Feeling: cynical
Listening to: Sarah McLachlan - Gloomy Sunday
Reading/Watching: Veronica Mars (Veronica is a stupid woman. Because drunk!Logan is quite cute.)

Folks, I'm going to make this really easy for you.

Snopes.com

Every time you see an e-mail forward claiming "this is a true story!" warning you about pedophiles who dress up as clowns and inject you with herpes, go to this website. Search for "pedophile clown herpes" and find out if this story is true, partially true, or full of poo-poo-ness. You will learn that the gang initiation no-headlights thing is a complete falsehood. You will learn that yes, Jane Fonda said horrible things about Vietnam vets, but she didn't say and do all the things that are attributed to her. And the ones I love best the the ones that prove yes, a lot of Disney animators are weird and twisted.

My dear mother, sweet and considerate as she is, loves to send me e-mail forwards with "warnings that all young women should know", and invariably when I look them up, they're false. This time, it was about the dangers of agreeing to "sample a new perfume" in a parking lot. Allegedly, the perfume is ether, it will immediately render you unconscious, and you will wake up robbed or raped or transmogrified into a circus monkey.

But while reading it, a part of my brain said, "What, doesn't ether take several minutes to knock someone out?" It was used in hospitals back in the day, but even then, it took quite a few long, deep breaths. So unless these so-called perfume robbery victims were trying to drink the ether through their noses, it would not be able to conk them out immediately.

Aside from these forwards making all women terrified to do anything in a parking lot, for any reason, unless we have a club, a taser, and a big guy named Momo, they are also clogging up my inbox, and that's annoying, because you can't just delete e-mail from your mother; it's rude.

So I wrote her back, saying, "Mom, please do me a favor. Every time you get one of these e-mails, go double-check it at this web site before sending it on." She replied with sheepish apologies, saying "I guess I'm just being silly old Mom, worrying too much" and I was hastening to comfort her, saying it was a bit believable, if you don't know about ether, but then I remembered.

My mother is a science teacher. She should have known this was garbage before I did. I swear, working for the public school system is pickling her brain.

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