Last Updated on April 14, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
Coke is unpatriotic and anti-God. Pepsi is unpatriotic and anti-God. Target doesn’t support veterans. Dennis Miller supports the war in Iraq. Andy Rooney doesn’t like the French. An atheist made the FCC make CBS discontinue Touched by an Angel.
If you actually read the 72 e-mail forwards that are probably in your inbox when you come in to work every morning, you’ll find lines like those in them. Makes me think I should be glad most people have forgotten the 1993 Diet Pepsi can scare.
Forget needles, pins, screws, crack vials, bullets, and Mercedes-Benz hood ornaments. I found O.J.’s bloody glove in my can of Diet Pepsi! Wait. O.J. didn’t happen in 1993. I must be a time traveler!
When someone told me the other day that Target didn’t support veterans, I suggested looking at Snopes. I checked myself. Sure enough, the rumor contains only a hint of truth and was originally perpetuated by someone with an axe to grind. While Target didn’t provide money to one particular Vietnam War memorial (the applicant didn’t apply correctly), according to the VFW, Target did provide money to fund another Vietnam War memorial.
The next time someone sends you an e-mail forward, you might wish to reply back with a couple of links:
http://snopes.com/info/whatsnew.asp
50 Hottest Urban Legends
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Actually, Dennis Miller *does* support the war in Iraq. He made that clear both in his latest standup (The Raw Feed) and on Bill Maher’s new HBO show “Real Time”. He’s decidedly more conservative these days. The reason? He says he got sick of all of his liberal friends saying Bush is Hitler, Ashcroft is Hitler; to him, there’s only one Hitler, and they don’t come close. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand…
He’s still pro-choice and not particularly fond of the NRA. But he’s also sick of – in his words – “the liberals telling me how !@$#ed up I am, and then taxing me for 48% of my !@$#ed-up-edness”. He also thinks we’re marginalizing testing in schools. Interestingly, he was home schooled. You think I’ve seen a lot of the guy on TV lately? 🙂
That’s true, but the “Dennis Miller on the Iraq War” mail forward that’s being passed around wasn’t written by him.
The “Andy Rooney on the French” forward that’s going around is mostly true too. There’s usually a small element of truth in them (not the Coke and Pepsi cans though–that was a Dr Pepper can, and it was only distributed in 12 states for a short period of time, and the descriptions you see in those mail forwards don’t accurately describe any soft-drink can that was on the market post-9/11) but the problem is usually the size of that element.
The overwhelming majority of e-mail forwards are about as reliable as The Weekly World News.