation of empowerment, but the long-term cost of such unthinking behavior is almost beyond reckoning, if enough people choose to engage in this form of acting out.
Luke Skywalker would not approve.
33 Days Until Florida's Urban Myth Is Debunked, It Is. Yeah.
Yourbane and his MASTERGATERS, inspite of HIS new disciplinary controls, will surely win that first game. Afterall, they are playing against a team with the talent level that Yourbane is accustomed to facing.
THINGS WILL CHANGE SOON FOR THE YOURBANE MYTH!!! REALITY CHECK WILL ROLL INTO THE SWAMP AND THE SWAMP WILL RETURN TO ITS FORMER GLORY AS A WET SPOT IN GAINESVILLE. :gun: :gun:
BeltwayVol
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2005
- Messages
- 1,441
- Likes
- 4
Claim: E-mail offers an Oakland high school student's Ebonics competition-winning translations of rap lyrics.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 1997]
This paper was turned in by an Oakland high school student who received the highest honors at the school district's Ebonics translation competition.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Assignment: Please translate the following Rap song lyrics from Ebonics to standard English.
Artist: Notorious B.I.G.
Album: Ready to Die
Song: One more chance (remix)
Lyrics:
First things first, I poppa, freaks all the honeys
Dummies playboy bunnies, those wantin' money
Those the ones I like 'cause they don't get nathan'
But penetration, unless it smells like sanitation
Garbage, I turn like doorknobs
Heart throb, never, black and ugly as ever
However, I stay coochied down to the socks
Rings and watch filled with rocks
TRANSLATION:
As a general rule, I perform deviant sexual acts with women of all kinds, including but not limited to those with limited intellect, nude magazine models, and prostitutes. I particularly enjoy sexual encounters with the latter group as they are generally disappointed in the fact that they only receive penile intercourse and nothing more, unless of course, they clean themselves on a consistent basis. Although I am extremely unattractive, I am able to engage in these types of sexual acts with some regularity. Perhaps my sexuality is somehow related to my fancy and expensive jewelry.
Lyrics:
And my jam knock in the Mitsubishi
Girls pee pee when they see me,
Nava-hoes creep me in they tee pee
As I lay down laws like I lay carpet
Stop it if you think your gonna make a profit
TRANSLATION:
I enjoy playing my music loudly on my car stereo. Apparently, women enjoy this also because they become sexually aroused when they see me driving. Oddly enough, when I visit the Native American reservations, some of the more sexually promiscuous Indian women attempt to seduce me in their homes. Their intent is to divest me of my earnings. Such actions are unacceptable.
Lyrics:
Dont see my ones, don't see my guns get it
Now tell ya friends Poppa hit it then split it
In two as I flow with the Junior Mafia
I don't know what the hells stoppin' ya
I'm clockin' ya Versace shades watchin' ya
Once ya grin, I'm in game, begin
TRANSLATION:
Understand this fact: you can have neither my money, nor my weapons. I suggest that you inform your peers that we engaged in violent sexual acts. Currently, I am rapping with my associates, the Junior Mafia. I'm having some difficulty understanding why you refuse to approach me. I am attempting to make eye contact with you through my expensive glasses, and as soon as you respond with a smile, I will approach you.
Lyrics:
First I talk about how I dress and this
And diamond necklaces stretch Lexuses
The sex is just immaculate from the back I get
Deeper and deeper help ya reach the
Climax that your man can't make
Call and tell him you'll be home real late
Lets sing the break
TRANSLATION:
I prefer to open the conversation with light banter about my wardrobe and jewelry, then I like to discuss my collection of expensive cars. This is more than enough to convince you to have sexual intercourse with me. I am able to insert myself further into you when I do it from behind. Furthermore, you will be able to reach orgasm. I understand this to be a problem with your current sexual partner. He needn't be concerned about your whereabouts. Please phone him and inform him that you won't be home for a while. By the way, please sing the chorus of the song for me also.
Lyrics:
She's sick of that song on how it's so long
Thought he worked his until I handled my biz
There I is major pain like Damon Wayans
Low down dirty even like his brother Keenan
Schemin' don't bring your girl 'round me
True player for real, ask Puff Daddy
TRANSLATION:
Your current love interest no longer wishes to hear your fabrications about the length of your member. After I had sexual intercourse with your woman, she became enlightened as to the proper way it is supposed to be performed; violently and immorally. It would be in your best interest to keep your woman away from me as my sexual prowess is very strong. If you are unconvinced, ask Puff Daddy.
Lyrics:
You ringin' bells with bags from Chanel
Baby Benz, traded in your Hyundai Excel
Fully equipped, CD changer with the cell
She beeped me, meet me at twelve
TRANSLATION:
Despite the fact that you attempted to win her at her doorstep with bags full of expensive clothes and a car (the lower end model Mercedes Benz which you financed by signing over your current vehicle) containing an expensive stereo and a cellular phone, your woman has contacted me through my pager indicating that we should rendezvous at midnight.
Lyrics:
Where you at? Flippin' jobs, playin' car notes?
While I'm swimmin' in ya women like the breast stroke
Right stroke, left stroke, what's the best stroke?
Death stroke tongue all down her throat
Nuthin' left to do but send her home to you
I'm through can ya sing the song for me, boo?
TRANSLATION:
You, on the other hand, jump from job to job, barely able to maintain payments on the Mercedes Benz you purchased for your woman. Meanwhile, I continue to engage in sexual intercourse and commit lewd osculatory acts with your women. My only remaining option is to request that she leave my home and return to you because I have reached orgasm and no longer have a need for her presence.
Origins: It's not uncommon for us to see urban legends transformed into jokes, or jokes rendered as urban legends. (The basic difference is that urban legends are told as true occurrences, while jokes are understood to be humorous but fictional anecdotes.) The latter process doesn't generally result in much improvement, however only rarely is the humor of a joke enhanced by prefacing it with a "This is a true story!" tag.
So, we're at a loss to know why someone saw fit to tack a spurious claim about an "Oakland high school Ebonics competition" onto this waggish piece offering translations of rap lyrics into a more standard form of English. The version quoted above has been bouncing around the Internet since 1997, and although we can't be sure that he was the originator of all the entries it sounds a lot like a routine comedian Bill Maher typically performs in his stand-up shows, during which he offers "translations of rap lyrics for white people." His performance of such a routine is captured in his most recent TV special, "'I'm Swiss' and Other Treasonable Statements," currently airing on HBO.
Yo, yo yo. Only one block of cheese and two days until Tennessee pops a cap in Florida's coach's wanna-be ass.
