that
an erection was facilitated by a bone displacing from the interior of one's pelvis and occupying hitherto flaccid space

and not by the usual bloody engorgement

[not me you understand, 'a laddie at school']
( writerblock ... embedding disabled by request on, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 10:12, Reply)

Spare rib
Someone once told me Prince had several ribs removed so he could pleasure himself orally.

It sounds so plausible. And to this very day I still don't know if it's true or not.

(Probably is... dirty purple love monster)
( Joe Scaramanga with a G-double-O-D vibration, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 10:03, Reply)

URBAN LEGEND
SALAD CREAM MAKES YOU IMPOTENT - TRUTH
(alex the ghost, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:57, Reply)

here's one
Myself and a mate once convinced another friend that the rotating signs found outside some shops (that revolve in even the slightest breeze), are in fact 'wound up' in the opposite direction by the shopkeeper (or other lucky staff member) before the shop opens each day. The sign then 'unwinds' for the duration of the day. I wouldn't say my mate was gullible, or usually open to such persasion, but within 6 months he became a Hare Krisna...
(5 Lighters for a Pound, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:52, Reply)

:o)
I once told my mate that Ken Dodd died.

"Did he?"

"No, Doddy"
(davefromkent, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:39, Reply)

Scatman John
I have been telling people he died in a tragic moped accident for years... not sure why!
(Minty Hit, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:34, Reply)

umm
My particularly gullible friend believed sparrows are baby pigeons.
The reason why there are no pigeons around crazy chicken, is yes, because the pigeons are the chicken!!
Also the only form of contraception that is 100% reliable is doing it immediately after eating a gherkin in a tent standing on one leg winking with your left eye and trying to lick your right shoulder…
(AnGeBloWz, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:28, Reply)

Oranges and exams
This one went round our school, years before we had the internet to research such lies:

It's exam season (O Levels). Part way through an exam one kid stands up and says:

"I am an orange. Oranges do not take exams."

And walks out...


I always thought it probably wasn't true but really wished it was.


Edit: *And* I believed that Lucy Lawless was really a lesbian (although wasn't taken in by TATU).
(Wascally Weasel now with 100% fewer jokes., Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:20, Reply)

personalised dictionary
A publishing company makes dictionaries with the word "gulliable" removed, and the name of your choice as the definition of "stupid".

I'd buy that!
( no cake for the impuritay Patrick Stewart hasn't aged since, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:20, Reply)

I'll have to wear a brown paper bag over my head after confesing to this...
The first time anyone told me about the Blair Witch Project, they didn't tell me it was a movie, so I went to the site... and bought it!
*sigh*... THE SHAME...!
(Mikash, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 9:19, Reply)

Fires
Friend of a friend story...

last week a mate was in [skanky city] when he parked his car down a side street to save on parking fees.
Some local kids noticed him and said,
"Give us a tenner and i will make sure nothing happens to your car"
"My dogs in there and hes clever so dont try anything!" was his reply.
Aparently the kids thought for a while and said "can your dog put out fires?"
My mate paid them the tenner.
(Fishbone-didi, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 8:57, Reply)

My brother
started the rumour that Bullseye host Jim Bowen died on 9/11 and there was so much about the disaster in the papers that they couldnt fit it in. My other brother believed him for several months till he saw him on TV.
( DumbMonkey The penis mightier than the sword, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 8:54, Reply)

You're just not going to believe this
but when I was at university, a friend of a friend (honest! really! I can supply names!) who was at another college decided to spend his whole budget for a semester on a nice hi-fi. When pedants pointed out that he might need some money to, say, eat during this 15-week period, he proudly responded that he had thought of that: he had bought a huge sack of oats and was going to live off porridge - the monotonous diet would be worth it, he said, as he had such a bitchin' hi-fi.

Within a few weeks he got scurvy from living off porridge. And then the hi-fi got nicked.

