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I read about an insurance scam once where this guy got fire insurance for each of his cigars, over $1,000 a piece..

That is an urban legend, and in fact never happened.

I read about an insurance scam once where this guy got fire insurance for each of his cigars, over $1,000 a piece. Then he smoked them. He took the insurance company to court, and the judge reluctantly ruled that the insurance company had to pay the guy $12,000. Fortunately for the insurance company, though, they were able to charge him with arson. Heh he got a hefty fine ($10,000 ish? I don't remember..) and served jail time.

You may want to check your sources first.

It's really a disservice to try to make a point using only anecdotal evidence. This is much worse when your anecdote is fictional.

Yet I'm sure you use the invetion of a man named Crapper everyday...

Urban legend.

Claim: Signing and circulating online petitions is an effective way of remedying important issues.

Status: False.

...and I won't even begin to bring up Clinton's preferred way of dealing with "enemies."

Good, because you'd have been pretty embarrassed when your "evidence" got smacked down.

And then there is the theory that we only use 10% of our brain.

This "theory" has been universally debunked. From snopes:

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.

The Santa by-way-of-Coke is an Urban Legend.

Claim: The modern image of Santa Claus -- a jolly figure in a red-and-white suit -- was created by Coca-Cola.

Status: False

(Excerpt)"This legend is not true. Although some versions of the Santa Claus figure still had him attired in various colors of outfits past the beginning of the 20th century, the jolly, ruddy, sack-carrying Santa with a red suit and flowing white whiskers had become the standard image of Santa Claus by the 1920s, several years before Sundlom drew his first Santa illustration for Coca-Cola"

For the curious....

Six Flags Great Adventure Park in New Jersey, which resulted in the deaths of eight (8) visitors due to their inability to immediately exit...

And there are all sorts of pages about people dying at Disneyland: The Google Search

And A pretty complete listing

But nothing about a beheading at the park though. (Allthough there have been accidents on Space Mountain).

The claim that crime in Australia has increased substantially since the gun buy back is an urban legend.

The technology has been around since BTTF was released but it is now marketable!

These are real hoverboards and act just like the ones in the movie. Check out my source!

Transforming the theories' inherent silliness into laughter is the best way to get people to see that silliness. . .and, perhaps, to cause them to think a little more critically the next time they're confronted with an "urban legend."

As for the argument that "nothing will convince the crackpots": If the public can be educated to know they are crackpots, who cares?

DDB (live from the mothership)

This latest bit of netsam aside, Alexander Fleming's life has already been the subject of considerable mythologizing. His discovery of penicillin was not the instant boon to medicine that we now assume it was. In fact, Fleming himself did not realize the significance of his findings -- thinking he had developed a mere antiseptic that was too slow-acting and too difficult to produce in large quantities, Fleming failed to test his penicillin thoroughly, wrote a tepidly-received paper about it, and moved on to other work. There ended his real involvement with the "greatest medical advance of the 20th (or any other) century." In 1935, two specialists -- Howard Florey, head of Oxford's William Dunn School of Pathology, and Ernst Chain, a Cambridge biochemistry PhD -- took up where Fleming's paper left off and spent several years at the arduous laboratory work of refining and testing pencillin to produce the world's first effective antibiotic. Fleming visited the two men at the Dunn School after they published their first paper on penicillin in 1940 (by which time Chain thought Fleming was dead) and didn't reappear on the scene until after penicillin had proved itself invaluable during World War II. The press lauded the newly-emerged Fleming as the lone genius responsible for the miracle of penicillin, and he was awarded numerous honors, including a knighthood and the 1945 Nobel Prize for medicine. (The Nobel Prize committee, at least, was on the ball and named Florey and Chain as co-recipients of the honor.)

No, it isn't. That's just an urband legend.

Just ask where their sign is. http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/heresign.htm and for the record, sometimes, I am amazed at the levels of stupidity that run rampant through my large company. Whats even more amazing is the lack of patience for those perceived as "stupid". Yes stupid is funny (the link cracks me up), but it takes far more effort to ridicule someone than it does to teach them a thing or 3. I'd hate to see how people react when kids mess up...

Snopes

NBC30

See? =) ALWAYS check with Snopes first, hehe.

-Berj

Apparently gref is not close enough to href for these anal computers:

secondary reference

The russians however... they used a pencil.

Not this again! NASA used pencils in the early days same as the Russians, they never payed to have a space pen developed...