Translation- Only one month and two days (32), Until Tennessee Exposes Florida's Urban Myth.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 1997]
This paper was turned in by an Oakland high school student who received the highest honors at the school district's Ebonics translation competition.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Assignment: Please translate the following Rap song lyrics from Ebonics to standard English.
Artist: Notorious B.I.G.
Album: Ready to Die
Song: One more chance (remix)
Lyrics:
First things first, I poppa, freaks all the honeys
Dummies playboy bunnies, those wantin' money
Those the ones I like 'cause they don't get nathan'
But penetration, unless it smells like sanitation
Garbage, I turn like doorknobs
Heart throb, never, black and ugly as ever
However, I stay coochied down to the socks
Rings and watch filled with rocks
TRANSLATION:
As a general rule, I perform deviant sexual acts with women of all kinds, including but not limited to those with limited intellect, nude magazine models, and prostitutes. I particularly enjoy sexual encounters with the latter group as they are generally disappointed in the fact that they only receive penile intercourse and nothing more, unless of course, they clean themselves on a consistent basis. Although I am extremely unattractive, I am able to engage in these types of sexual acts with some regularity. Perhaps my sexuality is somehow related to my fancy and expensive jewelry.
Lyrics:
And my jam knock in the Mitsubishi
Girls pee pee when they see me,
Nava-hoes creep me in they tee pee
As I lay down laws like I lay carpet
Stop it if you think your gonna make a profit
TRANSLATION:
I enjoy playing my music loudly on my car stereo. Apparently, women enjoy this also because they become sexually aroused when they see me driving. Oddly enough, when I visit the Native American reservations, some of the more sexually promiscuous Indian women attempt to seduce me in their homes. Their intent is to divest me of my earnings. Such actions are unacceptable.
Lyrics:
Dont see my ones, don't see my guns get it
Now tell ya friends Poppa hit it then split it
In two as I flow with the Junior Mafia
I don't know what the hells stoppin' ya
I'm clockin' ya Versace shades watchin' ya
Once ya grin, I'm in game, begin
TRANSLATION:
Understand this fact: you can have neither my money, nor my weapons. I suggest that you inform your peers that we engaged in violent sexual acts. Currently, I am rapping with my associates, the Junior Mafia. I'm having some difficulty understanding why you refuse to approach me. I am attempting to make eye contact with you through my expensive glasses, and as soon as you respond with a smile, I will approach you.
Lyrics:
First I talk about how I dress and this
And diamond necklaces stretch Lexuses
The sex is just immaculate from the back I get
Deeper and deeper help ya reach the
Climax that your man can't make
Call and tell him you'll be home real late
Lets sing the break
TRANSLATION:
I prefer to open the conversation with light banter about my wardrobe and jewelry, then I like to discuss my collection of expensive cars. This is more than enough to convince you to have sexual intercourse with me. I am able to insert myself further into you when I do it from behind. Furthermore, you will be able to reach orgasm. I understand this to be a problem with your current sexual partner. He needn't be concerned about your whereabouts. Please phone him and inform him that you won't be home for a while. By the way, please sing the chorus of the song for me also.
Lyrics:
She's sick of that song on how it's so long
Thought he worked his until I handled my biz
There I is major pain like Damon Wayans
Low down dirty even like his brother Keenan
Schemin' don't bring your girl 'round me
True player for real, ask Puff Daddy
TRANSLATION:
Your current love interest no longer wishes to hear your fabrications about the length of your member. After I had sexual intercourse with your woman, she became enlightened as to the proper way it is supposed to be performed; violently and immorally. It would be in your best interest to keep your woman away from me as my sexual prowess is very strong. If you are unconvinced, ask Puff Daddy.
Lyrics:
You ringin' bells with bags from Chanel
Baby Benz, traded in your Hyundai Excel
Fully equipped, CD changer with the cell
She beeped me, meet me at twelve
TRANSLATION:
Despite the fact that you attempted to win her at her doorstep with bags full of expensive clothes and a car (the lower end model Mercedes Benz which you financed by signing over your current vehicle) containing an expensive stereo and a cellular phone, your woman has contacted me through my pager indicating that we should rendezvous at midnight.
Lyrics:
Where you at? Flippin' jobs, playin' car notes?
While I'm swimmin' in ya women like the breast stroke
Right stroke, left stroke, what's the best stroke?
Death stroke tongue all down her throat
Nuthin' left to do but send her home to you
I'm through can ya sing the song for me, boo?
TRANSLATION:
You, on the other hand, jump from job to job, barely able to maintain payments on the Mercedes Benz you purchased for your woman. Meanwhile, I continue to engage in sexual intercourse and commit lewd osculatory acts with your women. My only remaining option is to request that she leave my home and return to you because I have reached orgasm and no longer have a need for her presence.
Origins: It's not uncommon for us to see urban legends transformed into jokes, or jokes rendered as urban legends. (The basic difference is that urban legends are told as true occurrences, while jokes are understood to be humorous but fictional anecdotes.) The latter process doesn't generally result in much improvement, however only rarely is the humor of a joke enhanced by prefacing it with a "This is a true story!" tag.
So, we're at a loss to know why someone saw fit to tack a spurious claim about an "Oakland high school Ebonics competition" onto this waggish piece offering translations of rap lyrics into a more standard form of English. The version quoted above has been bouncing around the Internet since 1997, and although we can't be sure that he was the originator of all the entries it sounds a lot like a routine comedian Bill Maher typically performs in his stand-up shows, during which he offers "translations of rap lyrics for white people." His performance of such a routine is captured in his most recent TV special, "'I'm Swiss' and Other Treasonable Statements," currently airing on HBO.
Yo, yo yo. Only one block of cheese and two days until Tennessee pops a cap in Florida's coach's wanna-be ass.
Translation- Only one month and two days (32), Until Tennessee Exposes Florida's Urban Myth.
BeltwayVol
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2005
- Messages
- 1,441
- Likes
- 4
Claim: We use only ten percent of our brains.
Origins: Someone has taken most of your brain away and you probably didn't even know it. Well, not taken your brain away, exactly, but decided that you don't use it. It's the old myth heard time and again about how people use only ten percent of their brains. While for the people who repeat that myth, it's probably true, the rest of us happily use all of our brains.