The really interesting thing is that I told this story to somebody I was working with during a summer job a couple of years after. He laughed, and I thought that was the end of it. I ran into him about six months later and was delighted when he told ME the same anecdote, swearing blind that it was a close friend of his who had had the whole scurvy/hi-fi experience. Just goes to show how these urban legends get perpetrated, I suppose.
( Olembe Refuses to write in this space, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 8:05, Reply)

Unknown Armies
Here's some funny rumours and actual facts form the game Unknown Armies (note that I take no credit for these):

"The interstate highway system was actually laid out as a giant magikal glyph to enable the summoning of a demonic legion in case of a Soviet attack."
Actual Spontaneous Combustion (ruling out cigarettes, cashmere sweaters, and questionable testemony) is the result of an infection of a bacteria that produces a flammable byproduct. The odds of a person getting enough of a build-up to catch fire is one in ten million.
"In Memphis, there's a phantom Piggly Wiggly. It's where the local ghost's buy their groceries."
A way make a zombie was actually practiced in Haiti. It involved poisoning a man so that he appears dead (but is actually alive) and won't wake up until he's been buried. The witch-doctor (and his assistants) would then dig up the coffin and beat the person into submission (being buried alive and brutally beaten would probably be enough to break anyone). Afterward, the newly-made zombie was fed a plant called "zombie cucumber" to keep him obedient and complacent.
"Brendan Behan's pint glass sits behind a bar in a Dublin Pub. Any who drink from it have words flow from them, but at what price?"
"Bigfoot has a Social Security Number."

10 karma points if you can tell me what is fact and what is fiction.
100 karma points if you can tell me what their explaination for Elvis is.
(lothric, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 7:34, Reply)

The most elusive of beasts (Cabbits are a close second)....
When I was a kid, I was utterly convinced of the existence of Jackelopes (cross between a jack-rabbit and an antelope). As I grew older and wiser I began to suspect that they were entirely a matter of fiction. However, doubt was banished when I saw a stuffed one in a resturant a few weeks ago.

Additionally:
Damn you SatchmoR! You made me lose the game! Again! Damn it!!! Damn Yooooooooou!!
(lothric, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 6:46, Reply)

re:Murray Walker
he WAS a marketing exec so maybe its the double bluff.

Thatcher invented Butterscotch Angel Delight
( Fire & Forget it's the only way to be sure, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 6:30, Reply)

I once believed
that reading four pages of QotW would make my essay do itself.

Bastards!
(28:06:42:12, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 5:23, Reply)

grunge monks
Some peole I knew lived next to a Buddhist monastery (in inner-city Sydney), and my friend told me that "the monks are always listening to Nirvana". I took it that they must listen to intense-wall-of-soundy music as a way of clearing their minds, and one day we were driving past the same place and I said something along the lines of "the monks apparently listen to Nirv...oh".
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 4:47, Reply)

monkey pirate
You mean RURAL legend, matey.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 4:10, Reply)

My Sister,
devil bitch that she was, once convinced me that because my first name was written on a war memorial, while on an otherwise plesant walk through a park in Widnes, that I had to go and fight in the great war...Absolutely no-body could console me as I was to be torn from my parents at the sprog age of 6 to go and shoot Germans.

When I had gotten used to the idea I told all my friends that "I had survived", and felt like a right prat when the dinner lady told everyone different.

I know this is off topic completely, but just needed to share.
(Feeb is a smooth operator, operating correctly, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 3:20, Reply)

urban legend
Creationism
(monkey pirate, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 3:09, Reply)

Rivalry with my girlfriend
My girlfriend and I have tried many times to trick the other. It started on April Fool's Day when she convinced me she was already married.

Recently I got her when she was sitting in her dad's new vibrating chair. She didn't know how it worked, and I was hiding the remote. I convinced her that it was weight-sensitive, because every time I touched her I would turn it on or off. I had her going for a while.

