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Top 10 Net Hoaxes / Urban Legends of 2005 From David Emery,Your Guide to Urban Legends and Folklore. It's time to look back on 2005 — an eventful twelve months by any measure — and revisit the Top 10 Net Hoaxes and Urban Legends of the year. As in 2004, contenders were ranked according to reader interest and longevity as gauged by email submissions, page views and search queries from January through December. Predictably, a number of the most popular email forwards were "golden oldies" from previous years, so a modest amount of subjective culling was required to make room...

This is old, but a good article on myths and urban legends: I always approach an article like this one with a great deal of fear and apprehension. This journal has one basic premise on which it operates, and that is that science and faith do not and cannot conflict. If, in fact, "God created the heavens and the earth," and if God revealed Himself to us through His word the Bible, they have to agree. If they disagree, it is either because we have bad science or bad theology or both. The lesson of history is that there have...

HOW OLD IS GRANDMA? One evening, a grandson was talking to his grandmother about current events. The grandson asked his grandmother what she thought about the shootings at schools, the computer age, and just things in general. The Grandma replied, "Well, let me think a minute, I was born before television, penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, Frisbees and the pill. There were no credit cards, laser beams or ball-point pens. Man had not invented pantyhose, air conditioners, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and the clothes were hung out to dry in the fresh air and man had yet to...

1: 'Mama' Cass choking on a sandwich When 'Mama' Cass Elliot died in her London flat in 1974 at the age of 32, a hasty postmortem suggested she had choked on her own vomit while chomping a sandwich in bed. At 5' 5" and 240 pounds, it was easy to believe that - like a female version of Monty Python's Mr Creosote - Elliot had simply gambled on one mouthful too many. Not so. The coroner's report after her death concluded that Cass died of massive heart failure, brought on by obesity and the strains of crash dieting. Though a...

don’t get it. My favorite columnists are writing volumes to hang Scott Peterson. Crowds at the courthouse resemble lynch mobs. Peterson is being compared to Hitler, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and a hit list of gruesome ax murdering child molesters. But the columnists forgot one thing, where’s the evidence? The news media has laughed a little too hard at the possibility of a satanic cult. If you do the research, there are THOUSANDS of unrecovered missing women and children in California that the media ignores. There ARE childhood survivors of satanic cults who have testified to graphic descriptions of siblings...

There is more than enough evidence that the LLL actively promotes Urban Legends to influence political decisions. As an example, this link simply tracks the references to Urban Legends in prior FReeper posts. Track these urban legends yourself and list the most often used such as "Republicans Suppress Black Voters", Bush Will Privatise Social Security", or "Only the Rich Received a Tax Break".

I have created a public register of "bump lists" here on Free Republic. I define a bump list as a name listed in the "To" field used to index articles. Free Republic Bump List Register

Happening in Houston Reported on KSEV, Houston, The Voice, Jon Matthews show... A soldier on leave from the US Army stopped off in a Conoco station to fill his vehicle and is told by the Middle Eastern man running the place to leave because he is a murderer. Houston FReepers, if you have the information about the address of the station and the number to Conoco, please spread around. Houstonians are already calling into Conoco demanding the oil company take the franchise away from the man who did this to our military. If you live in Houston, please fill this...

TERRORISM: Murder or Accident May 3, 2002; The increasingly strained relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia are causing many incidents from the past to be examined anew. It's never been a secret that Saudi Arabia is home to some very fundamentalist Moslems. The fact that 14 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudis is hard to ignore. During the Gulf War, the United States and Saudi governments went out of their way to prevent incidents between half a million U.S. "infidel" soldiers and Saudi fundamentalists. Just how extensive that effort was may be seen by some of...

Earl Waite recently returned home after spending 18 months at the federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon. Waite, 56, was accused by U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Special Agent Pat Green of having cut nine cords of firewood from state lands to which federal administrators claim ownership in what is commonly recognized as the Salmon-Challis and Sawtooth National Forest. Waite claims he only cut one Douglas fir tree up for firewood and that he had permits allowing him to do so. By summer's end, 1998, Waite and his son had cut and stacked 48 cords of firewood, all but nine cords were...

Students at the Purdue Med School were receiving their first anatomy class with a real dead human body. They were all gathered around the surgery table with the body covered by a white sheet. Then the professor started the class by telling them: quot;In medicine, it is necessary to have 2 important qualities as a doctor: The first is that it is necessary that you not be disgusted.quot; The students saw the professor uncovered the sheet, stuck his finger in the butt of the dead body, withdrew it and sucked it. quot;Go ahead and do the same thing,quot; he told...

