What Goes Around: Legends of the Net © 1996 or thereabouts, Reva Basch Didja hear the one about the poodle in the microwave? The alligators in the sewer? The gerbils, um, elsewhere? Only several dozen times each, right? It always happened to a friend of someone's sister, or when this guy she used to know was in college, or down near San Luis Obispo somewhere. It might show up as a 12th generation photocopy on your office bulletin board, or in interoffice mail. The event itself seems plausible, if not 100% verifiable. It may even be true, or have been true at some point, or contain an element of truth. It's always a great story, usually with an element of gore, surrealism or perfect poetic justice. One of the mixed blessings of the plugged-in life is that your email account opens one more conduit for the propagation of junk mail, chain-letters, and the milder (usually) form of spam known as urban legends. If you thought your office copier was working overtime on cranking out this stuff, you ain't seen nothin' until you've seen the Internet in action. The problem with net-generated legends is that the 12th copy, or the 1200th, looks the same as the original; there's no tell-tale xerox fadeout to clue you to the fact that this delicious little tidbit has been around the block again and again and again. Without email, you may not have heard about the gang who drove around with their headlights out and shot at every Good Samaritan who flicked their brights to let them know. This was in San Jose, and somebody saw it in the newspaper. Or the person who told them did. Then there was the $20,000 chocolate chip cookie recipe. Or maybe it was $250; accounts vary. See, this woman begged for the recipe and finally Mrs. Fields or Neiman- Marcus or whoever owned the rights gave it to her, along with a bill for some exorbitant amount. The cook, thus rooked, took revenge by distributing the recipe as widely as she could, and encouraging others to do the same. Inevitably, it ended up in thousands of electronic mailboxes, too. And let's not forget the one about the helicopter crew who fought a forest fire by scooping buckets of water from a nearby lake. After the fire was out and the crew surveyed the site, they found the charred body of a person wearing flippers and a swim-mask... Urban legends like these are just as good when told around a campfire or your office water cooler as they are in cyberspace.There's a subset, though, that derive context and meaning, as well as their major means of distribution, from the Internet itself. It's tempting to dub such stories "net legends," although that phrase is reserved, by habitues of Usenet newsgroups, for characters, real or fabricated, who've established an enduring online presence as a result of their personal style, extreme views, or downright ubiquity. With a nod to correct usage, let's appropriate the term anyway. As you'd expect, much of what circulates on the Net is of particular concern to users of that medium. There's the persistent rumor of a Modem Tax, a proposal the FCC may have considered for 14 seconds in 1987, but that's dead dead dead today. There are "virus" scares galore, including one that only attacks the hard disks of stupid people. ... ... Gotcha. The Good Times virus is a particularly tenacious example of the breed that relies heavily on email for its propagation. Typically, a well-meaning friend emails you an all-caps WARNING! followed by the advice to delete without reading any email you might get with the subject header Good Times. Such mail is alleged to contain an attached file that will destroy your system. There's usually a bunch more "information" about where the virus began and the dire consequences of its release. It's sort of like a chain letter in reverse. Most net legends are more benign. There's the story about the guy who calls customer support and tells them the cupholder on his computer is broken. "Cupholder?" asks the puzzled support technician. "Is this something you got as a premium at a computer show or something?" "No, it's part of the computer; it's right there on the front of the machine." "That can't be; our computers don't come with cupholders." "I'm telling you; I'm looking at it right now. There's this slot, and when you push a button the cupholder slides out..." The light dawns: The guy is talking about his CD-ROM drive. Given its indigenous population of nerds and wire-heads, it's not surprising that a high percentage of what goes around on the Net is science- and engineering-related. There's one about a fellow who was trying to break the land speed record, and put together some sort of rocket-powered vehicle; he may have just (just!) strapped a jet engine to the top of a car. He fired it up somewhere out in the desert, and... when the police came upon the wreckage, the speedometer was pegged at 240 mph, the brakes burnt to a cinder, and it was discovered that the engine had no off switch at all. Again, because of Net demographics -- lots of college kids out there, thinking about what college kids think about -- legends having to do with sex or drugs are perennial favorites; even better if it's sex and drugs =together=. A _true_ story -- about a side- effect of the anti-depressant drug Clomipramine that caused spontaneous orgasm every time the patient yawned -- made the rounds of the Net faster than you could say peer-review. For some reason, maybe because of his own fascination with technology, Walt Disney and his empire have been a magnet, on the Net, for conjecture and spurious imputation. Was Uncle Walt an illegitimate child? (There's no evidence to support it) Was he dishonorably discharged from the military? (Nope, because he was never =in= the military) Was his body cryonically preserved after he died? (No, he's buried at Forest Lawn). There's a virtual Fantasyland of Disney legends on the Web at www.best.com/~snopes/disney/disney.htm. A Usenet newsgroup, alt.folklore.urban, is devoted to sniffing out, cataloging, debating, investigating and rendering true-or-false verdicts on net legends of all description. The AFUers maintain a Web clearinghouse at www.urbanlegends.com that includes a comprehensive, searchable list of legends by theme, like Animals, Death, and TV. Their Frequently Asked Questions List, when printed out, is 56 pages long. Apocrypha, recurring rumors, jokes that will not die -- all gain legendary status on the Net by virtue of their longevity, if not their inherent amusement value. With hundreds of newbies around the world signing up for email every day, there'll always be someone, somewhere, who hasn't heard it, and who's eager to do his part as a good cyber-citizen by passing it along. The classic net legend is probably that of Craig Shergold, a 6-year-old (at the time the legend got started) British boy, gravely ill (ditto) with a brain tumor. Craig had expressed a desire for get-well cards. Lots of get-well cards. The wish transmogrified into a desire to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most get-well cards -- or postcards, or business cards – ever received. Somehow the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and others like it, were folded into the deal. In 1990, according to the Chicago Tribune, Craig made it into Guinness, with 16 million cards. The following March, 95% of his cancer was removed in an operation bankrolled by an American billionaire. He is now 17, apparently in good health, and still getting cards at the rate of several dozen a week. But on the Net, where the Shergold legend lingers, he's forever young and eternally, terminally ill.