Happy Australia Day from Murray By Moonlight and ULblog!

Today, in Australia, is a day to spend with friends and family, to fire up the BBQ, to play backyard cricket, to swim in the pool and to visit the beach.

I hope all my Australian readers [1] have a wonderful day, and for any non-Australians, today’s a great day to practise how to say “G’day!”

Footnotes:

1.	Yes, both of you.
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Brisbane, the city in which I live, is about to experience its worst flooding since 1893.

Residents are living in fear that the Wivenhoe Dam, a major water catchment upstream on the Brisbane River, might fail. If it does, it will be the end of my city.

Currently, Wivenhoe is releasing approximately 645,000 megalitres of water per day into the Brisbane River, in an attempt to stop the dam from failing entirely.

To put that in perspective, all of Sydney Harbour, one of Australia’s most internationally recognisable bodies of water, contains approximately 562,000 megalitres of water.

Even if Wivenhoe holds, by tomorrow and Thursday flood waters are projected to reach levels that haven’t been seen in Brisbane in almost 120 years, exceeding the peak levels of the infamous 1974 flood.

Elsewhere in Queensland, it is estimated that the total area of the state that has been impacted by flooding is larger that the area of France and Germany combined.

And the rain is predicted to continue.

More: Brisbane prepares for worst flood in 118 years (brisbanetimes.com.au)

I’ve just finished watching the rather spooky movie, Shutter Island, an atmospheric thriller set on a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts.

Aside from making me very thankful that I have never had to spend a night on an island like Shutter Island, the movie got me thinking about why islands feature heavily in scary stories.

What is it about islands that makes scaring the pants off people such an easy task?

Far away from anywhere familiar…

To begin with, scary stories are usually about isolation.

This isolation isn’t always necessarily physical – at times it can be emotional or psychological – but in most scary stories the main characters are cut off from the ‘normal’ world in some way.

Perhaps they work late at night in a spooky building when everyone else has gone home; or perhaps they took a wrong turn down a country road and they are now far away from anywhere familiar. Regardless of exactly how the story delivers the characters into the scary situation, one of the basic rules of many scary stories is that the characters must be cut off from the world they understand.

Islands, then, are a perfect setting for a sense of isolation. What could be more isolated than being physically broken off from the ‘normal’ world by savage and dangerous seas? Being stuck on an island means that any real escape is much more difficult, if not entirely impossible – and so the characters must make a stand against the menace that is threatening them.

The only rule is that there are no rules…

Another common element of scary stories is that the ‘rules’ are changed. The characters can’t expect to be able to solve problems in simple, ‘normal’ ways. They must cope – or, in stories where characters are killed one-by-one, fail to cope – with the fact that they can’t rely on familiar mechanisms to save them.

In scary stories set on an island, it’s very easy to change the rules. All you really need is a very bad storm, and suddenly an isolated setting is entirely cut off from the outside world.

When the bad storm hits the island, the phone lines are down, the seas are too dangerous to navigate, the power generators have been destroyed, help can’t reach you for hours or perhaps even days. You are stuck on the island and there is simply no hope of rescue.

The rules of the ‘normal’ world no longer apply, and you must now fight for your very survival [1].

Like the back of his murderous hand…

And a final element that makes scary stories set on islands even scarier is the fact that the bad guy often knows the island much better than the main characters.

Because an island represents a limited landscape, the bad guy can move from place to place with relative ease. He knows exactly what to do to eliminate any remaining remote chance of escape or rescue [2]. He knows when to attack, and where to hide when the tables are turned. He can fade like a ghost into the forest, and he can make his way into locked rooms through secret tunnels and passages that everyone else has forgotten about.

For most of the story he is seemingly invincible, and the island almost seems to conspire with him to eliminate the characters, one-by-one.

Back on dry land…

For all that islands often represent a menacing locality in books, television series and movies, the comforting reality is that very few psychos have gone about murdering entire island communities during very bad storms.

In fact, after trolling for a couple of hours through newspaper databases, I haven’t been able to find a single reference to a situation that seems anything like the standard ‘remote island, bad storm, psycho gets stabby with everyone,’ plot.

When you think about it, that’s probably a good thing, because something like that would be hell on tourism.

That isn’t to say that there have never been any disquieting mysteries relating to islands. If you’d like to explore the topic further, you might like to read about the entire colony that vanished from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, somewhere between 1587 and 1590, or perhaps about the mystery of what, exactly, is buried on Oak Island, Nova Scotia.

Footnotes:

1.	In fact, the plot device of ‘the very bad storm is on its way’ is so common in scary stories that if I lived on an island, I think I’d be pushing my boat into the water and heading for the mainland on any days when it was even just slightly cloudy…
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2.	The two-way radio is destroyed, the boats in the harbour are sunk, the lighthouse has been disabled.
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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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Remember the Microsoft Money Giveaway email? The one that promised bucketloads of cash for forwarding the email to as many people as you could, because Microsoft had invented an email tracker and apparently wanted to reward people for filling the Internet with spam? Hands up anyone who knows anyone who received any money from it?

Or the one that said that aspartame, used in artificial sweeteners, was making people rot from the inside out?

Or the one that came with the soundfile that when you played it, could tell you your name, star sign and was able to answer basic questions about geometry? [1]

Amidst receiving all of those emails, did you ever wish you could send one back that described what it would be like if you followed all of that urgent advice?

If you answered, ‘Hell, yes!’, then you’re not alone…

It seems someone has done that very thing, and while your mileage may vary on exactly how funny it is, if at all, I know I got a chuckle out of it as someone who spent a lot of time trying to let people know that chain emails aren’t necessarily the best way to learn about what’s really happening in the world.

Have you received a chain email recently that you’d like to share with ulblog readers? Send it in via the submit an urban legend link, and I’ll put it up on the site.

Footnotes:

1.	It’s very possible that I made that one up.
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