Urban Legends

Good news about Scott. He had surgery on Monday (Scott has been troubled by a sore tongue since on vacation last August). The surgeon was able to remove a sliver of glass from his tongue, so hopefully Scott will be cured. Scott said his anesthesiologist was funny and helped him relax. The last thing Scott remembered was seeing the guy reading some papers and asking the nurse how to do this type of procedure since it was his first time!

Scott complained that he has been very bored on his liquid diet. He finally ate macaroni and cheese for one meal, meat loaf with mashed potatoes for another, and brought toaster waffles to Sam's. We told him he looked like he had lost a lot of weight! (But honestly, since the surgery was Monday afternoon, and this is only Wednesday morning, and he's had three meals in the meantime, how many meals were liquid?). Dimitri asked me to write that maybe now Scott will stop eating at Panera Bread!

You must get many of those e-mails (and I don't just mean offers of "how to increase my manhood" or "how to claim my award" , although I get plenty of those too). I mean those "forwarded, forwarded, forwarded" cute messages that at first glance are sent in friendship. They seem to wish you health and happiness and good luck. Then you get to the last line and discover that if you don't forward it immediately to more people and back to the sender, you are threatened with bad luck and hard times. I like to live dangerously, so I never pass them along. It seems Pat R. agrees with me; she submitted the picture below.

Now the other type of e-mail that I get frequently contains warnings of imminent danger to myself and my loved ones. Again, on the surface they seem helpful and to have my best interest at heart.....but then they always end with "This is one of those e-mails that if you don't send it, rest assured someone on your list will suffer for not reading it." Ah, the gift of perpetual guilt!

I just got one today stating that my plug-in air freshener could burn my house down. So I checked it at out http://urbanlegends.about.com/ and learned that this is false. This site researches e-mail rumors and myths and posts whether they are true or false. So now you can check those e-mails out for yourself before you decide to pass them along....you know you can't always believe what you read.

Just for fun, here are the latest stories circulating as e-mails. Check it out and see which - if any- are true at http://urbanlegends.about.com/
The Urban Legends Top 25 most popular topics of the past week
Week Ending: 03/16/08

1. Is Barack Obama a Muslim?
2. Amazing Tsunami Picture
3. Hercules, World's Biggest Dog (Photo)
4. 'Do Not Call' List for Cell Phones?
5. 'POSTCARD' Virus Hoax
6. Jamie Lee Curtis - Hermaphrodite?
7. Bill Gates Is Giving Away His Fortune
8. St. Patrick's Day History & Folklore
9. Glade Plug-In Air Fresheners Fire Hazard?
10. Breast Infestation (Photo / Video)
11. John Cleese Letter to the U.S.A.
12. The Urban Legends Slideshow
13. World's Tallest Woman (Photos)
14. Mr. Rogers Was a Marine Sniper / Navy Seal
15. Richard Gere and the Gerbil
16. MasterCard Wedding
17. Live Worm Removed from Patient's Eye (Photos)
18. Did Nostradamus Predict the 9/11 Attacks?
19. Camel Spiders in Iraq (Photo)
20. Half-Human, Half-Animal? (Photo)
21. Pit Bull vs. Porcupine (Photos)
22. 'Creepy Gnome' Video
23. 'Eye of God' in Outer Space (Photo)
24. Reverse PIN # to Signal Police at ATM?
25. Shark Attacks Helicopter (Photo)