CLOSING COMMENTS "ADDRESSING THE JURY - THE AMERICAN PEOPLE" Ladies and Gentlemen: My name is Sherry Peel Jackson. I became a Certified Public Accountant in 1987, I was an Internal Revenue Agent in the Atlanta District for 7 years, and I became a Certified Fraud Examiner in 2001. I am here to summarize the tales of ignorance and deception that you have heard over the last two days and I am here to inform you of the state of the nation so that you may choose your next course of action. You have heard the truth of how the Internal ...

Kilgore Trout was bom in 1907 of American parents on the British island of Bermuda. Trout attended grammar school there until his father's job with the Royal Ornithological Society terminated. The family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where Trout graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1924. Thereafter, he wandered around the country, workng at menial low-paying jobs and writing science-fiction in his spare time. His only known residences during, this period are Hyannis, Mass., Indianapolis, Ind., and Ilium and Cohoes, N.Y. He has been married and divorced three times and has one child, Leo, a veteran of Vietnam. As of ...

A host of witnesses who offered testimony under oath during congressional-style hearings at a "Truth-in-Taxation" forum in Washington, D.C., say the event went off without a hitch and was generally a success. Bob Schulz, head of the We The People Foundation, which helped sponsor the event, said the forum – held Wednesday and Thursday at the Washington Marriott Hotel – "brought to public attention" allegations that the government has "intentionally and systematically conspired to deprive the American People of our Constitutional rights. …" "The hearing was but another step in the people's determination to get to the truth regarding ...

A political misfit with a grand legacy Seen as weak and vacillating, Lester Pearson gave Canada medicare, pensions, and a flag. A hard man to know, admits former Prime Minister KIM CAMPBELL By Kim Campbell If you ask Canadians to identify some of the elements that define us as a country, they will cite our medical plan, our two official languages, our international role as peacekeepers and our maple leaf flag that even Americans put on their backpacks when traveling abroad. All these symbols - including the reputation that would make an American want to be taken for a ...

tangled webPipe DreamsThe origin of the "bombing-Afghanistan-for-oil-pipelines" theory.By Seth StevensonPosted Thursday, December 6, 2001, at 11:32 AM PTA theory making the rounds on the Internet, on the airwaves, and in the press claims that the bombing of the Taliban has nothing to do with a "war on terrorism" but everything to do with the oil pipeline the West wants to build through Afghanistan. Where did this theory start, and how did it spread?The California energy company Unocal seriously pursued building an Afghanistan pipeline in the 1990s, but back then the theorists, such as this Middle East specialist in 1998, argued that ...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version July 21, 2004, 8:30 a.m. Where Urban Legends FallSnopes.com, the ultimate debunker. Many people have attacked Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 by now; my favorite description comes from Christopher Hitchens, who called it "a load of nauseating, boring rubbish from start to finish." But long before the familiar pundits began touring the Michael Moore media circuit, urban-legend debunkers Barbara and David Mikkelson, of the indispensable Snopes.com, were on the case. The husband-and-wife team are not professional folklorists. She describes herself as "just a housewife;" he's a...

This article from October 15, 2003 was basically reprinted today in the New York Post under the title "2000 Vote Myths." It takes on a special relevance because of Kerry's false claim that one million blacks were disenfranchised in the 2000 election: * * * The Florida Myth: An urban legend to fire up the base, by Peter Kirsanow Political myths can overcome facts through sheer repetition: The New Deal ended the Depression, tax cuts caused budget deficits in the Eighties, etc. These myths serve vital partisan imperatives — especially when the policy cupboards of the partisans are bare or...

Traditional Values Coalition has launched a media effort called the “Homosexual Urban Legend Series.” This informational service is designed to provide reporters, editors, and other opinion leaders with accurate information on the relationship between homosexuality and the molestation of children. It will also expose and debunk dozens of factually inaccurate urban legends created by homosexual activist groups to promote their political and social agenda.Please share this website with others. urban legendn. An apocryphal story involving incidents of the recent past, often including elements of humor and horror, that spreads quickly and is popularly believed to be true. Source: The...

THIS DIDN'T MAKE THE NEWS-It figures.</font +2> This is the text of an e-mail that has been going around--My Father sent it to me. This Didn't Make the News At Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC recently the Sergeant Major of the Army, Jack Tilley, was with a group of people visiting the wounded soldiers. He saw a Special Forces soldier who had lost his right hand and suffered severe wounds of his face and side of his body. The SMA wanted to honor him and show him respect without offending, but what can you say or do...