The Myth and the Media
That tired Ten-Percent claim pops up all the time. In 1998, national magazine ads for U.S. Satellite Broadcasting showed a drawing of a brain. Under it was the caption, "You only use 11 percent of its potential." Well, they're a little closer than the ten-percent figure, but still off by about 89 percent. In July 1998, ABC television ran promotional spots for The Secret Lives of Men, one of their offerings for the fall season's lineup. The spot featured a full-screen blurb that read, "Men only use ten percent of their brains."
One reason this myth has endured is that it has been adopted by psychics and other paranormal pushers to explain psychic powers. On more than one occasion I've heard psychics tell their audiences, "We only use ten percent of our minds. If scientists don't know what we do with the other ninety percent, it must be used for psychic powers!" In Reason To Believe: A Practical Guide to Psychic Phenomena, author Michael Clark mentions a man named Craig Karges. Karges charges a lot of money for his "Intuitive Edge" program, designed to develop natural psychic abilities. Clark quotes Karges as saying: "We normally use only 10 to 20 percent of our minds. Think how different your life would be if you could utilize that other 80 to 90 percent known as the subconscious mind."
This was also the reason that Caroline Myss gave for her alleged intuitive powers on a segment of Eye to Eye with Bryant Gumbel, which aired in July of 1998. Myss, who has written books on unleashing "intuitive powers," said that everyone has intuitive gifts, and lamented that we use so little of the mind's potential. To make matters worse, just the week before, on the very same program, correct information was presented about the myth. In a bumper spot between the program and commercials, a quick quiz flashed onscreen: What percentage of the brain is used? The multiple-choice answers ranged from 10 percent to 100 percent. The correct answer appeared, which I was glad to see. But if the producers knew that what one of their interviewees said is clearly and demonstrably inaccurate, why did they let it air? Does the right brain not know what the left brain is doing? Perhaps the Myss interview was a repeat, in which case the producers presumably checked her facts after it aired and felt some responsibility to correct the error in the following week's broadcast. Or possibly the broadcasts aired in sequence and the producers simply did not care and broadcast Myss and her misinformation anyway.
Even Uri Geller, who has made a career out of trying to convince people he can bend metal with his mind, trots out this little gem. This claim appears in his book Uri Geller's Mind-Power Book in the introduction: "Our minds are capable of remarkable, incredible feats, yet we don't use them to their full capacity. In fact, most of us only use about 10 per cent of our brains, if that. The other 90 per cent is full of untapped potential and undiscovered abilities, which means our minds are only operating in a very limited way instead of at full stretch. I believe that we once had full power over our minds. We had to, in order to survive, but as our world has become more sophisticated and complex we have forgotten many of the abilities we once had" (italicized phrases emphasized in original).
Evidence Against the Ten-Percent Myth
The argument that psychic powers come from the unused majority of the brain is based on the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. In this fallacy, lack of proof for a position (or simply lack of information) is used to try to support a particular claim. Even if it were true that the vast majority of the human mind is unused (which it clearly is not), that fact in no way implies that any extra capacity could somehow give people paranormal powers. This fallacy pops up all the time in paranormal claims, and is especially prevalent among UFO proponents. For example: Two people see a strange light in the sky. The first, a UFO believer, says, "See there! Can you explain that?" The skeptic replies that no, he can't. The UFO believer is gleeful. "Ha! You don't know what it is, so it must be aliens!" he says, arguing from ignorance.
What follows are two of the reasons that the Ten-Percent story is suspect. (For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein's chapter in the 1999 book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind.)
1) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
Variants of the Ten-Percent Myth
The myth is not simply a static, misunderstood factoid. It has several forms, and this adaptability gives it a shelf life longer than lacquered Spam. In the basic form, the myth claims that years ago a scientist discovered that we indeed did use only ten percent of our brains. Another variant is that only ten percent of the brain had been mapped, and this in turn became misunderstood as ten percent used. A third variant was described earlier by Craig Karges. This view is that the brain is somehow divided neatly into two parts: the conscious mind which is used ten to twenty percent of the time (presumably at capacity); and the subconscious mind, where the remaining eighty to ninety percent of the brain is unused. This description betrays a profound misunderstanding of brain function research.
Part of the reason for the long life of the myth is that if one variant can be proven incorrect, the person who held the belief can simply shift the reason for his belief to another basis, while the belief itself stays intact. So, for example, if a person is shown that PET scans depict activity throughout the entire brain, he can still claim that, well, the ninety percent figure really referred to the subconscious mind, and therefore the Ten-Percent figure is still basically correct.
Regardless of the exact version heard, the myth is spread and repeated, by both the well-meaning and the deliberately deceptive. The belief that remains, then, is what Robert J. Samuelson termed a "psycho-fact, [a] belief that, though not supported by hard evidence, is taken as real because its constant repetition changes the way we experience life." People who don't know any better will repeat it over and over, until, like the admonition against swimming right after you eat, the claim is widely believed. ("Triumph of the Psycho-Fact," Newsweek, 9 May 1994.)
The origins of the myth are not at all clear. Beyerstein, of the Brain Behaviour Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, has traced it back to at least the early part of the century. A 1998 column in New Scientist magazine also suggested various roots, including Albert Einstein and Dale Carnegie ("Brain Drain"). It likely has a number of sources, principally misunderstood or misinterpreted legitimate scientific findings as well as self-help gurus.
The most powerful lure of the myth is probably the idea that we might develop psychic abilities, or at least gain a leg up on the competition by improving our memory or concentration. All this is available for the asking, the ads say, if we just tapped into our most incredible of organs, the brain. It is past time to put this myth to rest, although if it has survived at least a century so far, it will surely live on into the new millennium. Perhaps the best way to combat this chestnut is to reply to the speaker, when the myth is mentioned, "Oh? What part don't you use?"
Only 31 Days (Or 10% of 310) Days Until Tennessee Exposes Florida's Urban Myth.
Origins: Someone has taken most of your brain away and you probably didn't even know it. Well, not taken your brain away, exactly, but decided that you don't use it. It's the old myth heard time and again about how people use only ten percent of their brains. While for the people who repeat that myth, it's probably true, the rest of us happily use all of our brains.
The Myth and the Media
That tired Ten-Percent claim pops up all the time. In 1998, national magazine ads for U.S. Satellite Broadcasting showed a drawing of a brain. Under it was the caption, "You only use 11 percent of its potential." Well, they're a little closer than the ten-percent figure, but still off by about 89 percent. In July 1998, ABC television ran promotional spots for The Secret Lives of Men, one of their offerings for the fall season's lineup. The spot featured a full-screen blurb that read, "Men only use ten percent of their brains."
