URBAN MYTHS

s'a mif gawdelpus

I have another one but its temporarily forgotten. Will recount as soon as senile moment passes

ah now

this is TRUE

in Winsdor great park, swans have gone missing.

DNA samples prove they were eaten by Albanians.

There's the one about involuntary organ donations. Something along the lines of a stranger buying you a drink in a hotel bar, then you awaken in a tub full of ice. Soon you realize, to your dismay, that you're short one kidney!

This actually made the email rounds, as a warning to be careful, when I worked in a hospital...

I saw a similar story on tv.

interesting. cant think off hand of other internal organs that come in pairs.

that is ones you would not notice should one go awol. Ovaries yes, but not all of us have those. Lungs...possibly, but I reckon you would spot one gone.

As for hearts spleens gonads and colons, they would all be obviously missed or are singular. In which case you are dead.

Eyes?...They could take your eyes, without you seeing that they had gone.

unless you looked (one eyed) in a mirror

Believe me I'm no pathologist or even butcher, but I dont know of internal organs in pairs.

I'm not sure if the following is an urban myth, but not minder
embarrassing than the original story here....

While in line at the bank one afternoon, my toddler decided to release some pent-up energy and ran amok. I was finally able to grab hold of her after receiving looks of disgust and annoyance from other patrons. I told her that if she did not start behaving "right now" she would be punished. To my horror, she looked me in the eye and said in a voice just as threatening, "If you don't let me go right now, I will tell Grandma that I saw you kissing Daddy's pee-pee last night!" The silence was deafening after this enlightening exchange. Even the tellers stopped what they were doing. I mustered up the last of my dignity and walked out of the bank with my daughter in tow. The last thing I heard when the door closed behind me were screams of laughter.

Guy finds out his fiancee is cheating on him. Gets some pictures of her making out with the other guy.

Fiance's family funds the whole wedding, a large elegant bash. Man goes along with wedding plans, never mentioning to her about the cheating.

Best man stands up to do his speech, and directs everyone to look under their chairs. Everyone's got an envelope taped under their chair. Inside is a picture of her and the guy she cheated with. All set up to embarass her.

That was emailed all around, "THIS WAS ON JAY LENO!" and all this crap. I believe I read it's a myth.

OOh! I like it, Slappy.

CJ, were you taking his deposit to the bank?

HAHA! Now you have AIDS, too!

I shouldn't have written in the "I" form. It wasn't me, of course!

That's what SHE said.

The biggie when i was a teenybopper was the hook-on-the-door story . . . the version vary, but basically a couple (who knew a friend of a friend, etc.) were out parked in the backwoods, "makin' out," and they hear on the radio about a psychopath who has escaped from the nearest state hospital (before the states dismantled the systems, the repository of the mentally unwell--the loony bin). Said psychopath is a one-handed dude, with a hook on the other arm. The culmination of the story is that when the couple get back home, and he gets out to open the door for her, he finds a hook hanging on the door handle.

Don't sign your organ-donor card! EMS will let you DIE so that the hospital can harvest your organs and make big $$$$$!

Relatives of an old girlfriend told this one at a Thanksgiving dinner some years ago: Friends of theirs went on vacation in Maine with their grandma. Day before they were to go back home to Philly, grandma died. They had to get back to work, didn't have time to do death certificates, and it's all kinds of rigamarole to transport a body across state lines, so they dithered, and finally decided to wrap grandma up in a tarpaulin and put her in the canoe in the roof rack and get it all straightened out when they got back home. So they started out. Four or five hours into the trip, they were hungry and bladders bursting and gave in to the inevitable and pulled into a rest stop on the turnpike. ate, peed, came out to the parking lot. And their car had been stolen.

Much appalled, or humorous, comment and speculation from her extended family on what happened then, what the thieves thought when they examined their loot, etc.

Having anthropological background, this was kinda like impromptu fieldwork to me, because one of the early anthropologists, forget who now, maybe Alfred Kroeber, had collected this story first in the 1920's, when they'd've gone on vacation in a Model T. This was before anyone had invented the term "urban legend". His students had backtracked the story from teller to teller, and it was amost invariably presented as having actually happened to a friend or a relative of a friend. But when they got to that persone, whom it supposedly had happened to, they found it had actually happened to a friend of theirs, and when they got to that person, they said, no, not them, but actually to a friend of theirs, and so on back. Same story, circulating for fifty years. And probably still today, someone coming back from vacation in Maine pulls into a rest area with a canoe on their roof....

Ann Landers used to be really good for this. Every month or so, she'd inadvertently publish an urban legend that someone had sent her (she did the organ donor one, I think, and warned everybody to be very careful in hotels they'd never stayed at before).

Makes me miss Ann Landers so much to read that, username. Think of the public service she performed so well for so long...