It's About Liberty: A Conservative Forum
Topics => General Board => Topic started by: trapeze on February 27, 2011, 12:45:15 PM
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I was perusing the Top Headlines sidebar at AceOfSpadesHQ as I usually do every morning when I saw this:
Crazy But True TV Fact: Mr. Ed Was Not A Horse (http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp?version=color#toggle) [dri]
Okay, I thought, I'll bite. Clicking on the link brings you to the Snopes website. Snopes is where I usually go to debunk the chain email urban legend nonsense that I occasionally receive from my mother and various other misguided (although extremely earnest) friends who are not, apparently, naturally skeptical.
The Snopes article claims that Mr. Ed was not a horse but instead was a zebra.
I found this to be ridiculous on its face but I read through the entire article anyway. It was well written and had an air of authority to it but still seemed like utter BS to me.
And, as it turns out, it is utter BS.
The Mr. Ed was a zebra story is part of a special section at Snopes called "The Repository of Lost Legends." (http://www.snopes.com/lost/lost.asp#false) The acronym of the title is a clue. Clicking on the Mr. Ed link also yields a clue: It plays an audio clip of Mr. Ed saying, "Maybe I didn't go to college but I'm not stupid."
There are eight other "lost legends" and each one is equally false (and funny if you are in on the joke). Snopes says that they created this section to illustrate a point: You should be suspect of even supposedly reliable authorities (in this case, Snopes). They call it "False Authority Syndrome" and they have a page about it here (http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp).
There has yet to be an acknowledgement from the guy at AceOfSpades who posted the original link that he was duped although several people have noted the fakery in the comments section. So remember: If it smells funny there is usually a pretty good reason. Don't let common sense fall victim to a false authority.
EDIT: That the above story could actually be believed by anyone (and you know that it has) is the reason why a significant majority of our citizens elected a man to be president who is the least qualified person in any room he walks into.
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A zebra would never have stood for it.
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Mr Ed is a horse, of course.
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Of course.
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How many horses did Zorro Have in the original BW series? No cheating.And what were their names?
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. Snopes is where I usually go to debunk the chain email urban legend nonsense that I occasionally receive from my mother and various other misguided (although extremely earnest) friends who are not, apparently, naturally skeptical.
Hey Trap, I got a laugh out of that one. My favorite uncle, a retired lawyer, well read and all around good guy conservative (together we battle wits with the West Coast Liberal Relatives, not a fair fight). He used to send me all these just too good to be true stories and pictures. I am much more cynical about these photo shopped pics and "feel good tales" like the tablecloth made by the Auschwitz survivor's wife who was reunited with her husband in New York in the sixties, blah, blah, blah.
He finally wised up and checks Snopes before he sends out that hooey.
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. Snopes is where I usually go to debunk the chain email urban legend nonsense that I occasionally receive from my mother and various other misguided (although extremely earnest) friends who are not, apparently, naturally skeptical.
Hey Trap, I got a laugh out of that one. My favorite uncle, a retired lawyer, well read and all around good guy conservative (together we battle wits with the West Coast Liberal Relatives, not a fair fight). He used to send me all these just too good to be true stories and pictures. I am much more cynical about these photo shopped pics and "feel good tales" like the tablecloth made by the Auschwitz survivor's wife who was reunited with her husband in New York in the sixties, blah, blah, blah.
He finally wised up and checks Snopes before he sends out that hooey.
It's annoying, really. I get an email from a well-meaning yet incredibly naive person telling me that if I put my name on it and send it out to everyone I know that Bill Gates is going to cut me a check for a hundred thousand bucks. I just shake my head. Then I send out a reply that very patiently describes how this is impossible and I usually put in a link to Snopes where they almost always have a page dedicated to any particular bogus email chain letter.
The last one I got was from my mother (she is elderly and not very computer savvy so I cut her quite a bit of slack) about some kind of virus alert that was "verified by Snopes." Apparently the knothead who sends her this stuff has gotten enough negative feedback (probably because of me doing "reply all" to his nonsense) that he decided to put a Snopes note on his trash. Well, I wrote back that a two-year-old virus is hardly news and that any virus is no problem for anyone due to anti-virus software that darn near everyone uses.
When I saw this story this morning at Ace I decided to send it to him since it was "verified by Snopes" just to twist his nose. I made sure that I emailed my mother so she would be in on it.
Email chain letters are usually as harmless as any other spam except for the amount of time and bandwidth that they take up. I am continually amazed though, that people continue to fall for them.
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This is a true story from just a few short weeks ago.
I was ice fishing with a buddy up at Lake of the Woods on the Canadian border. He told me a story about his dad's buddy who was spear-fishing for Northern Pike (you chainsaw a large rectangle in the ice, put a dark hut over the top of it so you can see underwater, and use a lure to bring fish in so you can spear them). Anyway, my buddy's dad's buddy was spear-fishing and all of a sudden, a Black Lab came up through the hole and just freaked him out! Turns out that another spear-fisherman's dog jumped INTO his spear hole, and he thought the beloved dog was gone forever, and well, it was just a miracle that the dog found his way to the other man's spear-hole....
...about a half hour later, the kid working for the resort came by to check if we needed anything, and we invited him in to fish with us for a while. And wouldn't you know it... the exact same damn thing happened to his cousin's buddy. I looked at my buddy, he looked at me, and we just laughed our heads off. The kid looked at us like we were crazy, so I told him that I had just heard the same story a half hour before, only it was my buddy's dad's buddy. He actually took a few moments wondering if my buddy's dad's buddy and his cousin's buddy were possibly the same guy. Then we REALLY laughed!
Urban legends are amazing things.
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Soooo, the Black Lab's name was Buddy??????
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This is a true story from just a few short weeks ago.
I was ice fishing with a buddy up at Lake of the Woods on the Canadian border. He told me a story about his dad's buddy who was spear-fishing for Northern Pike (you chainsaw a large rectangle in the ice, put a dark hut over the top of it so you can see underwater, and use a lure to bring fish in so you can spear them). Anyway, my buddy's dad's buddy was spear-fishing and all of a sudden, a Black Lab came up through the hole and just freaked him out! Turns out that another spear-fisherman's dog jumped INTO his spear hole, and he thought the beloved dog was gone forever, and well, it was just a miracle that the dog found his way to the other man's spear-hole....
...about a half hour later, the kid working for the resort came by to check if we needed anything, and we invited him in to fish with us for a while. And wouldn't you know it... the exact same damn thing happened to his cousin's buddy. I looked at my buddy, he looked at me, and we just laughed our heads off. The kid looked at us like we were crazy, so I told him that I had just heard the same story a half hour before, only it was my buddy's dad's buddy. He actually took a few moments wondering if my buddy's dad's buddy and his cousin's buddy were possibly the same guy. Then we REALLY laughed!
Urban legends are amazing things.
Yeah, like the time I had too much to drink and decided to walk home from the bar and then suddenly all those bigfoot rumors started.