The question that seems to be on everyone’s lips — well, let’s be honest, the question I’ve been asked at least a couple of times by email, anyway — is what do I, Murray By Moonlight, amateur urban legend investigator, think of the MythBusters show?

Do I like the show? Do I respect the things Adam, Jamie and the rest of the crew are attempting to achieve with it? Do I secretly envy them for all the things they get to blow up? For that matter, do I secretly envy Jamie (that’s him on the right in the picture) for his silly moustache and his even more silly hat?

The answer to at least some of these questions is yes…

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When I first began writing about urban legends, MythBusters was probably little more than an idea bouncing around in the head of television producer, Peter Rees. We were partying like it was 1999 back then [1], and urban legends were fresh and new and interesting; and a guy with an unhealthy interest in contemporary folklore and something of an analytical mind could put up a reasonably popular website devoted to helping people learn more about urban legends.

We didn’t have blogs back then. We didn’t have citizen journalism. We didn’t all have Twitter accounts and MySpace accounts and Facebook accounts and a zillion logins and passwords for a zillion pages we never looked at again. We just had a few key websites with a lot of people working behind the scenes to shed some much-needed light on the whackier things people claim to believe.

Then MythBusters arrived on the scene, bringing with it a change in the way people thought about Urban Legends.

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In the hands of Adam and Jamie and their very clever crew, Urban Legends [2] have become focused around things you can test. Things you can put your hands on, things you can put in a wind tunnel, things you can blow up or drown or shoot or, did I mention, blow up.

As much as anyone else, I’m always fascinated to see the way the MythBuster team goes about testing the latest crop of claims; and, like many other people, I can’t help enjoying it when clever people blow things up in interesting ways. Put the two ideas together, and that’s a half hour of television I’m definitely going to enjoy!

And yet, I do have a couple of reservations about the show.

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Like some others, I’m occasionally dismayed at the conclusions the MythBusters team is willing to draw from once-off testing. Of course, I understand that they don’t have an unlimited budget and that within a half-hour entertainment show they use clever and often ingenious methods for testing a particular Legend. Having said that, the purist in me wishes that the testing could be as rigourous as possible, and / or that the show was upfront in each episode that in many cases their testing can only really be considered indicative rather than conclusive.

In defence of the MythBusters team, you often see them talking about this in a casual way during their segment wrapups, but the show still carries this idea that ‘We know this claim is absolutely true or untrue because MythBusters tested it.’

Interestingly enough, the producers of the show are obviously aware of this concern out there in viewership land [3], so they occasionally have episodes in which they go back to retest their conclusions.

Personally, I’m glad they do this, but I still have a niggling feeling about the results they sometimes achieve that go unchallenged, or which haven’t caused enough concern in the viewership to warrant testing again.

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But my bigger concern is also probably a much less specific one.

While MythBusters has proven to be a great format for presenting entertaining tests and results of different beliefs and Legends, I can’t help feeling that no effort whatsoever is going into another important aspect of how Urban Legends work – why do people believe these things?

Back in the earlier episodes of the show, MythBusters featured a woman who would talk about these things [4], and I respected the show more at that point for treating Urban Legends as holistic entities, not just as the physical manifestations of their details.

I guess this didn’t prove as popular with the general viewership, and let’s face it – it’s a show that has to be concerned with appealing to the greatest number of people who might watch it.

But, like the episodes in which they go back to placate their disgruntled viewers, I’d love to see occasional episodes that feature experts in the way the belief side of Urban Legends works, and the communal and viral ways in which they spread.

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So yes, I enjoy MythBusters, and watch it with much happiness whenever I’m near a television and it’s on. I don’t think of it as required viewing, and it rankles me under the skin occasionally, but in the big scheme of things, I’d rather the show existed in a slightly flawed format (well, to me), than not at all.

In a way, I sometimes wonder whether or not the show has been ultimately good for the ‘Urban Legends Industry’ [5], or if it has had the effect of pushing these people and resources into the shadows, but I guess in the end, to the vast majority of people, it doesn’t really matter. The show must go on, and Adam and Jamie are there to tell us that you can’t kill someone by dropping a penny off the Empire State Building.

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All that’s left is to answer the questions from the opening paragraphs.

Do I like the show?

Yes, though I wish it was a little different.

