On 8 Jan 99, Brett Lorenzen wrote:
> Don't normally pass such things along, but figured this crowd would get
> a kick out of this one.
> ------------------------------------------
> I know this guy whose neighbor, a young
> man, was home recovering from having been
> served a rat in his bucket of Kentucky
> Fried Chicken.
Heh. This rather neatly incorporates most of the more egregious urban
legends floating aroung the net (and posted beside the office Xerox
machine, and recounted as "absolutely true!" by guys you meet in bars,
and so on.)
I've been interested in such pop mythology for a long time, well before
there was an Internet -- the net has just made it much easier and more
efficient to circulate these stories. But some of them -- the deep-fried
KFC rat, for instance -- have been around for decades. I first heard that
one when I was seven years old in 1963, sitting around a bonfire at
summer camp.
Definitions vary, but an "urban legend" usually has these identifying
characterisitics:
1 - It is typically told as having happened to a friend or acquaintance.
"My sister's boyfriend knows this guy..."
2 - It usually reflects worries or superstitions about social, environmental
and political matters over which we have no control: bugs and rodents
hidden in our food, "big corporations" manipulating our lives, the fear of
AIDS (or "infection" of our computers if not our bodies), and so on.
3 - They are often moral fables -- someone gets comeuppance for bad
behaviour, or rewarded for clever/virtuous behaviour.
4 - In some but not all cases, they may contain a germ of truth. The
"little dying boy/girl wanting postcards" scenario did happen, albeit on a
small scale -- the child in question was in hospital and did want mail, so a
radio station started a local campaign. The kid got better, the campaign
ended, but years later the story continues to flourish.
The best Web source of urban legend info is at:
http://www.snopes.com/
Be forewarned though, it's a rather poorly laid-out site, and has an
infuriating embedded MIDI file that has blasted my eardrums out more than
once when I've loaded the page.
-----------
Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.almonte.com/
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