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Forwarded Emails - How Real are Their Stories?
By Life-Musings.com | February 19, 2009
Do you frequently receive forwarded emails in your inbox?
Do you often forward them on?
I get many kinds of such emails - funny ones, inspirational ones, spiritual ones, heartwarming ones, serious ones, some about supposedly very stupid people, and even some about scandals. I do admit - many of them are interesting reads.
What bothers me is their authenticity.
Who Want to be a Millionaire
I once got this email about a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” contestant who was supposedly so brainless that she did not know if the Earth or an elephant was larger. The email came with attached photographs, too - the studio setting, the choices, her selected answer, as well as the contestant herself, sitting there looking baffled at the insanely difficult question.
I googled it and found out that the whole thing, it seems, was but a hoax. The lady was indeed a contestant on the British version of the show. But her baffled look was in response to another question, a much more difficult one, and the supposed question about size of the Earth, an elephant and a peanut was made up - someone had super-imposed the wordings onto the screenshot.
And I wondered - why do people do such things?
At least they had the decency to change the lady’s name, so “only” her face got humiliated on computer screens all over the world.
By the way, she did pretty well, winning 32,000 pounds.
Photographs of Female Politician
More recently, semi-nude photographs of a Malaysian politician, taken while she was asleep, were circulated to the media. A scandal has erupted.
I today received an email about the lady, which came with a set of supposed nude photographs of her. It seemed strange because, in those photos, the woman was not only awake, but posing, too.
Hmmm. Was she lying when she said she was an unwitting victim?
It turns out those photos are not of her at all!! As it is, the poor woman is already badly humiliated. And here we have people obviously out to further smear her reputation.
With the internet, it’s really difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not, isn’t it?
Man and Cars
Not too long ago, I received a forwarded email about a dude who enjoyed having sex with cars.
Uh, yeah. He apparently enjoys doing it with their exhaust pipes.
Surely this couldn’t be real!
I checked it out and, hey presto, there was the story online on an actual magazine.
Of the three emails, if I had to pick one which was most likely to be false, I would probably have chosen this one. Yet it turned out to be the ONE which was real.
…….
What’s real? What’s made up? What’s crazy? What’s sane?
The lines are surely blurrier than what they have ever been before.
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Topics: All Life Musings, Everyday Life, Independent Thinking, Modern Life, People, Questions about Life, The Human Psyche |