Urban Legends

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, one in the  USA, another in the UK and one is in the far east.

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If you are at all active on the Internet, you will receive urban legends from time to time from your friends.  These are like a virus in that they mutate over time and recur in your inbox.  Some are pretty subtle, but some not.

You can usually spot the bad ones because they have a lot of different colours and fonts.  Others are more subtle.  You can do yourself a favour by ignoring most of them and by not passing them on to your friends.  They will come around again and again anyway.  You can't  kill them.

Are they dangerous?  Usually not at the start, but if they target somebody or some industry, they can be.  If you want to check them out directly, here is a hint.  There is an Internet Site that makes a living by tracking such things down.  Put this address in your bookmarks

http://urbanlegends.about.com/

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08/05/2009 09:57 PM

In the recent movie DOUBT there was a sermon about a gossip going to her confessor.  She asked if gossip was a sin and the priest told her it was. 

For her penance he asked her to take a pillow up to the top of her apartment building and cut it with a knife and let the feathers fly to the four winds.  Then she was asked to go collect each and every one of them. When she  said that would be impossible, the priest had  made his point.

By passing on an urban legend to your address book of friends, you can be assured that you cannot collect them in a bag.  There is no 'undo' for a bad piece of information.  It gets worse over time

The Internet is not the primary source of Information for most of the literate population.  If you want to know something, you 'GOOGLE' it.  Are the results 100%?  No, of course not.  We are pretty good at ignoring bad information sometimes