Do I respect the things Adam, Jamie and the rest of the crew are attempting to achieve with it?

Absolutely, though see above for my few reservations about the way they go about testing their Legends.

Do I secretly envy them for all the things they get to blow up?

I’d probably just kill myself if I tried to blow something up, so not really. But it’s fun to watch someone else do it!

For that matter, do I secretly envy Jamie (that’s him on the right in the picture) for his silly moustache and his even more silly hat?

I have my own moustache, thank you very much, and I look silly in hats.

But then, aha ahahahaha, so does Jamie.

Footnotes:

1.	Largely because it was 1999 back then.
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2.	I’m not going to be obsessive-compulsive about it, but I wish they’d named the show ‘LegendBusters’, since there is a very real difference between Legends and Myths. Maybe ‘LegendBusters’ wouldn’t have been as catchy as a title, but it would have been more accurate in the pursuit of understanding contemporary folklore. Okay, it appears I am going to be obsessive-compulsive about it…
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3.	Particularly because a lot of viewers are only too happy to write in to call the team out on a particular conclusion.
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4.	Was she a psychologist? A folklorist? Sadly, it’s been so long since I’ve seen these episodes that I can’t remember.
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5.	By which I mean the sites and people who have worked hard on analysing and investigating Urban Legends.
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I recently discovered a wonderful retelling of the tale over on AmericanFolklore.net, and I’d love to encourage you to go over and read the story, if for no better reason than it might remind you (as it did me) of some great times you spent at a younger age being scared out of your wits by a good tale.

Interestingly, I’ve encountered two different main retellings of this tale in my life. The first is very much like the version over on American Folklore, where the young couple discover the psychopath’s bloodied hook attached to the car door handle, indicating a very narrow escape.

The second, which may well have been borrowed from some other tale of a terrible encounter with a maniac, is even grislier still!

In this version the boyfriend leaves the young woman to go for help. A few minutes later she hears a sound on the top of the car, and moments after that a police loud hailer instructs her to run from the car for her life, and that whatever she does, she’s not to look back. Of course, she does risk a glance back at the car as she flees, and the story ends with her screams as she sees the The Man With The Hook standing on the roof of the car, holding the severed head of her unfortunate boyfriend [2].

Hope you enjoy the read, and I’d love to hear about your own encounters with the story of ‘The Man With The Hook’ in the comments below.

Photo courtesy of TJ Scott.

Footnotes:

1.	For example, I first heard it when I was about 12, at a Christmas Camp I attended just south of Brisbane, here in Australia.
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2.	Seriously, when I look back on stories like these, is it any wonder we all had nightmares as children?
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Probably the most striking difference I’ve discovered thus far is that unlike many folk stories I’ve previously read, these folk tales don’t seem to particularly mind what you might think of as an unfair outcome [2].

A wonderful example of this comes from the tale entitled And Seven! [3], which recounts the story of a fat and lazy young woman who is courted by a young man. The young man gives his prospective bride 3 tasks to do, with the promise that he will marry her if she completes all 3 tasks. Being fat and lazy (so the story goes), the young woman doesn’t even attempt any of the tasks, but at the very last moment before each task is due to be completed, a different powerful witch [4] arrives on the scene to save the day. Each of the 3 witches asks only one thing in return — that the young woman remembers the witch’s name, and calls her on the wedding day to join in the feast. They each promise the young woman that they will reveal the secret that she did none of the tasks herself if they are not so summoned.

Of course, when the wedding is due the young woman has completely forgotten the names of the 3 witches and it is only because her groom recounts to her a story of meeting 3 witches, who called each other by name, that she is able to summon the witches to the feast, thus keeping her bargain with them.

The story ends with the fat and lazy woman living happily ever after, without once in the tale behaving in a way in which she might have earned that life.

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There are other tales with surprising outcomes in the collection — a favourite of mine so far is the tale of Dauntless Little John, who, though tiny, is so fearless that he spends the night in a cursed castle in which all others who have braved a stay have been found dead of fright by the next morning.

By living through the frightening experiences of the night, Dauntless Little John inherits the castle and a vast treasure and lives happily, until one day he sees his own shadow and… dies of fright! [5]

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If, like me, you have a love of folk tales from around the world, keep an eye out for Calvino’s collection. It appears to be filled with stories of the charming and unexpected; and, after all, what more could you ask for from a book?

