..but they still don't get any more true!
from
[url]http://www.snopes.com/humor/lists/fakenews.htm[/url]
This laundry list of "true news stories" began circulating on the Internet during the spring of 1998.
Just in case you were having a "bad day" . . .
The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, they were both eaten by a killer whale.
A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her with an ax leaving her mentally retarded.
A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Until that moment he had been happily listening to his walkman.
Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.
And finally . . .
Iraqi terrorist, Khay Rahnajet, didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.
Your day's not so bad, is it?
Though the list now most commonly takes the form quoted above of five tales of unspeakable irony, earlier versions listed seven incidents. Here are the missing two:
Trying to keep warm in freezing weather, a 50 year old Cypriot huddled over his paraffin heater. Accidentally overturning it, he set himself on fire, screaming in pain as his clothes were engulfed he ran out of his abode and jumped into a nearby reservoir, where he sunk like a stone and drowned.
In 1992, Frank Perkins of Los Angeles made an attempt on the world flagpole-sitting record. By the time he had come down, eight hours short of the 400 day record, his sponsor had gone bust, his girlfriend had left him and his phone and electricity had been cut off.
None of the seven tales is a true story. The one item that comes closest to having something to it is the entry about the luckless flagpole sitter -- Frank Perkins, the man named in the bit, set a pole-sitting record of 399 days in 1976 in San Jose, California. However, the horrific results he supposedly weathered were not reported in the media, leading one to believe a real name and achievement were used to dress up a fanciful tale.
The self-bombing Iraqi tale was reported as a news item in the 27 November 1994 issue of The People. Two things to be kept in mind when considering the validity of that cite: The People is notorious for printing tall tales, and no other news agency carried this story.
Interestingly, a 1966 Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon titled "Sugar and Spies" contains a segment where the coyote attempts to mail a letter bomb to his nemesis. The rigged package marked "postage due" is returned by the road runner disguised as a postman. But of course the coyote opens it, blowing himself up.