Jim Walker from The Santa Clarita Valley Signal talks about the time he had one of his kidneys stolen (before you become alarmed but not alert, Jim still has both of his kidneys) and the time he almost fell for the rumour that Wall-Mart was releasing Chanukah Hams just in time for the holiday season! [1]

A very fun read!

• Jim Walker: Sticking forks in urban turkeys

Footnotes:

1.	For those in need of extra guidance, Chanukah (variously spelled “Hannuka”, “Chanuka” and “Channukah”, is a holy Jewish holiday, and of course observant Jews would never eat ham.
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According to the article, some people did react to the broadcast with fear, however time has inflated these numbers to nothing less than mythic proportions.

• The Halloween myth of the War of the Worlds panic – BBC News

Obviously nothing says you’ve had a great time on a business trip more than coming home missing an organ. You and all the other guys in the office can compare scars where your kidneys used to be and reminisce about “Good old Ralph”, who was stupid enough to let it happen to him twice.

And yet, as much fun as that situation sounds like, grim stories of commercial organ harvesting are turning out to be very real, although perhaps a little less sensationally dramatic than the popular urban legend version above.

News site Bloomberg recently ran a piece about organ gangs preying on people living in poverty, offering them cash in return for harvesting a healthy kidney.

Aliaksei Yafimau shudders at the memory of the burly thug who threatened to kill his relatives. Yafimau, who installs satellite television systems in Babrujsk, Belarus, answered an advertisement in 2010 offering easy money to anyone willing to sell a kidney.

This particular piece focused on a black market ring that was selling the harvested organs to Israeli patients desperately in need of kidney transplants, but other news items have also surfaced telling similar stories from other parts of the world.

The interesting folklore question [1] about this is: doesn’t the existence of a global black market in illegally harvested and transplanted organs make this Urban Legend true? I mean, doesn’t it?

The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is ‘Not really.’

…Okay, I can tell you’re a little disappointed, but let me explain.

To understand why this doesn’t exactly verify the Urban Legend, we need to consider that despite their similarities, these two stories are still quite different.

The Urban Legend version — a traveling businessman meets a pretty woman in a bar who seems instantly, probably even unexpectedly, attracted to him — is as much a morality story as anything else. In some versions of the story the businessman is married, and the consequences of his infidelity, and for being foolish enough to allow his personal safety to be compromised by the promise of a night with a pretty stranger, are predictably awful. It’s kind of like someone taking the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” thing to a whole new and disturbing level of literal interpretation.

The real-life stories are more conventional and mundane and, let’s face it, all the more sad and terrible because of it. The simple reality is that there are people in the world who are willing to sell a kidney due to poverty. And wait, there’s also the complexity of the organ transplant process to consider. The idea that people are randomly harvesting some stranger’s kidney in a hotel room on the premise that it might be used in a transplant within a very small timeframe is almost as unrealistic as when Kim Kardashian promises to stay married for longer than a week. For a transplant to be successful, matching between donor and recipient must be done before the operation can have any chance of success.

So, ya, I personally don’t consider the classic Urban Legend story to have been substantiated by these stories of black market organ harvesting rings. The randomness of the way in which people are targetted for harvesting is so much a part of the morality warning [2] of the Urban Legend version that the fact that it’s missing from the news stories means the Urban Legend stays ‘False’ for now.

Further Reading

• Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis
• The Kidney Thieves
• Kidney Theft
• Requirements of a Kidney Donor

Footnotes:

1.	I promise, this really is interesting stuff to people who study contemporary folklore.
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2.	In other words, the “Dude, it could happen to you!” part of the story.
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• Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
  

While poking around the dark recesses of the internet for other versions of The Ghostly Bus Driver, I stumbled on this appearance by Kojak star, Telly Savalas, on an Australian show about the unexplained.

In it, Telly recounts a mysterious encounter with a helpful motorist late one night when he had run out of gas. I won’t say anything more, since that would steal Telly’s thunder.

Reader Devin P sent in the following email:

I apologize in advance for the vague details; couldn’t find them. Here goes. Supposedly transit riders of (area unknown) have reported that after having missed a late night bus, a friendly little old man in an "old fashioned bus in need of repairs" has suddenly arrived to take them where they are going. The old man is reported to make warm, friendly conversation, as he takes the rider to their stop. Later it is inevitably discovered that such a driver and bus are not running any route on (line unknown). This seems to be an inversion of the "Ghostly Hitchhiker" legend, with the "spirit" offering a ride to the living.

No need to apologise, Devin! I very much like this re-imagining of a classic scare-lore tale, and like you I believe it has grown out of a version of “The Ghostly Hitchhiker” [1].

Having said that, I can’t remember coming across a version like this in any of my source books, and Google doesn’t return a match when you search for terms like “ghost bus driver”.

Can I ask roughly where and when you heard this story, if you remember?

And to any others who drop by; have any of you heard a similar tale involving a helpful, ghostly bus driver?

