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Those dastardly hoax e-mails!
So what kind of e-mails am I ranting about? Well, I'll tell you. People send me forwarded e-mails a lot. Most of them are innocuous, benign, funny, and sometimes I even forward them myself. No biggie. What bugs me, though, are the hoax "breaking news" e-mails that get circulated around the country and globe, sometimes for years and years. Here are some examples of the trash I've received. (All of these phony e-mails are easily debunked by several "urban legend" sites, by the way. My favorite is snopes.com) 1. This is one of the classic hoax e-mails and has been circulating since 1997. This e-mail insisted that Bill Gates was sharing his fortune and each person who forwarded this particular e-mail would receive $245 because Microsoft was "tracking" all these forwarded e-mails. You'd be surprised how many people fell for this. This was one of the dumbest hoaxes ever invented and, unfortunately, many people believed it. (Gates does share his fortune, but not through idiotic e-mails.) 2. Along the lines of getting "free stuff" was the infamous "free Honda" e-mail that went out in 1999. This one claimed that Honda was trying to "break into the American market" and would give everyone a free Honda if they forwarded the e-mail to "everyone you know." Last time I checked, Honda had no trouble selling their cars and even if they were, why on earth would they give those cars away? People fell for this one, too. (There's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell them.) 3. A more recent e-mail (2004) asks everyone to "boycott" the new U.S. dollar coin because the government eliminated the words "In God We Trust." This is a more insidious e-mail because it involves the U.S. government, an entity not immune to suspicion in the first place. This e-mail got some people frothing at the mouth and trigger happy with the Forward option on their e-mails. The phrase "In God We Trust" has not been removed, of course. It's been inscribed on the edge of the coin. An initial minting error excluded the phrase, but it was corrected. (Anyone who still wants to get rid of those coins are welcome to send them to me and I'll dispose of them in an appropriate manner.) 4. This year, a particularly detestable e-mail about Barack Obama began making its ugly rounds. Titled "The Enemy Within," it asserts that Obama is a "radical and ideological Muslim." He is not. This e-mail is quite outlandish in its phoniness and will probably gain even more momentum as the presidential election looms near. The timing of this e-mail is clever; quite a few Americans today are hostile to anything related to the word "Muslim." It reminds me of the words "Russkies" and "communist" during the Cold War years. (I was very young then and wasn't in this country at the time, but I got the gist of it from MAD Magazine.) This e-mail is as fake as Pamela Anderson's breasts and Fox News' "fair and balanced" motto. (Fox News is about as balanced as a drunk on a unicycle.) My advice to anyone out there who receives such forwarded e-mails is to do a little research before you send it out to "everyone you know." Please. All you're doing is spreading vicious lies and gossip. Do us all a favor and Google it first.--Jacquie Brasher is senior staff writer for The Forest-Blade and may be reached at jacquie@forest-blade.com. Just don't send her any fake e-mails.
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