One reason this myth has endured is that it has been adopted by psychics and other paranormal pushers to explain psychic powers. On more than one occasion I've heard psychics tell their audiences, "We only use ten percent of our minds. If scientists don't know what we do with the other ninety percent, it must be used for psychic powers!" In Reason To Believe: A Practical Guide to Psychic Phenomena, author Michael Clark mentions a man named Craig Karges. Karges charges a lot of money for his "Intuitive Edge" program, designed to develop natural psychic abilities. Clark quotes Karges as saying: "We normally use only 10 to 20 percent of our minds. Think how different your life would be if you could utilize that other 80 to 90 percent known as the subconscious mind."
This was also the reason that Caroline Myss gave for her alleged intuitive powers on a segment of Eye to Eye with Bryant Gumbel, which aired in July of 1998. Myss, who has written books on unleashing "intuitive powers," said that everyone has intuitive gifts, and lamented that we use so little of the mind's potential. To make matters worse, just the week before, on the very same program, correct information was presented about the myth. In a bumper spot between the program and commercials, a quick quiz flashed onscreen: What percentage of the brain is used? The multiple-choice answers ranged from 10 percent to 100 percent. The correct answer appeared, which I was glad to see. But if the producers knew that what one of their interviewees said is clearly and demonstrably inaccurate, why did they let it air? Does the right brain not know what the left brain is doing? Perhaps the Myss interview was a repeat, in which case the producers presumably checked her facts after it aired and felt some responsibility to correct the error in the following week's broadcast. Or possibly the broadcasts aired in sequence and the producers simply did not care and broadcast Myss and her misinformation anyway.
Even Uri Geller, who has made a career out of trying to convince people he can bend metal with his mind, trots out this little gem. This claim appears in his book Uri Geller's Mind-Power Book in the introduction: "Our minds are capable of remarkable, incredible feats, yet we don't use them to their full capacity. In fact, most of us only use about 10 per cent of our brains, if that. The other 90 per cent is full of untapped potential and undiscovered abilities, which means our minds are only operating in a very limited way instead of at full stretch. I believe that we once had full power over our minds. We had to, in order to survive, but as our world has become more sophisticated and complex we have forgotten many of the abilities we once had" (italicized phrases emphasized in original).
Evidence Against the Ten-Percent Myth
The argument that psychic powers come from the unused majority of the brain is based on the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. In this fallacy, lack of proof for a position (or simply lack of information) is used to try to support a particular claim. Even if it were true that the vast majority of the human mind is unused (which it clearly is not), that fact in no way implies that any extra capacity could somehow give people paranormal powers. This fallacy pops up all the time in paranormal claims, and is especially prevalent among UFO proponents. For example: Two people see a strange light in the sky. The first, a UFO believer, says, "See there! Can you explain that?" The skeptic replies that no, he can't. The UFO believer is gleeful. "Ha! You don't know what it is, so it must be aliens!" he says, arguing from ignorance.
What follows are two of the reasons that the Ten-Percent story is suspect. (For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein's chapter in the 1999 book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind.)
1) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
Variants of the Ten-Percent Myth
The myth is not simply a static, misunderstood factoid. It has several forms, and this adaptability gives it a shelf life longer than lacquered Spam. In the basic form, the myth claims that years ago a scientist discovered that we indeed did use only ten percent of our brains. Another variant is that only ten percent of the brain had been mapped, and this in turn became misunderstood as ten percent used. A third variant was described earlier by Craig Karges. This view is that the brain is somehow divided neatly into two parts: the conscious mind which is used ten to twenty percent of the time (presumably at capacity); and the subconscious mind, where the remaining eighty to ninety percent of the brain is unused. This description betrays a profound misunderstanding of brain function research.
Part of the reason for the long life of the myth is that if one variant can be proven incorrect, the person who held the belief can simply shift the reason for his belief to another basis, while the belief itself stays intact. So, for example, if a person is shown that PET scans depict activity throughout the entire brain, he can still claim that, well, the ninety percent figure really referred to the subconscious mind, and therefore the Ten-Percent figure is still basically correct.
Regardless of the exact version heard, the myth is spread and repeated, by both the well-meaning and the deliberately deceptive. The belief that remains, then, is what Robert J. Samuelson termed a "psycho-fact, [a] belief that, though not supported by hard evidence, is taken as real because its constant repetition changes the way we experience life." People who don't know any better will repeat it over and over, until, like the admonition against swimming right after you eat, the claim is widely believed. ("Triumph of the Psycho-Fact," Newsweek, 9 May 1994.)
The origins of the myth are not at all clear. Beyerstein, of the Brain Behaviour Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, has traced it back to at least the early part of the century. A 1998 column in New Scientist magazine also suggested various roots, including Albert Einstein and Dale Carnegie ("Brain Drain"). It likely has a number of sources, principally misunderstood or misinterpreted legitimate scientific findings as well as self-help gurus.
The most powerful lure of the myth is probably the idea that we might develop psychic abilities, or at least gain a leg up on the competition by improving our memory or concentration. All this is available for the asking, the ads say, if we just tapped into our most incredible of organs, the brain. It is past time to put this myth to rest, although if it has survived at least a century so far, it will surely live on into the new millennium. Perhaps the best way to combat this chestnut is to reply to the speaker, when the myth is mentioned, "Oh? What part don't you use?"
Only 31 Days (Or 10% of 310) Days Until Tennessee Exposes Florida's Urban Myth.
BeltwayVol
Well-Known Member
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- Apr 29, 2005
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Just for you U-T
Claim: "Love bugs" are the result of a genetic experiment gone wrong.
Examples: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
Love Bugs are actually man-made. Scientists were genetically engineering females of a species of insect that would mate with the male mosquito, but be sterile and produce no offspring. Unfortunately, they accidentally also created a male Love Bug, and a pair somehow escaped into the wild. Since the bugs had no natural predators, their numbers quickly exploded into the millions.
Origins: The "love bug" (also known as the honeymoon fly, telephone bug, double-headed bug, united bug, and March fly) is a nuisance any Florida motorist is unhappily more than passingly familiar with. Though these bugs neither bite nor sting, at certain times of the year their sheer numbers transform these innocuous insects into airborne hordes seemingly determined to devil anyone fool enough to take to the road. The adults splatter on windshields, lights, grills, and radiators of motor vehicles, and their dried remains are hard to remove. Suicidal pairs of love bugs have been known to cause overheating of motors when large numbers of them are drawn into the cooling systems of liquid-cooled engines. Unlike other bugs, something particular to them adversely affects the paint jobs on cars, pitting and etching the paint if their mortal remains are left on a vehicle for more than 48 hours.