Footnotes:

1.	Though some are quick to point out that it’s difficult to define ‘Italian’ in a folk sense, since historically what we think of as ‘Italy’ was in fact a number of distinct provinces with their own folk traditions and tales.
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2.	Not that there aren’t also plenty of tales in which the hero faces adversity but wins the day!
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3.	The title comes from the fact that the young woman is so gluttonous that when her mother is making soup for her, she eats bowl after bowl, while her mother counts them aloud, reaching a total of 7 bowls at each meal.
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4.	All 3 of whom are sisters.
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5.	Reading this story made me wonder if something frightening had happened to Dauntless Little John’s shadow during his stay in the castle, or if this was just meant to be a surprising and darkly humorous outcome given Dauntless Little John’s fearlessness about everything else. Sadly, the tale itself leaves the story at that point, and doesn’t explain why he died of fright from seeing his own shadow.
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It may not look like it on the surface, but at its core [2] this is a very big topic. If you think about it, apples have featured in one way or another in a vast body of religion, mythology, superstition, fables and folk wisdom.

I won’t try to tackle all of this in one post, that would be madness. However, over the next little while I hope to put a few articles up on ulblog exploring the interesting world of the apple.

But for now, let’s start with one of the stories that takes place at the beginning of everything.

In the beginning…

Most people reading this blog will be familiar with the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from The Garden Of Eden for eating the fruit of The Tree Of Knowledge.

In popular tradition, the fruit that was at the centre of humanity’s fall from grace is usually represented as our friend the apple, but did you know that the early writers of the Old Testament probably had another fruit in mind?

The Book Of Genesis never mentions the name of the fruit from which Adam and Eve ate, and while apples feature later in the Old Testament [3], Biblical scholars think that the fruit originally used to symbolise forbidden knowledge might more readily have been the fig, or grapes or one of several other more likely suspects [4].

It’s a bum wrap, see…

So why did the apple go on to become the fruit we all associate with the story of Adam and Eve?

Unfortunately, we don’t really know.

Some scholars suggest that it was simply the product of a rather obvious pun in Latin — the Latin word for apple is malum, while the Latin word for evil is malus [5]. So, it’s possible that the coincidental similarity between these two words made it easy for early Latin theologians to associate the fruit with the original sin [6] [7].

Other scholars have suggested that since the apple was a prized and often expensive fruit in the Mediterranean during the time in which Christianity was gaining ground and in which the Bible was being translated into European languages, it became natural to associate the irresistible temptation that led to humanity’s downfall with the rather delicious fruit.

The biggest eviction since last year’s Big Brother Finale!

We’ll probably never know exactly why the apple became intrinsically associated with the story of Adam and Eve and The Garden Of Eden.

Still, it’s kind of fun, when you’re biting into a juicy apple, to think about how this fruit went from being a law-abiding, upstanding member of the orchard, to being implicated in the greatest scandal the Old Testament ever knew, and all on hearsay evidence and faulty testimony!

The next post in this series will explore the ugly side of apples, in “The Bad Apple.”

Footnotes:

1.	It was a Pink Lady, in case you’re interested. Pink Ladies have a very tart flavour and are one of my favourite apple varieties.
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2.	Aha ahahahah, bad apple pun intended! …Sorry.
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3.	See Proverbs 25:12.
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4.	See The Straight Dope: Was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple?
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5.	See Wikipedia.org: Apple.
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6.	See Wikipedia.org: Original sin.
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7.	You know, I can just see some Monk giggling away at dinner about this pun while all the other Monks sit around and think, “It’s even worse than all his, ‘Knock knock, who goeth there?’ jokes”.
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Among other things, it demonstrates how language and folk beliefs develop and intermingle, and also introduces us to a reasonably common culprit in language-related folk beliefs: the backronym.

Coffee and other disasters

I was having a coffee with some coworkers a few weeks ago and for some reason we were talking about shipping disasters [1]. The wreck of the HMAS Sydney had only just been discovered, after resting hidden off the coast of West Australia for more than 60 years. This was big news here in Australia — the sinking of the Sydney has been one of the most lasting and contentious mysteries to have survived World War II, unlike the 600 unfortunate sailors who lost their lives when she went down with all hands in November of 1941.