5 seconds worth of reasearch and you could have found the real story.

No he didn't. It ISN'T a fact. Although Thomas Crapper took out nine plumbing patents between 1881 and 1896, none of these patents was for the "valveless water-waste preventer" he is often credited with having invented.... Alexander Cummings is generally credited with inventing the first flush mechanism in 1775 (more than 50 years before Crapper was born).

yep... it's almost an urban legend, though there have evidently been two such instances... Here's a link

Snopes.com

If our democratically elected President believes we can breathe there, we can!

You do realize that it was Quayle that said that, right?

Then again, you probably got that from an email forward, and nothing that's forwarded along is fake. I should know -- I earned a little girl $11.50 towards a kidney transplant by forwarding emails to everyone on my contact list!

You can find confirmation of this in the only source I would trust: coke. They made repeated comments in interviews post-new-coke-fiasco that both Pepsi and New Coke taste tested higher than Coke's original recipie, and that they initiated the whole flavor change project in response to their own confirmation of the Pepsi Challenge results.

If Coke's results had shown that Coke was better, I'd supspect their methods, but when a company A (bias toward answer 1) gets answer 1 and company B (bias toward answer 2) gets answer 1, I begin to accept the credibility of answer 1.

On the topic of doing google searches for testing done 20 years ago, and being shocked that you don't find that much info on-line... well, you can guess where I'm going with this :-)

However, there is an ok summary on the Urban Legends site which details among other things, "Batteries of well-controlled taste tests showed folks liked the taste of Pepsi better" All of the references they cite are print-publications (again, not shocking given the era).

Check those facts, please.

Subliminal adverts were excluded by the FCC from radio and television only, and I think the film people agreed to ban them voluntarily. In any event, there is scant evidence they work. Hey, I was disappointed. I mentioned this elsewhere here.

Now, Ring Around the Rosie is a centuries old nursery rhyme that most know dates back to the time of the Black Death. I won't go into the details, but thats what it is about.

I had never heard this before. To verify, I typed "ring around the rosie" into google, and this is the first hit. here's the third hit from snopes.com, an interesting website which I would be inclined to believe.

"How about Ring Around the Rosie'?" another Elf asks. The directors veto it.

Now, Ring Around the Rosie is a centuries old nursery rhyme that most know dates back to the time of the Black Death. I won't go into the details, but thats what it is about.

Is this real?

It's real. It's not an urban legend.

Link please.

Here you go.

You get 1 MS Licensing point for each copy of XP, 5 for MS Office and 10 for 2000 Server. No points at all for Linux.

How many points do I need to get a Harrier?

Disclaimers don't work.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.htm

I could swear I'd heard that from a reputable source though...*sigh*

Then how come that the Websites made for very large companies, such as Yahoo, Msnbc and (to a limited extent) CNN look fine, yet still are very accessible? Heck, even Tommy Hilfiger cleaned their act up (but this may have something to do about snide comments about their site looking bad on blind people's browsers... If they want to pretend that Tommy never made that comment on how his clothes look on certain kinds of people, he cannot afford to make similar claims about his website...).

The general impression I got was that very often it's the sites of medium sized companies that are the worst: large enough to have the money to contract it out to an incompetent web-design shop but too small to know how to judge the product that they paid good money for.

The day after Thanksgiving is not the busiest shopping day of the year. The fact that you put that phrase in quotes indicate that you might know that already, but others reading it might not. :)

Does this include music? Does this mean that only AOL users are entitled to sing and be sang Happy Birthday?

Yes, AOL Time Warners owns the copyrights for the Happy Birthday Song!

Actually, here's a true story very similar to that.

Mutant Marsupials Take Up Arms Against Australian Air Force

The reuse of some object-oriented code has caused tactical headaches for Australia's armed forces. As virtual reality simulators assume larger roles in helicopter combat training , programmers have gone to great lengths to increase the realism of the their scenarios, including detailed landscapes and -- in the case of the Northern Territory's Operation Phoenix -- herds of kangaroos (since groups of disturbed animals might well give away a helicopters position).

The head of the Defense Science and Technology Organization's Land Operations/Simulations division reportedly instructed developers to model the local marsupials' movements and reaction to helicopters.

Being efficient programmers, they just re-appropriated some code originally used to model infantry detachments reactions under the same stimuli, changed the mapped icon from a soldier to a kangaroo, and increased the figures' speed of movement.