It was an encore of a trick I did on the plane a month ago. I was flying with a large group of friends, and each seat had those little remote controls for the radio, TV, and...lights. I convinced everyone that the lights were motion sensitive, and I could turn mine on just by pointing at it. I would turn it off by blowing on it. Meanwhile the control was safely concealed in my hand. Nobody else could make theirs work (aside from my girlfriend there were three other guys doing it). I let my girlfriend try to turn on my light to "prove" to her that mine worked and all the others were broken.

Christ, I hope these weren't too boring or difficult to understand.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 2:44, Reply)

Fan death
Koreans have this insane belief that the electric fan is the deadliest household appliance. Every summer, many deaths are reported in the papers attributed to fan death.

If you fall asleep with the fan on and the windows closed, Koreans believe you will likely die.

How does this work? There are a number of theories:
-the fan on exposed skin will cause hypothermia
-the fan creates a vacuum around your face, causing you to suffocate
-the fan unmixes the air, separating it at a molecular level and pushing the oxygen away from your face
-the fan burns the oxygen itself
-and when they're cornered, "Koreans have a unique physiology which makes them prone to fan death while other races are unaffected"

I first heard it from my Korean boss, who warned me to keep a window open. Curious, I asked why. It led to me asking every Korean I knew, and they all said the same thing. I even asked a doctor, and he told me in very scientific terms how a fan can kill. And the people most likely to tell you, "No, that's total bullshit," the FAN MANUFACTURERS THEMSELVES, well, they make sure to include safety tips on the instruction manual so you will keep the window open.

My girlfriend insists that this is not superstition, and has basis in science, even though we've slept together with the fan on many, many times.

Okay, I never fell for it. Hope this isn't too off-topic. I just find it weird that an entire country would believe it and insist it's scientific. Then again, it's not so weird when you compare it to belief in the Jesus vampire.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 2:38, Reply)

A
mate of mine used to claim that his girlfriend's aunt was the woman who got sprayed gold in "Goldfinger".

Oh and another friend managed to convince her boyfriend that Belfast was an hour ahead of the rest of the UK.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Fri 6 Jan 2006, 1:42, Reply)

Purple Acki
hahaha Useless_rocker we in Wigan had the purple acki round our way.

All the kids used to say 'yeah he lives down my street' he lived on every bloody street in Wigan!

Also the rumour was he used to carve his initials with a knife into the poor lads arse of whom hes just bummed.
(PieEater, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 1:29, Reply)

I didn't fall for this but it had some gullable members of my 6th form confused for a couple of days . . .
A typical conversation went like this:

1st Friend: Did you know that when you cook a cucumber, it becomes a courgette?
2nd Friend: No it doesn't thats stupid!
1st Friend: No really it does, didn't you even know that?!
2nd Friend: Really?
1st Friend: Yep, God's honest truth.
2nd Friend: Seriously? Well I never knew that!
( FreudianSlap, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 1:09, Reply)

You spin me right round baby
CDs and DVDs in Australia (or indeed, anywhere far south of the equator) have to go the other way around, and are therefore incompatible with UK/US/Canadian equipment.

Honest! Why? Well, surprisingly quite simple when you think about it. As we all know, manufacturing processes are never perfect, and so the discs are rarely perfectly circular. This imperfection results in significant wobbling when the discs are spun really fast -- something that the players hardware has to be able to correct for. Unfortunately, when the disc is spinning in the opposite direction to the earths rotation, the Coriolis effect induces instabilities that hardware of the player is unable to correct for (due to requiring third and higher order differential stability correction in the mechanical hardware), so therefore the player (and discs) have to be manufacturered to rotate in the direction /matching/ the spin of the earth in the region that the player is manufactured from.

This is why you can swap UK and US discs, but Australians can't use discs from the US/UK and vice-versa.
( duckbilledfattypuss full of fatty pussy duckness, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 0:56, Reply)

Once convinced a friend
that Tom Cruise played himself in "The Last Samurai". He has Japanese roots and wanted to follow up on them. Needless to say she hadn't seen the movie and came looking for me as soon as she did. Apparently she had told lots of people, who all thought she was a looper.
(mattressking, Fri 6 Jan 2006, 0:47, Reply)