Then, out of the wide blue yonder, someone mentioned the fact that “SOS” stands for “Save Our Souls”. There was general agreement around the table that this is the case [2].

But I don’t buy it.

This is, like, seriously aggravating…

There’s a thing that happens in my head when certain things seem ‘too neat and tidy’. It’s like a little mental alarm that I can’t ignore that goes off when people say things like this.

In one way it’s annoying, in another way it can be interesting, since it’s led to a lot of interesting conversations and even more interesting research and learning opportunities.

Still, I have this feeling that conversations would be a whole lot simpler if I didn’t have this bizarre mental alarm constantly going off in the back of my head!

Sending out an SOS

At the time of the conversation above I honestly had no background in whether or not SOS stood for anything in particular.

Like most people, I know it’s the international distress signal, and also like most people I know that in Morse Code it’s represented by the sequence, “…—…”

Beyond these two basic pieces of information, however, I was as uninformed as the next uninformed person of the history and meaning of SOS.

And yet I did have one vital piece of knowledge on my side — there’s a very human tendency to want things to have meanings, even if no meaning originally existed.

I also had a hunch that even if SOS did stand for something, we were being very English-centric for assuming it originally stood for phrase in our own language.

A gazillion dollars on the line!

“I’ll bet you a gazillion dollars that SOS didn’t originally stand for ‘Save Our Souls’,” I said.

“A gazillion dollars?” My coworker replied. “How many zeroes are there in a gazillion?”

“Never mind about the zeroes,” I replied, “what about the bet? A gazillion dollars.”

“All right,” he said, “that’s a bet!” And then he threw back his head and laughed evilly [3].

SOS?! Wikipedia to the rescue!

And away we scamper to Wikipedia.org; which, on the subject of “SOS”, has this to say:

In popular usage, SOS became associated with phrases such as “Save Our Souls,” “Save our Ship” “Save Our Shelby,” “Shoot Our Ship”, “Shoot on Site”, “Sinking Our Ship”, “Son of Satan”, “Survivors On Shore”, and “Save Our Seamen”. It is mostly known by “Save Our Souls”. However, these phrases were a later development, most likely used to help remember the correct letters—something known as a backronym.

The article also explains that SOS was originally a German maritime signal, adopted in 1905, and became the standard used by other nations in 1908 due to its simplicity.

That’ll be a gazillion dollars, thanks

And that’s the story of how I won a gazillion dollars from an evil coworker [4]!

Of course, I shouldn’t gloat too much, since it was just as possible when we made our bet that my evil coworker was right and I was wrong. And yet, I’ve encountered these kinds of folk beliefs before, and they tend to fit a pattern that you can learn to look for when talking to others.

So yes, it was a bit of a gamble; but it was gambling with loaded dice — which, I have to admit, is a nice thing to know if you’re putting your gazillion dollars down on the coffee table!

Much warmth,

Murray By Moonlight

Photo courtesy of Nico Kaiser.

Footnotes:

1.	Not the usual sort of thing we talk about. Usually we’re more interested in discussing airline and railway disasters. [5]
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2.	Although, one person did mention thinking that it meant “Save Our Ship” instead.
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3.	I could be making that bit up, since this is my blog and not his.
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4.	He’s not really all that evil. In fact, he’s actually quite a nice guy, despite owing me a gazillion dollars and refusing to pay up on the grounds that it’s not a real number.
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5.	Just kidding. As with every other workplace in the universe, we usually talk about whatever was on television the night before, and about just how bad the coffee is that day. Seriously.
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In this rendition, Bloody Mary is a witch who lives in a forest and who lures children from a nearby village to use them in black magic that will give her back her youth.

Predictably, things don’t go well at all for the wicked witch once the villagers discover that she has been lying, and she is burned alive for murdering their children.

Before she dies, however, Bloody Mary curses the village, and to this very day anyone who chants her name three times in front of a darkened mirror will summon her vengeful spirit from the grave.

You can read the tale in full over at: Bloody Mary: A Scary Urban Legend from Pennsylvania Folklore

Imagine, for a moment, what it would have been like for the first sentient humans to look up at the night sky and to see the moon charting its way across the heavens. It must have been one of the great mysteries of existence, worthy of secrets and rituals, and later to become an object of worship and suspicion.

