|
Top:Society and Culture:Mythology and Folklore:Urban Legends:
This one was forwarded to me in the guise of a funny story that might be true.... Well, let's see if it is
I started by looking at the the AFU website, but I didn't have any luck. Found out a little later I wasn't searching for quite the right thing. I looked at the Associated Press website, but couldn't find anything there, either (although their online archives only go back to 1997). So, I looked at the Log Cabin Democrat (Conway, Arkansas) -- nothing in their two-years of archives, either. How about the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette? Nothing there either. Okay, at this point this is starting to get pretty fishy (like it wasn't to begin with?). I also visited Deja News, the searchable database of practically every Usenet newsgroup posting in living memory. That cinched it. This story has appeared in several different forms. Most of them involve Arkansas and several of them involve someone named Linda, but the stories can't agree whether Linda was the "victim" or the Good Samaritan. Not all of the stories claim to be straight from the AP. The dates on the stories were all over the map. The ending line about blonde-ness appears to be a recent mutation. It's almost believable because many of us (myself included when I worked in the dairy case at Safeway in high school) have seen canisters of cheap biscuit dough explode quite abruptly and with a pretty good pop. So, sure, it COULDA happened. Oh well. It fails the Sniff Test. The complete origins of this story are lost in the mists of time now, but this one definitely fails. For an even more in-depth discussion, including sources, visit Barbara Mikkelson's page on this urban legend.
Page created 3/3/99 by Michael Heggen. |
© 1995-2004 by Michael Heggen. All rights reserved, except as noted. |