1:10 p.m. - 2006-01-25
a word of advice...
It never ceases to amaze me that after all of these years of false information being distributed through the Internet via email forwards, that people still are so trigger happy when it comes to forwarding this information on to the masses.
I'll make a confession. I've done it, too. In my defense, I will say that I haven't done it for at least a year or two, and that when I did, it was because it came from a person I couldn't imagine just randomly forwarding false information. But even so, I definitely forwarded some email about cold medicines from some company or other having a dangerous drug in it and how we were all supposed to immediately throw away any such products. I did check out that email...by going to my medicine cabinet, finding a medicine on their list and locating the offensive ingredient. There it was! Right there! Dyonmenonepiphrineglyceride or whatever. The problem here is that the ingredient in question is harmless and is used in many drugs.
Bob Cantoni gently informed me of this upon receiving my frantic email, and directed me to www.snopes.com
While almost nothing is 100% reliable on the Internet in terms of where info is coming from and how biased it is, etc., I have found that Snopes generally has backing info to support its claims.
I have also discovered that, so far, every email forward I've felt was questionable, that I've gone to Snopes to check out, has been deemed false or true at one time, but now very old and no longer relevant.
So, that email going around about the cell phone companies giving your phone number to telemarketers and everyone having to re-register yearly with the Do Not Call List, according to Snopes, is false. If you're on the Do Not Call list, you're good. And any cell phone directory that may come to exist in the future, will be opt-in, as opposed to opt-out. Like, you have to call them to get on it, as opposed to you have to call them to make sure you're NOT on it.