Footnotes:

1.	Sometimes also known as “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”.
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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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Don’t stop for any reason. Whatever you do… DON’T STOP FOR ANY REASON!!

That’s the frantic advice being given by a chain email that made its way into my inbox today [1].

Your life depends on it.

You are not safe.

If you pull your car over, if you stop, you are going to become a victim of a gang robbery, rape or perhaps even murder.

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Email warnings about gang tactics and initiation rituals are nothing new. Not only have they been floating around the internet for a number of years, there is every likelihood they were shared via photocopiers and fax machines before email became the de facto way of forwarding alarming advice.

Over the years, we have been warned that gang members have begun to hide in the back seats of cars when motorists stop to fill up with gas, only to attack and murder the driver once he or she has arrived home.

We have been told to never flash our car lights back at someone who puts theirs onto high beam because a gang initiation ritual requires gang members to drive around at night flashing their headlights, and to pursue and murder the first motorist who flashes their lights back.

And we’ve been told about various gang initiation crimes centred on car parks and shopping malls, in which women and children are to be abducted and murdered by new members to a gang.

Now we have an email that claims that gangs have developed two new techniques:

• Leaving a baby / infant car seat by the side of the road to force concerned motorists to pull over to investigate
• Throwing eggs at windshields with the knowledge that if the motorist attempts to clean the egg off with their wipers he or she will make the situation worse and will be forced to pull over anyway

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Collected via email on 13 January 2011:

Subject: FW: Police warning when driving.!!

While driving on a rural end of the roadway on Thursday morning, I saw an infant car seat on the side of the road with a blanket draped over it.

For whatever reason, I did not stop, even though I had all kinds of thoughts running through my head. But when I got to my destination, I called the Police and they were going to check it out. But, this is what the Police advised even before they went out there to check….

"There are several things to be aware of … gangs and thieves are now
plotting different ways to get a person (mostly women) to stop their
vehicle and get out of the car.

"There is a gang initiation reported by the local Police where gangs are
placing a car seat by the road…with a fake baby in it…waiting for a woman, of course, to stop and check on the abandoned baby.

"Note that the location of this car seat is usually beside a wooded or grassy (field) area and the person — woman — will be dragged into the woods, beaten and raped, and usually left for dead. If it’s a man,
they’re usually beaten and robbed and maybe left for dead, too.

DO NOT STOP FOR ANY REASON!!!

DIAL 0-0-0 AND REPORT WHAT YOU SAW, BUT DON’T EVEN SLOW DOWN.

"IF YOU ARE DRIVING AT NIGHT AND EGGS ARE THROWN AT YOUR WINDSCREEN, DO NOT STOP TO CHECK THE CAR, DO NOT OPERATE THE WIPER AND DO NOT SPRAY ANY WATER BECAUSE EGGS MIXED
WITH WATER BECOME MILKY AND BLOCK YOUR VISION UP TO 92.5%, AND YOU ARE THEN FORCED TO STOP BESIDE THE ROAD AND BECOME A VICTIM OF THESE CRIMINALS.

THIS IS A NEW TECHNIQUE USED BY GANGS, SO PLEASE INFORM YOUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES.

THESE ARE DESPERATE TIMES AND THESE ARE UNSAVOURY INDIVIDUALS WHO WILL TAKE DESPERATE MEASURES TO GET WHAT THEY WANT."

Please talk to your loved ones about this. This is a new tactic used. Please be safe.

Get started NOW — SEND THIS MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND LOVED ONES TO BE CAREFUL AND AWARE OF EVERYTHING AROUND THEM SO AS NOT TO BECOME A VICTIM.

∗∗∗

Thankfully, you only need to spend a couple of minutes on Google to turn up results that clearly indicate that this email is a hoax.

The DesMoines Register, for example, spoke to the DesMoines Police Department who confirmed that the email is a hoax.

The Tennessee Department Of Corrections issued a statement indicating that an employee had privately forwarded the email, but there was no evidence to consider it as true.

And of course the excellent reference sites of snopes.com and urbanlegends.about.com have both tagged the email as false.

∗∗∗

So, please be assured that there really is no widespread global [2] gang initiation ritual taking place in which infant car seats and eggs are being used to waylay motorists.

Footnotes:

1.	Thanks to Darren K
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2.	In case you’re interested, the example of the email that I have used above has been modified for an Australian audience – according to this list on Wikipedia, Australia is the only country that uses “000” as its emergency number.
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This is probably old news for some, but I thought I’d mention it as a friend on Facebook shared this video as being true.

It isn’t.

This video was produced by French marketing company, LastFools, for mobile accessory manufacturer, Cardo Systems, who make headset systems.

The video, of course, went viral, and while there are a lot of demonstrations on sites like YouTube that you can’t pop popcorn with mobile / cell phones (my favourite one demonstrates that you can ‘do’ the same thing with bananas), there are obviously people who are still encountering the original viral marketing campaign for the first time.

Further reading: Videos of ‘popcorn’ mobile phones faked

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)