If Michael Jackson has taught me anything. He has taught me that zombies cant resist dancing (watch the Thriller video). I think this would be a good starting point for any zombie survival strategy. Unless this is just an urban legend.

a) I can't tell - is the water in the cup of the one with the fork bubbling?
b) aren't you not supposed to put metal in the microwave?
c) what is being advocated here? use glasses with imperfections, or not to microwave for so freakin' long?
d) what's this about not microwaving water on its own?

there are so many urban legends about the alien technology of the microwave.

Of all the stories from the original book, The Darwin Awards, this is one that was found to be an urban legend, hense it never actually happened. Sorry to burst anyones bubble...

Cute video, but the some "facts" presented are nothing but fabrications and urban legends.

e.g.- Walt Disney NEVER worked as a creative asset for any newspaper. Although, he delivered the Kansas City Star and Times for his father's paper route when he was a child, Disney was never hired by a newspaper as a cartoonist. - there were no openings.

e.g - Thomas Edison once said that a teacher considered him "addled". The alleged note to his mother Nancy saying he is "too stupid to learn" is an imaginary figment.

e.g - (The Great Moments with) Abraham Lincoln was first elected to public office at the age of 24, became a member of the bar at 28, after teaching himself law, after 8 years as a State Rep. became a US Rep at age 36. Some failure.

e.g - Hilary & the Donald. Well, that stuff is true.

I like the urban legend about cops hooking a suspect up to a copying machine. When the suspect made a statement, the cops pressed the button and printed a copy with "HE'S LYING" written on it.


So the poor girl was killed by Jason "My Name Is Earl" Lee?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Maybe they specialize in copulatory sheets for Orthodox Jews?


You mean the ones with the holes in them? Hah anyone dare me to dress up as an othodox jew - go in and ask for them?

edit: actually that hole in the sheet thing, is all an urban legend - I feel silly, I thought it was real.
http://www.snopes.com/religion/sheet.asp

There is a great german movie on this urban legend (aptly titled "Paul is dead"), in which a boy discovers all kinds of "evidence" (the Abbey-Road-Cover thing, O.P.D.-badge, backward masking etc.) for the cover-up of Paul's death - only to find out later on that he has been fooled by his older friend, who introduced him to this "conspiracy".

Like most videos like this I've seen here, this one is full of crap. You can have a fine time on snopes.com checking the things it says. For instance, the inventor of 7-up is almost certainly not an albinio, and the dot first appeared on the label after the inventor was dead. You can find tons more of statements that are either false or completely unsubstantiated.

So this video is just a sequence of facts/urban legends in plain type. The first point isn't even a sentence.

I'm just explaining my downvote.

MarineGunrock, I remember hearing about the "tumbling bullet" wound from a 5.56mm but have read numerous articles since then refuting that logic. It's apparently an "urban" legend that refuses to die.

As best as I can recall, the only reason for switching calibers was weight. A soldier could carry seventy 30-06, ninety 7.62mm (essentially a shortened .30 cal), or a whopping 210 5.56mm at a given weight. The potential reduction in the weight of the rifle was also a factor (bigger calibers require heavier rifles). There was initially great resistance to this caliber switch, precisely because it produced a much less significant wound. Yes, the velocity was slightly higher, but the 50-grain bullet is hard pressed to produce a wound channel anywhere near the size of a bullet weighing 150-grains and almost twice the cross-sectional area. The disparity increases rapidly when you factor in how much more quickly the lighter caliber loses energy over distance.

Lower lethality, however, was considered a worthwhile trade-off, especially since wounding the enemy is tactically almost as good as killing him and the extra 120 bullets made such wounds significantly more likely. There were also small concerns about the diminished range of the 5.56mm, but that's why we have snipers that carry larger calibers. As far as I am aware, most states do not allow 5.56mm for deer hunting because it is significantly more likely to produce a non-lethal wound. It's been a while (a decade or more) since I've looked into this, but I recall seeing that ballistic tests in every kind of medium showed the 5.56mm to be far less deadly than the 7.62mm, and that's without giving any consideration to how much more quickly the lighter 5.56mm loses energy to range and/or shielding, let alone loss of accuracy to crosswinds or intervening light cover.

History has proven the move to 5.56mm to be the right one but it was definitely a trade-off.

Interestingly, the Soviets made a similar decision about calibers but stuck with a heavier round. They shaved off weight, but not as much, by going with a 7.62x39mm as compared to a 7.62x51mm NATO round with a 110-gr(?) vs. 150-gr round. Their heavier round could punch through shielding a little better than the 50-gr 5.56mm, but they gave up a lot of velocity and the flatter trajectory and accuracy that comes with it. And they still couldn't carry as many rounds as soldiers equipped with the 5.56. I don't know who made the right choice, but I do know that in both case, weight (and hence more ammo) was the determinative factor that outweighed the loss of lethality.

I dunno about that prosthetic theory. "brother of a friend..." sounds like urban legend. Snopes comes to mind; let's see: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/tongue.asp

So Simmons himself, anyway, claims it's natural. That doesn't explain the world record though because, yeah, Simmons' looks longer than this guy's. Maybe it's more about camera angles.

the eskimo / inuit snow thing is obviously an urban legend.

English probably has just as many words for snow. sleet, hail, powder, slushy, icy, (ok, well ask a snowboarder they probably have more words )..

I like the idea of the serious invocation, or something along those lines (would be helpful for buzzkill documentaries too- I likes em, but somedays I just want kittens)

Anyway, about the snuff. I have always felt that snuff videos were, by definition, filmed with the outright intention from the beginning of capturing a death on film... the motivation of course being titillation or to somehow profit from such activities.