Every May and September these sex-crazed critters become an annoyance bordering on intolerable as the air teems with mating pairs. But the "love bugs" haven't always been part of the Floridian landscape, thus we've seen an abundance of "mad scientist" stories about how the state came to be infested with them. (Love bugs are not solely a Floridian plague; they range throughout the Gulf states and into Mexico and Central America, as well as up into Georgia and South Carolina. But they seem particularly enamored of Florida.)
Truth is, Mother Nature is far more to be feared than any mad scientist and is far more capricious. In this case, she inspired some of her children to migrate to a new area, and in doing so prompted the creation of a number of rumors which attempt to explain why these critters came to take up residence in places where they weren't found before.
Love bugs are not the result of a genetic cloning experiment gone wrong, nor were they unwittingly loosed from a research facility charged with studying exotic insects. They also weren't bio-engineered as a natural solution to the mosquito problem. (Love bugs do not eat mosquitos: the adults do not eat at all, and larvae feed on decaying plant material.) These overly amorous critters are native to Central America; the best guess as to how they came to these United States places them as undiscovered stowaways who arrived by ship in Galveston or New Orleans around 1920. They migrated into Florida in 1947 from Louisiana, looked around, liked what they saw, and decided to stay. Their natural capacity for reproduction took care of the rest.
30 Days Until Tennessee "Bugs" The Hell Out Of Florida's Urban Myth and Exposes Him.
Claim: "Love bugs" are the result of a genetic experiment gone wrong.
Examples: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
Love Bugs are actually man-made. Scientists were genetically engineering females of a species of insect that would mate with the male mosquito, but be sterile and produce no offspring. Unfortunately, they accidentally also created a male Love Bug, and a pair somehow escaped into the wild. Since the bugs had no natural predators, their numbers quickly exploded into the millions.
Origins: The "love bug" (also known as the honeymoon fly, telephone bug, double-headed bug, united bug, and March fly) is a nuisance any Florida motorist is unhappily more than passingly familiar with. Though these bugs neither bite nor sting, at certain times of the year their sheer numbers transform these innocuous insects into airborne hordes seemingly determined to devil anyone fool enough to take to the road. The adults splatter on windshields, lights, grills, and radiators of motor vehicles, and their dried remains are hard to remove. Suicidal pairs of love bugs have been known to cause overheating of motors when large numbers of them are drawn into the cooling systems of liquid-cooled engines. Unlike other bugs, something particular to them adversely affects the paint jobs on cars, pitting and etching the paint if their mortal remains are left on a vehicle for more than 48 hours.
Every May and September these sex-crazed critters become an annoyance bordering on intolerable as the air teems with mating pairs. But the "love bugs" haven't always been part of the Floridian landscape, thus we've seen an abundance of "mad scientist" stories about how the state came to be infested with them. (Love bugs are not solely a Floridian plague; they range throughout the Gulf states and into Mexico and Central America, as well as up into Georgia and South Carolina. But they seem particularly enamored of Florida.)
Truth is, Mother Nature is far more to be feared than any mad scientist and is far more capricious. In this case, she inspired some of her children to migrate to a new area, and in doing so prompted the creation of a number of rumors which attempt to explain why these critters came to take up residence in places where they weren't found before.
Love bugs are not the result of a genetic cloning experiment gone wrong, nor were they unwittingly loosed from a research facility charged with studying exotic insects. They also weren't bio-engineered as a natural solution to the mosquito problem. (Love bugs do not eat mosquitos: the adults do not eat at all, and larvae feed on decaying plant material.) These overly amorous critters are native to Central America; the best guess as to how they came to these United States places them as undiscovered stowaways who arrived by ship in Galveston or New Orleans around 1920. They migrated into Florida in 1947 from Louisiana, looked around, liked what they saw, and decided to stay. Their natural capacity for reproduction took care of the rest.
30 Days Until Tennessee "Bugs" The Hell Out Of Florida's Urban Myth and Exposes Him.
- Joined
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Originally posted by KYVolFan@Aug 18, 2005 8:29 AM
I learned a little bit about Herbicides while attending UT Ag School.
Also, 14 years in the Nursery and Golf Course Construction business will give you a more than a little bit of practical knowledge.
[snapback]127843[/snapback]
Sorry to be off topic, but do you know if MSMA will kill fescue?
BeltwayVol
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2005
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- 4
Just in time........
Claim: Responding to pressure from religious groups, Alabama's state legislature redefined the value of pi from 3.14159 to 3 in order to bring it in line with Biblical precepts.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1998]
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legistature narrowly passed a law yesterday redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Guy Hunt says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.
The law took the state's engineering community by surprise. "It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi," said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.
Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisly defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate".
"I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it," said Lawson. "The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the alter font of Solomon's Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass."
Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact answer could harm students' self-esteem. "We need to return to some absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period."
Science supports Lawson, explains Russell Humbleys, a propulsion technician at the Marshall Spaceflight Center who testified in support of the bill before the legislature in Mongtomery on Monday. "Pi is merely an artifact of Euclidean geometry." Humbleys is working on a theory which he says will prove that pi is determined by the geometry of three-dimensional space, which is assumed by physicists to be "isotropic", or the same in all directions. "There are other geometries, and pi is different in every one of them," says Humbleys. Scientists have arbitrarily assumed that space is Euclidean, he says. He points out that a circle drawn on a spherical surface has a different value for the ratio of circumfence to diameter. "Anyone with a compass, flexible ruler, and globe can see for themselves," suggests Humbleys, "its not exactly rocket science."
Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to support the bill, agrees. He said that pi is nothing more than an assumption by the mathematicians and engineers who were there to argue against the bill. "These nabobs waltzed into the capital with an arrogance that was breathtaking," Learned said. "Their prefatorial deficit resulted in a polemical stance at absolute contraposition to the legislature's puissance."
Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect the way math is taught to Alabama's children. One member of the state school board, Lily Ponja, is anxious to get the new value of pi into the state's math textbooks, but thinks that the old value should be retained as an alternative. She said, "As far as I am concerned, the value of pi is only a theory, and we should be open to all interpretations." She looks forward to students having the freedom to decide for themselves what value pi should have.
