Why are urban legends today so lame?

I'm just interested in the whole folklore of it and I'm kind of irritated that it's devolved into trite Readers' Digest jingoism, blatantly-cribbed standup routines and grossout shock photos. I'm more into the weird ironic stories, like the legend posted in that update about the origins of the "baby on board" sign.

literally everybody I know has no idea what human trafficking is and falls for every trafficking-related urban legend.

anybody else keep seeing a bunch of this nonsense? the zip ties thing came back up today and I feel like I've been fighting that disinfo for five years now.

I remember the Wayfair thing a couple years back, but that was pretty Qbert

there was also the one lady (Emmy Hurley) who started a sex trafficking panic because she got in the wrong Uber w/out checking, her driver didnt speak English well, and she ignored the driver indicating she was an Uber driver and that she'd take her back and dove out the moving car, then proceeded to keep doubling down on the story even as law enforcement said "this woman isn't a sex trafficker, she's an Uber driver, and this was a misunderstanding".

Here's a roundup of those rumors:

https://polarisproject.org/human-trafficking-rumors/

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Katie-Sorensen-kidnap-accusations-trial-17078111.php

Similar to the panicked report from the woman who said her children were almost snatched by human traffickers from Ikea a few years ago, a fanciful bit of bullshit which was reported on as fact by mainstream outlets.

What were some of your favorite political urban legends pre-Birther era (where they got much worse forever)?

There's...

Killary
Al Gore says he invented the internet
JFK was killed by the Mafia

Prince had lower ribs removed so he could suck himself off

wasn't that Manson?

also was he a politician?

Prince was Minnesota Comptroller from 1992-1996

I knew it had to have been after his Imperial Period

All this talk of the Israel/Palestine conflict got me to thinking of Smokey IS the Bandit. When I was a kid a friend of mine swore blind that he had seen a film with that name - or he had read about it, or he knew it was on TV etc. Because apparently the original plan for Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 was for Jackie Gleason to play the dual roles of Sheriff Justice and either A bandit or THE bandit or something. Which apparently got as far as shooting a test version of the film, until they went back and re-edited it. The only extant relic is this trailer, which is based on the original concept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu4Ht2opvqY

But how could a bunch of kids in the UK know about this? It haunts me still. I have the impression that every advanced culture, every civilisation, has a dim memory of knowing someone who claims to have seen Smokey IS the Bandit even though it doesn't exist. Perhaps AI will be able to make it exist. AI will eventually be able to make every film exist! The seven-hour version of Greed. Or a version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail that doesn't have the awkward k-nig-hts pronunciation joke, which makes sense on paper but sounds racist out loud.

It really should be Smokey IS The Bandit. I realise that the rule is that "the" should be lowercase, but "The Bandit" is a character. The character is called "The Bandit", not "Bandit". Those are my thoughts for today, the twenty-third of July, 2024. May The Lord have mercy on my soul, and the souls of these people here on Ilxor, some of whom are very good.

And now, "nineteen years pass..."

Carter token with Willie Nelson on the White House roof

tokin

I heard about Willie tokin', never heard about Jimmy bogartin'

It was Carter's son Chip that toked with Willie. The president definitely listened to Led Zeppelin on the White House roof though.

xp Because that trivia about Smokey and the Bandit 3 could be found in about every movie trivia book at the time?

The kid from the Wonder Years grew up to be Marilyn Manson

"xp Because that trivia about Smokey and the Bandit 3 could be found in about every movie trivia book at the time?"

It's possible. But I grew up in the countryside. The only books we had were farming manuals, and the Bible. And a dozen collected volumes of Cahiers du Cinéma, which in the mid-1970s had turned away from Maoism towards a newfound appreciation of blockbuster cinema. And also a suitcase full of freshly-printed copies of Trafic. I have no idea where we got those from. And the Panini sticker album of Dune which was obviously based on the book rather than the film because it shared the book's final lines.

But in essence those things were the only reading materials we had. I remember from those years that you're supposed to site a water butt away from the river's edge otherwise the cattle will make the riverbank all muddy, and also that any attempt to apply Lacan's psychoanalytic theories to an interrogation of cinema are doomed because of its inherent contradictions.

Maybe you read in a newspaper something about the movie before it was finished? I remember as a kid learning that Spielberg's new alien film was going to be a horror, or that the new Star Wars movie was going to be called Revenge of the Jedi. Little facts mostly lost to time that came from snippets read in the newspaper.

On a more serious level, this does raise the question of whether people are any more informed about movie rumours in the internet age than we were back in the early 1980s, when we got information from friends of friends of friends who had read something in a magazine and passed it on, breathe in.

My pragmatic brain says "yes, we are vastly more informed nowadays, don't be a luddite". But an awful lot of modern internet movie news, in particular, is (a) close analysis of trailers, which is cardboard content (b) endless recycling of the same basic story with mild rewriting (c) close analysis of tweets, or sections of celebrity interviews, taken out of context and also rehashed.

Or the kind of story where the headline is "five reasons why X", or "what really happened when X did Y", but the actual story is just speculation. And there's Reddit with its endless reposts of "today I learned that O J Simpson was originally going to be The Terminator". And r/unresolvedmysteries with its rehashings of the Elisa Lam case.

I guess the fundamental thing is that there's a limited pool of interesting facts, and no matter how efficient and widespread the communications medium, that pool of facts will eventually be exhausted. Which is why AI is so important, because it can generate an endless stream of new facts. They won't actually be facts, but they'll feel like facts. They'll be factables.

Factables - facts that aren't facts, but fill the same hole.

Factables - facts that aren't facts, but fill the same hole.
― Ashley Pomeroy, Wednesday, July 24, 2024 10:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Are you referring to JD Vance

aka factoids