Eager to demonstrate their flying skills for some visiting American pilots, the hotshot Aussies "buzzed" the virtual kangaroos in low flight during a simulation. The kangaroos scattered, as predicted, and the Americans nodded appreciatively . . . and then did a double-take as the kangaroos reappeared from behind a hill and launched a barrage of stinger missiles at the hapless helicopter. (Apparently the programmers had forgotten the remove "that" part of the infantry coding).

The lesson? Objects are defined with certain attributes, and any new object defined in terms of the old one inherits all the attributes. The embarrassed programmers had learned to be careful when reusing object-oriented code, and the Yanks left with the utmost respect for the Australian wildlife.

Simulator supervisors report that pilots from that point onwards have strictly avoided kangaroos, just as they were meant to.

Only somewhat true. Check out snopes for a more accurate (although less humourous) rendition and the true origins of this not quite urban legend.

This reminds me of that story about a city in Japan named USA. Thus, they could sell their products as "Made in USA".

Exactly. Look at what Disney has cranked out in the past... Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and so many more titles that were based on ideas in the public domain. Now I'd like to see someone put on a production of a show called "Beauty and the Beast", and not get their asses sued off by Disney.

Even Hollywood is getting pissed off about the whole copyright scene. Writers are running out of things to write about. Movie ideas are so expensive because everything has been done already. That's why we're getting re-hashes like Oceans 11 (1960, 2001), and the James Bond franchise.

In another example, I know that greeting card company hired out a friend of mine to come in for a Santa Claus photo shoot. Why? Because the image we most associate with Santa Claus is owned by Coke, and they needed to have a new model to base illustrations on to meet the "original work" standard in the copyright clause to avoid lawsuits. (Or repel them if Coke would sue anyway).

It's our culture that we're pissing away when we let copyright get extended too far.

Actually, that's not currently correct -- while there are many arguments whether the law should ban simulated sex with minors, it does not at the moment, as per a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.

And snuff films (if they existed) would be illegal -- see here for the snopes.com write-up of the furor surrounding the US release of the fake snuff film `Snuff' in 1976.

Check out this at snopes.com.

It clearly states that statistics show that it is, at best, the 5th biggest shopping day of the year for retailers. That is, it's behind the two weekends before Christmas. Really, this makes sense. A lot of people put off their shopping to the last minute.

Here's a more specific link (the previous post just points to the main page).

Black Friday is the shopping day after the American Thanksgiving holiday. Biggest shopping day of the year for retailers.

That's actually a common misconception. It's the "official" start of the Christmas shopping season, but the busiest days of the year are almost always the weekend before Christmas.

Biggest shopping day of the year for retailers.

Nope. At best it's the fifth biggest shopping day of the year. The two weekends before Christmas are the biggest.

More information is here.

You too, are an idiot.

just deserts

Sounds like the EMI Customer Rep had a previous job as a television programmer at ABC.

My guess is that in a few days, we'll hear the same sort of reply:

Dear Customer:

Very very very sorry, overzealous insensitive person fired, did not reflect company philosophy, blah, blah, blah, fully support technology, homina, homina homina, we like you customer, yadda yadda yadda, etc.

Sincerely,
Pointy Head VP

This was probably invented by Wallace & Gromit, right? It sort of reminds me of the NASA program to create a pen that could write in space. NASA (and american taxpayers) "invested" close to one million dollars on that. The russians used pencils.

Actually, that is an urban legend.

In my opinion, the most disasterous game ever is still E.T.

He did not say he invented the Internet, but he did say "I took the initiative in creating the Internet". From snopes.com:

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

Now sure the "urban legend" uses the word invent instead of create, but the point is the same. Al Gore seemed to be taking credit for something that was *MUCH* larger that he was---even as Vice President. Especially for a project that had been going on since the late 60's. What about Vint Cerf the developer of TCP/IP? Or Tim Berners-Lee, developer of the World Wide Web. Or Ray Tomlinson founder of e-mail? Heck, if we are going to talk about politicans what about LBJ since the DARPA project that became the Internet was started during his administration?

There are a thousand people more deserving to proclaim they "took the initiative in creating the Internet". Sure Al may take credit in helping to promote it, but his statement was way too broad and arrogant. He didn't even acknowledge anyone else. It is everything I dislike about a powerful person taking credit for the work of the "little guy".

Brian Ellenberger

Could you make that Ellen Feiss one with an open mouth?