Robert S. Dietz, a professor at Arizona State University who has followed the controversy, wrote that this is not the first time a state legislature has attempted to redifine the value of pi. A legislator in the state of Indiana unsuccessfully attempted to have that state set the value of pi to three. According to Dietz, the lawmaker was exasperated by the calculations of a mathematician who carried pi to four hundred decimal places and still could not achieve a rational number. Many experts are warning that this is just the beginning of a national battle over pi between traditional values supporters and the technical elite. Solomon Society member Lawson agrees. "We just want to return pi to its traditional value," he said, "which, according to the Bible, is three."
Origins: This wonderful bit of creative writing began circulating on the Internet in April 1998. Written by Mark Boslough as an April Fool's parody on legislative and school board attacks on evolution in New Mexico, the author took real statements from New Mexican legislators and school board members supporting creationism and recast them into a fictional account detailing how Alabama legislators had passed a law calling for the value of pi to be set to the "Biblical value" of 3.0.
This brilliant piece of humor was originally posted to the newsgroup talk.origins on 1 April 1998 as well as sent to a list of New Mexican scientists and citizens interested in evolution and printed in the April issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter NMSR Reports. Its talk.origins poster followed up a day later with a full confession and explanation of the prank, thereby allowing others to share in the fun. One would have thought that would have been the end of it.
Ah but the Internet works in mysterious ways. Several readers forwarded the piece to friends and posted it to other newsgroups. As the story moved along, what would have easily identified it as a parody and not a news item was stripped out: the attribution to "April Holiday" of the "Associmated Press." Now it looked like a real news piece. Which is how it was received by many.
There is not now and never has been a bill in front of the Alabama state legislature to redefine the value of pi. With one exception, none of the names given in this fanciful account stand up to scrutiny.
The one exception is Guy Hunt. He is a former governor of Alabama, convicted in 1993 for diverting $200,000 from his inaugural fund to his personal use.
Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
29 Days Until Tennessee Debunks The Urban Myth and Makes It Look Simple As Pi!
Claim: Responding to pressure from religious groups, Alabama's state legislature redefined the value of pi from 3.14159 to 3 in order to bring it in line with Biblical precepts.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1998]
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legistature narrowly passed a law yesterday redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Guy Hunt says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.
The law took the state's engineering community by surprise. "It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi," said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.
Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisly defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate".
"I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it," said Lawson. "The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the alter font of Solomon's Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass."
Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact answer could harm students' self-esteem. "We need to return to some absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period."
Science supports Lawson, explains Russell Humbleys, a propulsion technician at the Marshall Spaceflight Center who testified in support of the bill before the legislature in Mongtomery on Monday. "Pi is merely an artifact of Euclidean geometry." Humbleys is working on a theory which he says will prove that pi is determined by the geometry of three-dimensional space, which is assumed by physicists to be "isotropic", or the same in all directions. "There are other geometries, and pi is different in every one of them," says Humbleys. Scientists have arbitrarily assumed that space is Euclidean, he says. He points out that a circle drawn on a spherical surface has a different value for the ratio of circumfence to diameter. "Anyone with a compass, flexible ruler, and globe can see for themselves," suggests Humbleys, "its not exactly rocket science."
Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to support the bill, agrees. He said that pi is nothing more than an assumption by the mathematicians and engineers who were there to argue against the bill. "These nabobs waltzed into the capital with an arrogance that was breathtaking," Learned said. "Their prefatorial deficit resulted in a polemical stance at absolute contraposition to the legislature's puissance."
Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect the way math is taught to Alabama's children. One member of the state school board, Lily Ponja, is anxious to get the new value of pi into the state's math textbooks, but thinks that the old value should be retained as an alternative. She said, "As far as I am concerned, the value of pi is only a theory, and we should be open to all interpretations." She looks forward to students having the freedom to decide for themselves what value pi should have.
Robert S. Dietz, a professor at Arizona State University who has followed the controversy, wrote that this is not the first time a state legislature has attempted to redifine the value of pi. A legislator in the state of Indiana unsuccessfully attempted to have that state set the value of pi to three. According to Dietz, the lawmaker was exasperated by the calculations of a mathematician who carried pi to four hundred decimal places and still could not achieve a rational number. Many experts are warning that this is just the beginning of a national battle over pi between traditional values supporters and the technical elite. Solomon Society member Lawson agrees. "We just want to return pi to its traditional value," he said, "which, according to the Bible, is three."
Origins: This wonderful bit of creative writing began circulating on the Internet in April 1998. Written by Mark Boslough as an April Fool's parody on legislative and school board attacks on evolution in New Mexico, the author took real statements from New Mexican legislators and school board members supporting creationism and recast them into a fictional account detailing how Alabama legislators had passed a law calling for the value of pi to be set to the "Biblical value" of 3.0.
This brilliant piece of humor was originally posted to the newsgroup talk.origins on 1 April 1998 as well as sent to a list of New Mexican scientists and citizens interested in evolution and printed in the April issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter NMSR Reports. Its talk.origins poster followed up a day later with a full confession and explanation of the prank, thereby allowing others to share in the fun. One would have thought that would have been the end of it.
Ah but the Internet works in mysterious ways. Several readers forwarded the piece to friends and posted it to other newsgroups. As the story moved along, what would have easily identified it as a parody and not a news item was stripped out: the attribution to "April Holiday" of the "Associmated Press." Now it looked like a real news piece. Which is how it was received by many.
There is not now and never has been a bill in front of the Alabama state legislature to redefine the value of pi. With one exception, none of the names given in this fanciful account stand up to scrutiny.
The one exception is Guy Hunt. He is a former governor of Alabama, convicted in 1993 for diverting $200,000 from his inaugural fund to his personal use.
Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
29 Days Until Tennessee Debunks The Urban Myth and Makes It Look Simple As Pi!
BeltwayVol
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2005
- Messages
- 1,441
- Likes
- 4
First Post With The New Sig..... :angel:
Claim: A girl freezes her naked ass to her date's car on their first (and last) date.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]
THIS IS HYSTERICAL- DEFINITELY THE WORST FIRST DATE I EVER HEARD OF.
This was on the Leno show last night (9-7-99). Jay went into the audience to find the most embarrassing first date that a woman ever had. The winner told about her first date experience. She said it was snowing and cold and the guy took her skiing. It was a day trip (no overnight). They were strangers, and truly had never met before.
The date went OK until they were coming back that afternoon. They were going along in the car and she had to pee real bad, but it was still about an hour more back to civilization. He said she should try to hold it, and she did for a while. It finally came to the point where she told him that he could either stop and let her pee beside the road, or in the front seat of his car.
They stopped and she went out beside the car and pulled her pants down and started. Well, she didn't have real good balance, so she let her butt rest against the rear fender to steady herself. He was a real gentleman and looked the other way.
