You know those crazy claims that come in to your e-mail, like the one about Obama not being eligible for security clearance or how some food companies pay a secret tax to the Jews, the first thing you have to do is head to snopes.com to check it out. Really, go to snopes - resist hitting the forward button and sending the nonsense on to your friends. In general, you can depend on Snopes to tease apart fact from fiction.
If you take this link and drag it to your bookmarks, you'll end up with a bookmark you can click to get a random snopes article. I find that the articles are thorough enough you'll almost certain to learn something new.
Like too many Cokes didn't kill a student and apparently Dr. Seuss and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. weren't college classmates, despite claims to the contrary.
Seriously, who makes this stuff up? At least you can enjoy it and know the truth before you start repeating the same legends over and over again.
Funny. This is what I IM'ed a friend on Wednesday:
ReplyDeleteGrant us an email app which scans for bogus emails in Snopes and flags them as such. Then maybe friends will stop sending me all that crap.
Oooh, I like it!
ReplyDeleteIf snopes had an API, you could develop just that.
Come to think of it, why doesn't this exist?
-Ben