Before Forwarding That Scary Email, Check Snopes.com

Charging cell phones exploding. Strawberry-flavored meth on the school playground masquerading as Pop Rocks. A missing 13-year-old named Ashley Flores (who is white and attractive). These are urban legends spread by email, which can float around in various incarnations for years.

The swine flu can be cured by a diet heavy on the onions, and not just because people avoid getting too close. However, you should eat them skin and all. Cut onions will kill you because they are a bacteria magnet.  And speaking of germs, hand driers make bathrooms unsafe by increasing the amount of airborne bacteria. The government (or somebody) is getting ready to disclose your cell phone number to telemarketers. Or so they say.

And then there are the email-based urban legends about our President, of which there are hundreds.  They claim that President Obama owes his election to any or all of the above:

• Cuban Communists
• Al-Quaeda
• Kenya (their monetary contribution was small)
• Brazilian oil barons
• other filthy rich furriners
• the KKK
• an endorsement in the National Review
• radical underground leftists
• radical above-ground leftists
• foaming-at-the-mouth feminists
• the Black Panthers

It's also rumored that Obama deliberately spread the swine flu so that radical Muslims could take over the US when we were all dead. His mother dressed him funny, posed nude and is an ravening atheist. The leader of the free world "was travel to Ukraine and have sex action with many ukranian girls" (don't click on the link that accompanies this one, whatever you do). Our President was sworn in on the Koran; has every Revelatory earmark of the Antichrist; publically ignores veterans and soldiers; thumbs his nose at the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance; PLUS he once held a telephone upside down, props his feet on the Oval Office desk, and has a pile of unpaid parking tickets.

Your next email may say that Lady Gaga is a hermaphrodite, and she donated millions to the Obama campaign (I made that last half up).  Better delete her tracks off the kids' iPods.  The FBI has animated eyes on your computer tracking your every move.  Not sure what we would do if that one were true.  Not a word of truth in any of it, but that doesn't stop millions from freaking out and forwarding it.

When my mom used to say, "they'll tell you a lie and show you a picture of it," she wasn't speaking of friends and family. We tend to trust email forwarded from our kith and kin. However, just because someone you love and trust sends you a forwarded email, that doesn't make the email true. That friend or relative, and thousands of others before them, may have been tricked by any one of thousands of urban legends floating around the internet. Some of these urban legends have been around since 2004 or earlier!  To verify a scary email message before you send it out to "warn everyone you know," check www.snopes.com and find out whether it's just an urban legend.