When she was finished, she quickly noticed that her warm butt had stuck to the fender. Thoughts of tongues frozen to pump handle nightmares immediately came to mind and she soon realized that she had a real problem. She was thinking of every way she could to get released from his fender. He was getting a bit concerned too, and finally cried out to her asking if she was OK.
Well, with a red face, she said she was freezing her butt off! She finally had to ask for assistance. Now this isn't the worst of the story, there's more to come. She took off her sweater and covered herself as good as she could and asked him to came around to see if he could help.
After the laughter subsided, they assessed the situation. They had a real problem. They agreed that they needed something warm to melt her butt off of the fender. Thinking about the pee that she just sprinkled on the ground made her think that pee is about the only thing that they had that could get her free.
Well, after exploring every other possible solution, she looked the other way, and so did he, and proceeded to unzip his pants and pee her butt off the fender. The rest of the trip home there wasn't much conversation.
True story.
Origins: It is true that a guest on the Tonight Show did tell this story when Jay Leno went into the audience looking for "bad date" anecdotes. What is less clear, however, is if the incident described happened.
I think Jay Leno was hoaxed. And I think he went asking for it, too. For quite a while, on the Tonight Show web site was a page soliciting those who've had nightmare dates to e-mail the show about those experiences with a view towards getting these people to tell them to Jay Leno on the air. Such a set-up practically begged to be exploited by someone intent upon seeing herself on national TV.
That the possibility of a hoax exists isn't, by itself, proof of anything. But it does provide a bit of framework towards explaining how someone would get this opportunity, and it belies any notion that the girl just happened to be in the audience that night and hadn't previously thought of relating her tale of woe to anyone.
The telling arguments against this tall tail tale have to do with the mechanics of it. If caught in the position of needing to go but not having access to a toilet, most women would choose to squat beside the car. Less chance of being seen, after all, but it's also the position the vast majority would naturally adopt. It should be noted, however, that some rare women prefer to urinate standing up. It's not the norm, but they do exist.
Even if the heroine of this story were one of those rare women, there is still the problem of an erect urinator pissing on her clothes. Pants would be only pulled down, not entirely removed, because to do so would necessitate taking off the boots, something no one would think of doing while standing on the frozen tundra. Though it's possible to avoid pissing on what is bunched down around one's ankles when in a crouched position, all bets are off if standing. Gravity makes its own rules, after all. To have urinated standing up would have been to risk the overwhelming likelihood of having to afterwards pull on freshly pissed-upon pants. And this is not the kind of fashion statement one looks to make on the first date.
A warm body part could become fused to cold metal (and doubly so if either component is wet), but getting enough of a person's fundament firmly attached to the side of a car would take some doing. Even if it did become affixed, the large surface area of it would quickly work to re-warm the metal enough to release the temporarily restrained. Over a stuck surface large enough to hold a woman in place, the little stream of urine a man could provide wouldn't do nearly as much to work the lady free as her body heat or his warm hands would.
Even with all these improbabilities, the story still falls within the realm of possibility . . . except for two telling details. Had it been cold enough to flash-freeze the young lady's buns to the car, it would also have been cold enough to send her yipping away from the vehicle the very moment her naked butt touched the metal. Whatever she would have wanted to do wouldn't have mattered instinct would have taken over, propelling her away from the car, in much the same way that someone who has just touched a hot object instinctively yanks his hand away.
Granted, if those cheeks were a bit damp and she managed to momentarily rest against a patch of naked metal that was just cold enough, she might leave a bit of skin behind even from this brief a contact. However, she would break loose there's no doubt about that. Now if our heroine still chose to lean up against the car after either a cold goosing or a skin ripping, it would take an act of God to prevent her from this time resting her mittened hands on the fender and her bum against them.
Most damning of all, however, is the nature of car fenders themselves. They're painted. Though it's possible to freeze a tongue to the unpainted metal of playground equipment, all bets are off if the structures have been painted, shellac'd, or otherwise coated.
Could a bare butt become stuck to the side of a car? I don't think so. And I just don't believe dating behavior has changed that much in the few years I've been away from it to allow for anyone's trying to do this.
28 Days Until The Urban Myth Get's His Ass Stuck Somewhere He Doesn't Want It.
Claim: A girl freezes her naked ass to her date's car on their first (and last) date.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]
THIS IS HYSTERICAL- DEFINITELY THE WORST FIRST DATE I EVER HEARD OF.
This was on the Leno show last night (9-7-99). Jay went into the audience to find the most embarrassing first date that a woman ever had. The winner told about her first date experience. She said it was snowing and cold and the guy took her skiing. It was a day trip (no overnight). They were strangers, and truly had never met before.
The date went OK until they were coming back that afternoon. They were going along in the car and she had to pee real bad, but it was still about an hour more back to civilization. He said she should try to hold it, and she did for a while. It finally came to the point where she told him that he could either stop and let her pee beside the road, or in the front seat of his car.
They stopped and she went out beside the car and pulled her pants down and started. Well, she didn't have real good balance, so she let her butt rest against the rear fender to steady herself. He was a real gentleman and looked the other way.
When she was finished, she quickly noticed that her warm butt had stuck to the fender. Thoughts of tongues frozen to pump handle nightmares immediately came to mind and she soon realized that she had a real problem. She was thinking of every way she could to get released from his fender. He was getting a bit concerned too, and finally cried out to her asking if she was OK.
Well, with a red face, she said she was freezing her butt off! She finally had to ask for assistance. Now this isn't the worst of the story, there's more to come. She took off her sweater and covered herself as good as she could and asked him to came around to see if he could help.
After the laughter subsided, they assessed the situation. They had a real problem. They agreed that they needed something warm to melt her butt off of the fender. Thinking about the pee that she just sprinkled on the ground made her think that pee is about the only thing that they had that could get her free.
Well, after exploring every other possible solution, she looked the other way, and so did he, and proceeded to unzip his pants and pee her butt off the fender. The rest of the trip home there wasn't much conversation.
True story.
Origins: It is true that a guest on the Tonight Show did tell this story when Jay Leno went into the audience looking for "bad date" anecdotes. What is less clear, however, is if the incident described happened.
I think Jay Leno was hoaxed. And I think he went asking for it, too. For quite a while, on the Tonight Show web site was a page soliciting those who've had nightmare dates to e-mail the show about those experiences with a view towards getting these people to tell them to Jay Leno on the air. Such a set-up practically begged to be exploited by someone intent upon seeing herself on national TV.
