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If it sounds crazy, it probably is!
"The Born Loser" is a favorite and a recent Sunday panel touched on a topic I've been thinking about. Wilberforce and Hattie had written papers on Abraham Lincoln and the teacher asked them to read them. Wilberforce read, "Lincoln was born in a log cabin, in 1809. He opposed slavery and became the sixteenth president of the U.S.A." The teacher praised his report and asked where he got his information. "The Internet," he replied. Next she asked Hattie to read her report. "Lincoln was brought to earth by aliens. He was seven feet tall, with a glass eye he invented." The teacher was shocked. "That is completely absurd. Where did you come up with that ridiculous information?" Hattie answered, "The Internet." A funny strip but a truthful one, too. The Internet is a wealth of information but it is also a wealth of misinformation. You have to take everything you read on the "World Wide Web" with a grain of salt - much the way you should question everything you read. Heck, before I got in the newspaper business I used to think it was gospel if it was printed in the paper! The same goes for e-mail. Email is a wonderful way to communicate and with postage going up almost yearly now, it may soon be the only way to communicate. But for every valid e-mail I get, there are a half dozen junk or spam mailings. I get details on prescription pills I need, sure-fire stock market tips, low interest mortgage rates, low cost Rolex watches and more. As a friend observed, "What I can't figure out is how do these people get my address and how do they know I need all this stuff?" Then there are the millions awaiting me from some attorney in Nigeria, holding some person's multi-million dollar estate. I just need to e-mail him my bank account number and he'll share the fortune with me. Ditto for many real-sounding banks that say my account is endangered (maybe by the Nigeria lawyer?) and I need to verify my account numbers with them. I do business with two local banks and thankfully neither of them have e-mailed me. Some of the craziest things come in the form of chain emails. News about "In God We Trust" being taken off coins and great essays and quotes by famous and infamous people who never said anything near like what is attributed to them. There are tips on conspiracies about individuals and falsefront companies taking over the U.S.A. I am urged to read them and to send them on to others so that we can get the word out. There's a good site where you can check many of these crazy e-mails regarding politics, social matters, individuals and more. Snopes.com investigates allegations floating around on the Web and either debunks them completely or tells you what kernels of truth, if any, are in them. Of course, the real paranoid folks will tell you snopes.com is a conspiracy too, set up to deliberately deceive us. If you get a lot of the kind of e-mail I am talking about (and I don't know anyone who doesn't), check out snopes.com sometimes. You'll find many of the topics you have gotten emails on analyzed on the site.
Just remember my rule: "If it sounds crazy, it probably is." Of course, that can go for a lot of things…not just the Internet and e-mail!
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