Associated Content falls for Mr Ed, Sixpence

[bufungla]

A bit old (over a year ago) - chow me if I missed an earlier post:

In the process of praising snopes right and left, columnist Steve Helmer becomes so awed by the overwhelming amount of info on the site that he completely misses the point of the Lost Legends section:

Not only is it a valuable source for finding out whether an E-mail I've received is a scam, I've learned quite a bit from the site as well and have found myself visiting it on days when I was just looking for something to keep me entertained.

In their "Lost Legends" category for example, I learned Television's Mr. Ed was really a zebra. I never knew that and would never have suspected it either and the popular nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was a recruiting tool for pirates. Under their "Cokelore" section, I learned Coca-Cola really did used to contain cocaine; something I had originally believed to be false information. And the story about Dr. Ducan MacDougall (who tried to find out how much souls weighed and might have succeeded) in the Religion section was a bit creepy but very interesting.

The comments section is even worse - it's virtually nothing but people asking whether this or that UL is true. It's very reminiscent of when I would tell my ex-friends and relatives to verify the truth of whatever chain email they just got on snopes.com before forwarding it to half the planet, and they would forward it to me instead because I somehow had a "magical way" of finding out whether these things were true or not.