My somewhat bigoted mother got an email forward from an extended family member. This particular forward (which she called “great”) purports to have been penned by Andy Rooney. Things like

I like big cars, big boats, big motorcycles, big houses and big campfires.

I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some governmental stooge with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts for squirting out babies.

I don’t think being a minority makes you a victim of anything except numbers. The only things I can think of that are truly discriminatory are things like the United Negro College Fund, Jet Magazine, Black Entertainment Television, and Miss Black America.

My father and grandfather shouldn’t have to die in vain so you can leave the countries you were born in to come over and disrespect ours. I think the police should have every right to shoot your sorry ass if you threaten them after they tell you to stop. If you can’t understand the word “freeze” or “stop” in English, see the above lines.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Andy Rooney

I remember reading about it in late November. Parts of it were attributed to George Carlin in an earlier forward. “Andy Rooney didn’t write that,” I said. “It’s a hoax.”

Needless to say, she got angry. Why? I’m not sure, perhaps because without the big name attached to it, it’s just hateful invective disguised as honest patriotism. When I told her that Rooney had actually called the oft-attributed forward “detestable,” she seemed to get even angier, now that the commentator whom she had held up as a shining example of her worldview actually condemned it.

Nevermind the political differences involved here: those are in perpetuity. The lesson I hope she learned (but which she probably did not) is that e-mail forwards, regardless of what they espouse, are generally misleading, flat-out lies, or at least wrongly attributed.

For those of you who have never been to Snopes before, I highly recommend it, not only as an entertaining source for debunking old myths and stories, but a way to stay abreast of the latest scams, hoaxes, and fraudulent forwards.

When he finally drifted into an uneasy sleep, he did so with a feeling of shame and unworthiness gnawing at his insides. A collage of jumbled images coalesced in his mind’s eye. He saw himself at the helm of Bucephalus [a tractor -Ed.] driving a terrified pack of naked and enslaved Bakerites across a plateau. He was bathed in an ethereal glow with a Winchester thrown over one shoulder and his steed roaring like a Howitzer. To all sides, the mob scurried before him in buck-naked profusion: beer-gutted deputies from the Sheriff’s department stumbling over fallen cleaning maids. Hairy-backed trolls bounding along in quivering rolls of free-swinging celluloid. Crones with bowls of dead goldfish scampering over the sick and dying, stopping only to rob them of their jewelry and lap at their wounds. Roy Mentzer on all fours being openly sodomized with garden tools by the chain-gang in suspension. The student body from Holborn bleeding from every orifice, crawling along on their hands and knees, being trampled underfoot, tearing and biting at one another, pulling hair, gouging eyes, all fleeing in an obscene bow-legged panic toward the edge of a cliff. And John driving them forward as the shepherd in residence. Bucephalus screaming, the Winchester pounding, bodies falling, the terrain being marred, and finally the whole convalescent lot of them being driven straight over the edge. And their bodies falling like feed sacks against the open sky before being impaled, pounded and blown to bits on the escarpment of jagged limestone columns below. And John plodding along on the ledge high above, the panoramic display of the open sea stretched out and cascading before him, the dead mob strewn along the beach having finally gotten its cue and gone silent.

Man alive, do I love this book. Steal, kill, and pillage to find a copy, folks. It’s good reading.