> Our Flag: Did you Know?
>
> Do you know that at military funerals, the 21-gun salute
> stands for the sum of the numbers in the year 1776?
Sorry, Pa, it just ain’t so. See http://www.snopes.com/military/21gun.htm, which in part reads:
“Although the year 1776 is deeply significant to Americans and the total of its digits does add up to 21, it played no part in this drama. (Indeed, the custom of the 21-gun salute antedates the American Revolution by at least several decades.)”
> Have you ever noticed the honor guard pays meticulous attention to
> correctly folding the American flag 13 times? You probably thought it
> was to symbolize the original 13 colonies, but we learn something new
> every day!… [snipped the rest]
Sorry again, but it just ain’t so. See http://www.snopes.com/military/flagfold.htm, which in part reads:
“The flag is folded this way simply because it provides a dignified ceremonial touch that distinguishes folding a flag from folding an ordinary object such as a bedsheet, and because it results a visually pleasing, easy-to-handle shape. That this process requires thirteen folds is coincidental, not the product of design.”
Now, why should I care? So what if people believe that 21-guns = 1776 and 13-folds = eternal life and God and honor and Mother’s Day and all that? Well, from an information technology standpoint, I view Internet bandwidth in general and email inbox space in particular a limited resource. When we forward these falsehoods through the ether to everyone in our address book, and they forward it to their pals, ad infinitum, it only takes three or four forwards to create a huge mass of junk email flooding the servers on which the Internet depends.
Think of the math. If you forward this to ten friends, and they forward to ten friends each, and so on, say, ten times, you’ve just created ten-to-the-tenth-power, or 10 BILLION emails. Considering that this email was 21KB worth of space on my PC, that’s over 200,000 GIGABYTES of storage space wasted on an easily disproved assertion. And that doesn’t begin to add in the time it takes to download, read, and discard the email. May not be much of an inconvenience to y’all, but I have to process over 400 emails per day in my line of work.
And from a truth standpoint, I just think fostering any falsehood, no matter how insignificant, is detrimental to society. It’s a very small leap from 21-gun salute = 1776 to such 9/11 falsehoods as:
“Quran (9:11) — For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; and there was peace.”
The world is a tough enough place to understand when we’ve got the facts on the table. Adding these Internet Urban Legends just muddies things up and makes seeking the truth more difficult.
Anyway, that’s enough out of this radical liberal. When you get one of those emails with all the > > > > > > >’s in it, please check out http://www.snopes.com before forwarding it to me.
“Radical” Russ — live and direct from the land of tolerance and diversity, America’s only county granting gay marriage licenses, and one of the five founding AM stations carrying Air America Radio…
____________________________________________________________________
|
_ | "RADICAL" RUSS BELVILLE | Read More at http://radicalruss.net/blog/
| Portland, Oregon U.S.A. | Permission is granted for reprint of this
| © 2004 by Russ Belville | post, as long as this footer is included.