Across the centuries that separate then from now, we have believed many things about the moon. The Egyptians saw the moon as the god Thoth, who was responsible for giving humans the gift of writing. The Greeks worshiped the moon as the personification of Selene, and she was the sister of Helios, the sun god; and then later as Artemis, who was the virgin goddess of the hunt, as well as of healing and childbirth. To the Romans she was Diana, and she was as virginal and wild as Artemis, her Greek forebear. And to the Babylonians, the moon was Sin [1], and he was the god of wisdom, and eventually the creator of all things.

In those centuries and millenia, the moon has been a creator, protector, benefactor and guardian. But the moon also has a dark side [2], both literal and figurative, and the presence of a full moon hasn’t always been thought of as a blessing.

“Is it a full moon tonight?” someone asks, hanging up a phone.

“I don’t think so,” you reply. “Why?”

“Because that’s the third customer who’s yelled at me today for no good reason. It has to be a full moon!”

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Exactly at what point in human history it became common to believe that a full moon could affect our emotions and sanity remains a mystery that may well endure for the rest of time.

We know that we owe the English word ‘lunatic’ [3] to such a belief, and we can trace the word back through French and ultimately to Latin, where it was derived from the worship of the Roman goddess Luna, whose embodiment as the moon was thought to have an influence on mental stability.

We also know that in the folklore of recent centuries the full moon became invested with the power to force shapeshifters – people cursed to become creatures such as werewolves – to transform themselves into hideous monsters hungry for human blood, the ultimate embodiment of the loss of reason and sanity.

And we know that for hundreds of years a growing number of mystics, natural philosophers, scientists, and psychiatric professionals alike have searched for proof of a correlation between the full moon and the extremes of human behavior it has been thought to influence.

In Dark And Bright Of Moonlit Night

Of all the many and varied things we have believed about the moon, the conviction that it wields a sinister effect when it shines at its brightest has lingered longer than any other, and has in fact thrived to this very day.

And yet the question remains: is there any real justification to the belief that during the full moon suicide rates increase, assaults rise, hospital and psychiatric admissions soar, accidents abound, and people generally become more aggressive and unpredictable? Or is this simply a modern belief that hearkens back to a more superstitious time?

In an attempt to answer that very question, a number of studies have been conducted by researchers on either side of the ‘lunar effect’ debate, and reading any one of them, and the wealth of supporting statistics they include, you would be forgiven for believing largely whatever the author intended.

It’s only been in the last 10 or so years, however, that an effort has been made to go back to many of these studies to look at the methods they used and whether or not the results they produced can be considered reliable.

And the outcome? It seems that the most convincing arguments tell us that the full moon doesn’t have a noticeable effect on how we behave.

When The Full Moon Fades

Debate will almost certainly continue, and the future will hold more research studies, and even more contentious results.

But until some link between the full moon and our behavior can be demonstrated, we can explain the common belief in the ‘lunar effect’ in terms of how people tend to notice certain types of patterns.

In simple terms, it’s not a matter of the full moon making people behave in strange ways, but rather the fact that we notice these things more when the moon is full. Or, to put it another way, when we have a full moon we have an explanation for the unexpected or antisocial actions of others, and because we can match the one against the other, the fact that it’s a full moon feels significant. During other phases of the moon, we’d simply say, “Wow, that customer was a complete pain in the ass more annoying than Paris Hilton a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that I love being yelled at!”, and we’d pretty much leave it at that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, we only have a couple of weeks until the next full moon, and I need to make sure my health insurance is up to date and that I’ve replenished my supplies of shaving cream for the inevitable bout of hairiness…

Further reading

• Moonstruck! Does The Full Moon Influence Behavior?
• Full moon and lunar effects

Footnotes:

1.	Not the same connotation as the word ’sin’ implies in English today.
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2.	Intriguingly and tragically enough, the first two women to be tried and executed for witchcraft [4] by the Inquisition were members of a Milanese cult devoted to the worship of Madonna Oriente, a moon goddess.
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3.	Which first appeared in Old English as the word ‘lunatyke’ at some point during the 14th century, and literally meant ‘moon-driven’ or ‘moonstruck’.
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4.	Although, the Inquisition had sentenced many to death for other forms of heresy before it turned its attention to witchcraft.
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