Fwd: Please Pass this On To Everyone You Care About!! • December 7, 2000

Fwd: Please Pass this On To Everyone You Care About!!

by David Banyas

There’s a Bill 602P that’s being quietly pushed through House and Senate to tax e-mail at five cents apiece. And did you also know that all senators and congressmen don’t pay into Social Security because they have a free retirement plan taken directly out of the General Fund, our tax money, that pays them their entire annual income until they die? Oh, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allows African-Americans to vote, will expire in 2007! And your Social Security number is encoded to reflect your race! And if you’re African-American and were born before 1928, you can get $5000 in slave reparations from the government! I swear!

Bar goers beware! A drug called Progesterex used by veterinarians to sterilize animals is being dropped into drinks at public bars. It renders female victims unconscious and sterilizes them! Anti-perspirant will cause breast cancer because it prevents the body’s normal purging through sweating. Waterproof Sunscreen will cause blindness if it runs into your eyes because you can’t wash it out. Oh and don’t lick envelopes ‘cause I heard that this girl in California accidentally cut her tongue on one and there was a roach egg on it. It incubated in her tongue ’cause it’s all warm and moist and a doctor had to cut it out! These are all true stories! It happened to a friend of a friend of mine!

Please forward this to everyone you care about!!

The urban legend society has been reborn. The Internet has seen to that. Yes, the information highway is littered with cyber-shit that seems to eventually find its way into everyone’s e-mail at least once. The above statements are currently being circulated in and about the Internet and are being distributed as fact at water coolers all over the world. Not a single one is true. Only two seem to have started out in fact but were perverted into barely recognizable imitations of their original selves.

One is the Voting Rights Act expiration. Yes, the VRA will expire in 2007, but it does not give blacks the right to vote. Back in 1870, that right was outlined in the permanent writing of the post-Civil War Constitution under the 15^th Amendment. Not intending for it to be permanently in force, LBJ introduced the Act in 1965 to obstruct Jim Crow laws, the unfair practices that were preventing blacks from registering (In Selma, Alabama, black voters were handed a Chinese newspaper; if they couldn’t read it, they could not vote). The basic prohibition against discrimination in voting contained in the Fifteenth amendment and in the Voting Rights Act does not expire in 2007 — it does not expire at all; it is permanent. Whether or not we will still need the Act to be renewed is another issue.

The other rumor that’s been milled to ribbons is concerning the federal retirement plan. Yes, the federal employee has better retirement perks than the average private sector employee (the fed will pull down at least 85% of the average income between the highest three consecutive annual incomes during his tenure compared to the regular 60% of the private sector employee’s last year), but it is not free. All federal employees, including senators and congressmen, pay into this retirement plan as well as Social Security. Whether or not they deserve such a plan is yet another issue.

The propagation of rumor has been a pastime of humanity since Adam said "Hey, Eve. I hear that there is a bad apple." The FOAF — ‘Friend of a Friend’ story — is how we all have discovered most of the information that we’ve ever learned. Some of the data was proven true, the rest … not so much. Today the proliferation of the FOAF is supersonic as it moves from one side of the country to the next in seconds.

The most popular e-mail hoaxes today are an incarnation of the chain letter. Some claim to be helping a sick child, others claim to be disclosing secret recipes, but the most popular ones invoke the names of well-known businesses that will send you something in the mail if you just "forward this e-mail to ten people." They claim that the e-mail will be tracked and you will be rewarded for passing on the notice. The original sender assures the recipients that they personally have enjoyed the reward. If they don’t have the FOAF reference, they usually claim to be from some laughable authority saying "I’m a lawyer, so I know…" or "Hi. This is Bill Gates" or "I am Junior Johnson, the founder of Cracker Barrel" (Dan W. Evins is actually the founder of Cracker Barrel’s parent company, CRBRL Group). Though somewhat different, they all implore you to PLEASE FORWARD!!!! and keep the pathetic cycle churning.