That the possibility of a hoax exists isn't, by itself, proof of anything. But it does provide a bit of framework towards explaining how someone would get this opportunity, and it belies any notion that the girl just happened to be in the audience that night and hadn't previously thought of relating her tale of woe to anyone.
The telling arguments against this tall tail tale have to do with the mechanics of it. If caught in the position of needing to go but not having access to a toilet, most women would choose to squat beside the car. Less chance of being seen, after all, but it's also the position the vast majority would naturally adopt. It should be noted, however, that some rare women prefer to urinate standing up. It's not the norm, but they do exist.
Even if the heroine of this story were one of those rare women, there is still the problem of an erect urinator pissing on her clothes. Pants would be only pulled down, not entirely removed, because to do so would necessitate taking off the boots, something no one would think of doing while standing on the frozen tundra. Though it's possible to avoid pissing on what is bunched down around one's ankles when in a crouched position, all bets are off if standing. Gravity makes its own rules, after all. To have urinated standing up would have been to risk the overwhelming likelihood of having to afterwards pull on freshly pissed-upon pants. And this is not the kind of fashion statement one looks to make on the first date.
A warm body part could become fused to cold metal (and doubly so if either component is wet), but getting enough of a person's fundament firmly attached to the side of a car would take some doing. Even if it did become affixed, the large surface area of it would quickly work to re-warm the metal enough to release the temporarily restrained. Over a stuck surface large enough to hold a woman in place, the little stream of urine a man could provide wouldn't do nearly as much to work the lady free as her body heat or his warm hands would.
Even with all these improbabilities, the story still falls within the realm of possibility . . . except for two telling details. Had it been cold enough to flash-freeze the young lady's buns to the car, it would also have been cold enough to send her yipping away from the vehicle the very moment her naked butt touched the metal. Whatever she would have wanted to do wouldn't have mattered instinct would have taken over, propelling her away from the car, in much the same way that someone who has just touched a hot object instinctively yanks his hand away.
Granted, if those cheeks were a bit damp and she managed to momentarily rest against a patch of naked metal that was just cold enough, she might leave a bit of skin behind even from this brief a contact. However, she would break loose there's no doubt about that. Now if our heroine still chose to lean up against the car after either a cold goosing or a skin ripping, it would take an act of God to prevent her from this time resting her mittened hands on the fender and her bum against them.
Most damning of all, however, is the nature of car fenders themselves. They're painted. Though it's possible to freeze a tongue to the unpainted metal of playground equipment, all bets are off if the structures have been painted, shellac'd, or otherwise coated.
Could a bare butt become stuck to the side of a car? I don't think so. And I just don't believe dating behavior has changed that much in the few years I've been away from it to allow for anyone's trying to do this.
28 Days Until The Urban Myth Get's His Ass Stuck Somewhere He Doesn't Want It.
BeltwayVol
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Claim: American Idol favorite William Hung died of a heroin overdose.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2004]
American Idol's William Hung Found Dead of Heroin Overdose
Las Vegas, NV Kitschy American Idol Star William Hung, famous for his botching of Ricky Martin's "She Bangs," was found dead yesterday, apparently of an intentional heroin overdose. The announcement of his death sent shockwaves to the tens of people who still found him funny.
Ironically, Mr. Hung was found by a VH1 camera crew sent to begin filing "William Hung: Behind the 'Music.'" Viacom immediately decided to rename the special: "William Hung: fifteen minutes till death."
Origins: On 27 January 2004 William Hung, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, endeared himself to millions of viewers and became a household name with his awful yet charmingly spirited, Ricky Martin-imitative 90-second performance of the song 'She Bangs' on the TV talent show American Idol.
In mid-July 2004, a rumor began to circulate that William Hung had died of a heroin overdose. Although a number of entertainers have indeed passed on from that cause (e.g., Janis Joplin, John Belushi), this rumor is yet another case of a celebrity's demise being attributed to a heroin overdose even though the "victim" is still in fact very much with us (as in the case of Steve Burns of TV's Blue's Clues).
The notice of Mr. Hung's death wasn't even a "serious" rumor in that it was started by a spoof, and the sample excerpted above provides several clues that the William Hung death piece was intended to be humorous (e.g., the heroin overdose was "intentional"; the word "music" is enclosed in quotes; the deceased was found funny by "tens of people"). The article that prompted the rumor was published on 13 July 2004 on Broken Newz, a satire news and entertainment site whose disclaimer advises that "stories listed on this site are not real." It was the work of pranksters Bill Doty and Joe Peacock of Zug.com, a comedy site.
Mr. Hung remains very much alive and has since the rumor performed in a number of venues.
27 Days Until Tennessee "Bangs" Out a Win and Exposes Florida's Urban Myth.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2004]
American Idol's William Hung Found Dead of Heroin Overdose
Las Vegas, NV Kitschy American Idol Star William Hung, famous for his botching of Ricky Martin's "She Bangs," was found dead yesterday, apparently of an intentional heroin overdose. The announcement of his death sent shockwaves to the tens of people who still found him funny.
Ironically, Mr. Hung was found by a VH1 camera crew sent to begin filing "William Hung: Behind the 'Music.'" Viacom immediately decided to rename the special: "William Hung: fifteen minutes till death."
Origins: On 27 January 2004 William Hung, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, endeared himself to millions of viewers and became a household name with his awful yet charmingly spirited, Ricky Martin-imitative 90-second performance of the song 'She Bangs' on the TV talent show American Idol.
In mid-July 2004, a rumor began to circulate that William Hung had died of a heroin overdose. Although a number of entertainers have indeed passed on from that cause (e.g., Janis Joplin, John Belushi), this rumor is yet another case of a celebrity's demise being attributed to a heroin overdose even though the "victim" is still in fact very much with us (as in the case of Steve Burns of TV's Blue's Clues).
The notice of Mr. Hung's death wasn't even a "serious" rumor in that it was started by a spoof, and the sample excerpted above provides several clues that the William Hung death piece was intended to be humorous (e.g., the heroin overdose was "intentional"; the word "music" is enclosed in quotes; the deceased was found funny by "tens of people"). The article that prompted the rumor was published on 13 July 2004 on Broken Newz, a satire news and entertainment site whose disclaimer advises that "stories listed on this site are not real." It was the work of pranksters Bill Doty and Joe Peacock of Zug.com, a comedy site.
Mr. Hung remains very much alive and has since the rumor performed in a number of venues.
27 Days Until Tennessee "Bangs" Out a Win and Exposes Florida's Urban Myth.
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