Legends and facts

I've added a terrific website to my list of sites. Look under the Links list to the right of this post. That site is snopes.com which labels itself as the "Urban Legends Reference Page". But it is so much more than that. I've been looking at this site for years for both its entertainment value ("How could people believe these things?") and for its thorough research on current events. Yes, there are articles about urban legends (here's one I remember from college) but that's just a part of the content of the site. They cover topics from politics (Are Congressional staffers and family members exempt from repaying their student loans?) to fake pictures (Does this photo show a shark attacking a British Navy diver?). They find the truth about sports stories (Was professional hockey's Stanley Cup trophy really left in a snow bank?) and movies (Did Charlie Chaplin once lose a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest?). You owe it to yourself to go to the site and look around. But beware - you can spend a lot of time there without realizing it.

The reason I'm writing about this today, though, is a story that I saw today about car batteries. I'd always been told not to store a car battery (or any lead-acid battery like a lawn tractor battery) on a cement surface. I didn't know why but enough people who I trusted had told me this so I always made sure to put a piece of wood under the battery. Well, by reading this article, I found that this is no longer true. Yes, it was true in the past when the materials used to make the casing of the battery weren't as good as today's materials. Now I know it's OK to do that and I know why.

With so much information available on the World Wide Web, it can be confusing to try to take the time to figure out what is true and what is not. It's nice to have these dedicated folks doing a lot of the work for us. So, the next time someone sends you an email saying this coming July (2011) will contain five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays and that this only occurs once every 800+ years, you can tell them that while the first part is true (that month will indeed have five Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays), it's not that unusual and you can point them to this article to prove it. If you don't, they'll do it again in March, 2013 or August, 2014. Or, if they are fixated on July, it will happen again in July, 2022. Hardly 800 years.