Here are a list of the latest e-mail give-away hoaxes as found on www.urbanlegends.com:

• Scads of Cash from Intel/AOL

• Free Ericsson Phones

• Free Nokia Phones

• $50 Gift Certificates from Victoria’s Secret

• $35 Gift Certificates from The Gap

• Scads of Cash from The Newell Co.

• Free Coca-Cola for a month

• $50 Gift Certificates from Cracker Barrel

Not a single one has a crumb of truth.

First off, know this: Forwarded e-mail cannot be tracked. Do you know where the e-mail you sent last night is going today? No. The only way that every single e-mail can be tracked is if every single person in the chain were to forward the message back to the sender and then that person would report the list of forwardees back to where they’d received it and so on and so on. Not impossible, but since it relies on the human element … it will never happen.

Secondly: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Corporations do not arbitrarily hand out money and goods to the Net Potatoes of the world. Stop looking. That ain’t gonna happen, either.

There is nothing inherently dangerous about forwarding e-junk. In a scant few cases, there is some truth. For instance, the "Area code 809 scam," which warns of a dupe that gets you to call a long distance number of a foreign country, is, in fact, real. The claims that it will charge you $2,245 per minute, however, are not. The charges are no more than any other 900-number, but since the call will not be protected under domestic laws, there is no warning of a toll call and you may find no legal leg to stand on if you want to contest the charges.

Another true and very recent urban legend is the notice of the FDA recall on products containing PPA (phenylpropanolamine), a drug found in many over-the-counter cold medications. On November 6, the FDA issued a warning about PPA to consumers and is now asking drugmakers to stop putting PPA into their products saying that it may cause strokes. The FDA is currently working on an all-out ban of PPA, but there is no actual recall yet. Call 888-INFO-FDA for more information.

The only real danger in forwarding most of these urban legends is that you’ll be tipping your hand to those that know better that you’re a bit on the gullible side.

So that’s the lesson. Believe none of what you hear, half of what you see, but have no faith in what you get in your e-mail. Check it out before you act on it.

Other Urban Legends Debunked:

• Menstruating women do not trigger bear attacks. (CA Department of Fish and Game)

• There is no documented case of bees, spiders, or any other insects making a home in cacti or people’s hair.

• Frog/toad urine does not cause warts.

• Daddy longlegs are none of the following: spiders, biters, or venomous.

• There has never been any police report of a baby that was killed and hollowed out as a vehicle to smuggle drugs. (Edna Buchanan, Miami Herald)

• There is no proof that Richard Gere and a gerbil were ever intimate.

• No fast food restaurant uses cow eyeballs, Styrofoam, or feathers in their milkshakes.

• There is no asbestos in tampons or crayons.

• Never did Liz Claiborne or Tommy Hilfiger say they were racist in any interview. Hilfiger has never even been interviewed by Oprah, Larry King, or Elsa Klensch.

• There are no gang initiations that include any of the following: lacing pay phones or ATM envelopes with LSD or cyanide or strychnine, slicing off women’s body parts at the gas station, poking the public with HIV-infected hypodermics, or killing someone who flashes highbeams at their car as the gangs drive with the headlights turned off.

• The "ghost" seen in the background in a scene of Three Men and A Baby is actually a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson that was accidentally left in the dark room. The rumors that it was a ghost of a boy who died in the house in which they shot the scene is false: the scene was shot on a sound stage.

• The visible "hanging man" supposed to have committed suicide on the set of The Wizard of Oz is actually a crewmember who tried to get out of the shot.

• On assignment to do a humor piece about the famed women’s demonstration at the Miss America pageant of 1968, Lindsy Van Gelder, a female journalist for the New York Post, started the rumor that there were bras burned by feminists when in fact only a few women simply threw their bras into a trashcan. In fact, there’s no evidence that any undergarment was ever so much as singed at any women’s rights demonstration in the decade.

• According to Buzz Aldrin, the Great Wall of China is not visible from space.

• Walt Disney was cremated, not frozen.

• There is no federal law protecting praying mantises.

• Cracking knuckles has never been proven to cause arthritis.