Urban Legends

On Wednesday, 10 people showed up for our after-school urban legends day.  Urban legends are stories that get passed around by people that are false or only partially true.  Sometimes a person will tell a story that happened to "a friend of my mom's" or "a girl down the street."  Other times, you hear a story in an email or text, or read something in a Facebook or Twitter post.  You should always be sceptical, because they're often urban legends!  If you want to know if a story you heard is real or fake, check out http://www.snopes.com/.  Another great way to tell is to try to find newspaper articles or news stories that back up the claim. 

At the program, we talked about urban legends we had heard, took a quiz, watched a few segments from Mythbusters, and wrote our own urban legends.  Each urban legend was created by randomly drawing a perpitrator, a victim, a location, and an object and weaving them into a story.  Here are a few of our own urban legends:

Urban Legend #1 by Kaitlyn and Alyssa
OK, oh my God, I read this crazy story in Seventeen magazine.  There was this really nice teacher/professor lady walking around the mall with her two-year-old toddler, shopping for a Christmas outfit.  And they were all minding their own business and stuff, right?  And then some crazy dangerous escaped criminal came up behind them, pointed a gun at the lady's head, and stole her kid's lollipop!  Then he, like, ran away!  The store clerk call the cops and they arrested him in the next town.  Turns out he was a serial lollipop stealer!  Insane, right?  But totally true.

Urban Legend #2 by Billy and Ashton
A pizza delivery guy stopped by a store to deliver a pizza and soda to Mark, a store clerk.  Mark went out to pay the pizza guy.  As the pizza guy drove away, Mark dropped the can of soda in the road.  The wheel of the pizza van drove right over the soda and the pressure made the can shoot right into Mark's head!  He was in a coma for six months and has a permanent indentation of a soda can on his forhead.  True story!

Urban Legend #3 by Taliah, Janae, and Blya
This really happened to my friend's cousin!  One day this innocent child was in a pet store and a nerdy computer whiz came in.  Since he was a nerd, he had a mini-stapler in his pocket.  It fell out of his pocket just as a dog escaped from its cage.  The dog thought it was a bone and picked it up with its mouth!  It ran over to the child while biting the stapler, and the dog accidentally stapled the child's ankle!!