one more thought on urban legends

It would be interesting if everyone were forced to give completely honest answers to which urban legends they had fallen for and which ones they had never believed. This wouldn’t work without the proverbial gun to the head, though, because as a rule people never like to admit that they are ever tricked by anything, just as it’s falsely taken to be the sign of an intellectual never to be surprised by anything.

I saw through that infamous “kidney” one right away… the one where two guys in California supposedly picked up some women in a bar and found in the morning that these women had drugged them and removed their kidneys for sale on the international transplant market. Not that it could never happen, but the story was always told in too pat a fashion. I kept getting that warning on circular emails from which all female recipients seemed to be removed, as though it were something the international men’s fraternity needed to be aware of and offer mutual warnings about. “Watch out for those women in bars.” That was almost funnier than the story itself.

I also though Barbara Streisand should never have fallen for that supposed speech from Shakepseare’s Julius Caeasar, which she used in attempt to reveal W. Bush’s true character. It was obviously bad Shakespeare pastiche, and was quickly exposed as such

But the two I did fall for were these…

1. That supposed commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut that was floating around early in the past decade. It sure sounded like Vonnegut to me.

2. That claim that glass is technically a very slow-moving liquid rather than a solid, and that this is why old windows when removed from buildings are often fatter at the bottom. I believed this one because it was told to me by someone who is quite knowledgeable about science and who is not at all a prankster, so he must have been duped as well. Turns out it’s an urban legend. The fatness at the bottom of the glass is apparently due to poorer technology for cutting glass in the past, and the fatter side was generally placed at the bottom for increased stability. Or so says snopes.com. But maybe they’re just so cynical at Snopes that they’re trying to deceive as to which things are urban legends and which are truths.