Wikipedia's article on the subject addresses such problems of definition and comes to somewhat the same conclusion:

"The term snuff film does not, at least currently, have a clear definition. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor any U.S. agency have put forth legislation or terminology that would define the term "snuff film" authoritatively. Some possible definitions include; a number of acts (murder of animals, faked deaths, accidental deaths, suicides, murders) which are filmed and only later distributed for commercial gain and/or entertainment. Some definitions state that snuff films must be pornographic in nature.[1]

The most common definition of a snuff film is of a motion picture showing the actual murder of a human being that is produced, perpetrated, and distributed solely for the purpose of profit. This definition thereby excludes recordings of murders caught by accident, and videotapes of actual murders that were never intended to be released as entertainment films. Given these criteria, the existence of snuff films is highly questionable, and commercial snuff films have long been relegated by skeptics to the realm of urban legend and moral panic. To date, no film generally accepted as fitting this definition has been found.[2]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_film

I agree with this notion... so therefore, accidents, assassinations, and wartime casualties do not fall into the definition of snuff... which then brings up the debate of just what it is people do not want on the sift. Is it all deaths on film? Is it just the ones that seem highly exploitive in nature?

I personally would draw a line at videos that were filmed with the intent of capturing a murder, and somehow profiting from it... vids of terrorists beheading journalists would therefore fall into this category, and I, for one, would not want them on the sift. But I believe there are many instances of people being killed on film that have great historical and political significance, and although I do realize that a great many people who use this site predominately use it as a way to catch the latest family guy/colbert top 15, there are also many of us who see the sift as having great potential as a means to aggregate and organize the video content/culture of the internet. So, therefore, by defining 'snuff' as pertaining to all deaths, we are excluding a lot of very important content.

For example:
The Zapruder film, for one, is not snuff, although it has already been banned for this reason. Mr. Zapruder never set out that day with the intention of filming the death of JFK, he did not then turn around and begin distributing unmarked copies of it at underground porn-fairs... it was a terrible terrible event that was caught on tape. Personally I am still highly miffed that it was removed from this site.

Another example:
Footage of Holocaust victims and death camp liberations could potentially also fall into this category if we go crazy with this anti-snuff campaign as it could be argued that many of the people in those films are in the process of dying, albeit slowly, but dying all the same... in any case, for footage such as this, a *serious tag would definitely be warranted as I doubt very many people want to watch dead bodies being piled up like cord-wood while having their morning coffee... however, I also doubt very many people would campaign for the bannation of such films due to their historical significance, the need to never forget, etc, etc.

As for wartime casualties, which is probably where we are going to have the most content to argue about...

War is a messy business dammit. People die. Lots of people die. By banning the transmission of images of death from the front lines were are only further insulating ourselves from this very real, very important facet of warfare. It goes right along with banning images of military coffins being unloaded... what people do not see, they do not think about, when they do not think of the end result of war it is easier for them to become complacent to the conflicts being waged in their interest, or in their name. In light of this, I feel it is horribly negligent on our part to censor that aspect of war... I would be all in support of some sort of function that would allow people to block such vids from their view... if they want to remain ignorant of the harsh realities of warfare that is their choice... but it is a reality, and an extremely important one that I feel deserves acknowledgment and the right to be gathered, brought here, and cataloged right alongside all other video documents of the realities of this world and it's political/historical troubles.

Great post! In the slasher movie 'Urban Legend', Robert Englund is a university lecturer who gives a lecture on Urban Legends in which he talks about Mikey. The students say that Mikey died from consuming Pop Rocks while drinking Coca-Cola. While he informs them that this is simply an urban legend they are still reluctant to volunteer to drink Cola and eat Pop Rocks at the same time.

"Stupid" eh? Nice one Theo.

There are perfectly reasonable arguments as to why the Saddam vid could be posted, many of which have been articulated.

Then there is a mechanism in place for submissions to be thrown out or one could let the votes tell the story. Either way "the system", as it's been designed, works to exclude items you or others don't like or are deemed to fall foul of the posting guidelines.


To be honest I find your overbearing, net cop behaviour a bit more worrying.


One other thing that is ticking me off is the casual familiarity with which the term "snuff" is being wielded. That's a term subject to considerable interpretation.

I quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_film;

"The term "snuff film" does not, at least currently, have a clear definition. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America, The Federal Communications Commission, The Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor any U.S. Agency have put forth legislation or terminology that would define the term "snuff film" authoritatively. Some possible definitions include; a number of acts (murder of animals, faked deaths, accidental deaths, suicides, murders) which are filmed and only later distributed for commercial gain and/or entertainment. Some definitions state that snuff films must be pornographic in nature.[1]

The most common definition of a snuff film is that its a motion picture showing the actual murder of a human being and is produced, perpetrated, and distributed solely for the purpose of profit. This definition thereby excludes recordings of murders caught by accident, and videotapes of actual murders that were never intended to be released as entertainment films. Given these criteria, the existence of snuff films is highly questionable, and commercial snuff films have long been relegated by skeptics to the realm of urban legend and moral panic. To date, no film generally accepted as fitting this definition has been found.[2]"

The numbers in brackets are citations. In my opinion, the Saddam video is certainly not snuff.


Snopes also has an article addressing the question of the existence of one accepted definition of snuff - http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/snuff.asp

They argue that it's a myth and in this day and age I can see why. It's simply alot easier to fake the material.

So where does this leave the Saddam video? Well by not applying a knee-jerk definition this will allow us to calmly assess whether similar submissions are suitable for the Sift, on a case by case basis.

*geek hat*

Contrary to popular belief, lemmings do not actually commit mass suicide. The urban legend was started by Disney through a documentary that declared that lemmings killed themselves en masse by running off cliffs, while really what was shown was doctored footage a few lemmings dying through accidents in their migrations made to look like crowds of lemmings.

http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm