Test your grip on reality

Which of these 11 claims are true, and which are bunk?

Normally I don’t do list posts, because I think they are a gimmick, and I’m just not really the type to clamor onto the latest bandwagon. I made this list just to share some of the research I did in compiling info on “urban legends” for one of the English classes I teach. I found that I’d been duped by at least a few of these stories during the course of my life. Just so you know, I checked all of these (at least one was included in lists as true when it has been proven false).

How well did you do at sniffing out the bogus claims?

Answers:

1. Einstein failed math in school. = Bogus. He was always good at math.
2. Apple computers has more money than the U.S. Government. = True.
3. Pizza perfume. = True. An obese nation loves for our most beloveds to smell like pizza.
4. Bubble gum can’t be digested. = Bogus. Takes a couple days though.
5. Fish have a 3 second memory. = Bogus. This has been tested!
6. Baboons kidnap puppies. = True. Some of the males do. They got dogs!
7. Disney had his body cryogenically frozen. = Bogus. He was cremated.
8. A tooth will dissolve overnight in Coke. = Bogus.
9. A priest rescued a drowning little Adolf Hitler. = True. Well, recently recovered period newspapers support pre-existing claims. It’s not 100% airtight, but it’s quite likely.
10. Roaches can live for 9 days without their heads. = True. Damn. I was sure this was false, but an Article in Scientific American proved I was wrong.
11. Kentucky Fried Chicken had to change it’s name to KFC because they don’t use real chickens. = Bogus (that pic is by me, and featured in another blog post)

If you got more than half correct, you aren’t easily fooled and you tend to like to check facts before committing yourself to believing something.

If you got more than half wrong, you are swayed by emotion and authority, and go with the group, rather than trusting yourself to figure things out and come to your own conclusions through doing the necessary research (even if it’s just doing a super-quick Wikipedia search).

The assessment above is just for fun. There’s no authority behind it whatsoever.

Let me know how you did, if you’re not embarrassed. Which ones had you fallen for? Me, I was wrong about the roaches, and I also believed the BS about the gold fish. I’d heard about Disney since I was a kid so had accepted that, and I also think I used to believe the stuff about Einstein, when I was a kid, but haven’t thought about it since then. I thought it took an awful long time to digest gum, but never believed it couldn’t be done. I instantly knew the KFC thing was bogus, but wrongly disbelieved the one about pizza perfume.