Urban Legend

Whenever I get an EMail that makes some outlandish claim, I always head to Snopes to see if it's a well-known falsehood or perhaps even true:

Along with the freest access to knowledge the world has ever seen comes a staggering amount of untruth, from imagined threats on health care to too-easy-to-be-true ways to earn money by forwarding an e-mail message to 10 friends. “A cesspool,” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, once called it.

David and Barbara Mikkelson are among those trying to clean the cesspool. The unassuming California couple run Snopes, one of the most popular fact-checking destinations on the Web.

This NYTimes article about Snopes was interesting. Not surprisingly, they spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down political spam mail.

Missy forwarded me a story via Gail about someone buying a farm in an estate sale and discovering the barn was full of incredibly expensive cars of various vintages worth $35M. According to Snopes, the real story is interesting, but not as dramatic as that.