Sloan: Urban legends entertaining untruths

My book-of-the-month summary for August is “Encyclopedia of Urban Legends” (Norton, 2001, 525 pages) by Jan Harold Brunvand.

Urban legends are false, but perpetuated as fact through word-of-mouth, social media, lame-stream media, etc.

Excerpts:

• A college library sunk into the ground because the architect forgot to calculate the weight of books.

Wendel Sloan

• Santa is an anagram of Satan, so parents shouldn’t teach their kids about Santa.

• The five-point stars (pentacles) on the American flag are occult symbols chosen by Freemasons.

• An ornithology professor gives a final exam consisting of drawings of bird feet, from which students must identify the birds. The students are outraged and one slaps his test down in front of the professor and declares, “This is the stupidest test I’ve ever seen!” When the professor asks his name, the student removes his shoes, exposes his feet and says, “You tell me!”

• When a child’s Cabbage Patch doll is damaged, her parents send it back to the factory for repair. The manufacturer then sends them a citation for child abuse.

• A football coach recruits players by asking farm boys plowing behind a horse which way to the university. If they lift the plow to point, he signs them to a scholarship.

• A man buys a case of expensive cigars and insures them against fire. After smoking them he files an insurance claim saying they were “destroyed in a series of small fires.”

• A woman could not place a 911 call during an emergency because she could not find the “11” button on the phone.

• Scientists drilling a deep well in Siberia broke through the roof of hell and the screams of the damned could be heard through the hole.

• FBI director J. Edgar Hoover enforced strict guidelines about formatting of memos, including margin widths. He returned one with instructions to “watch the borders.” Immediately, hordes of agents were dispatched to the Mexican and Canadian borders.

• A scuba diver is sucked up from the ocean by a fire-fighting plane refilling its tanks with water — then dropped into a forest fire.

Contact Wendel Sloan at [email protected]