[UA] New artifact and ritual as an urban legend

[Cassady Toles]

One of my key issues with this idea is the fact that urban legends don't
travel primarily through word of mouth.  They travel because they are
mentioned on television (a recorded medium that isn't memory), put into
movies (ibid), mentioned in comic books or books of ghost stories (see
previous), sent on e-mail (ditto), published in the american folklore
journal (see above), read on the radio or discussed on the radio as news
(this arguably would work, but commercial stations operate with recorded
delays of one to three seconds, sorry), or listed on websites these days
(which also wouldn't work).  If it only works through word of mouth, it's
going to be either _very_ local, or the details will be very sketchy.  In
either case, I don't see why the FBI would bother investigating it.  Even if
they did, where would the orders to do so come from, every time someone sent
a memo or e-mail it would be destroyed...

So if you are going to do this story, consider how the story would get
around without EVER being mentioned on ANY of those mediums listed above. 
And if it would get to them solely through word of mouth, why aren't they
looking for "the Hook," "Phantom Hitchhiker," or the guy who drove home and
found a girl scout stuck to the grill of his car?

I would like to end with the caveat that I'm sure I sound like an
egomaniacal jerk, but I have an obsessive interest in folklore and good
folklore scholarship (not Joseph Campbell) and I've studied how these
stories propogate and what they do, and they don't work the way everyone
wants them to.

It's because of that issue someone mentioned about memory and the bard who
recalled the tale but it tripled in length.  What those tests don't mention
is that some minor details were dropped and are dropped and other things
fleshed out as things are memorized.  I can tell you ten thousand jokes I've
been told in Irish pubs and bars, but I can't repeat to the line any of them
from the first time I heard them.  Oral tradition works that way.

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"I am the messiah in the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniel's.  Drink of me
and
no peace." -- Cobra Baghdad www.peoplehateme.com
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