Guru Unaffected by LSD – Christmas Flounder (N.C.) – Japanese Urban Legends

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/baba-ram-dass-and-the-tale-of-the-acid-gobbling-guru/

Scientific American

24 December 2019

Baba Ram Dass and the Tale of the Acid-Gobbling Guru

Skeptics have questioned a story told by the late counterculture icon in his classic best seller Be Here Now

    By John Horgan

[…] To commemorate the man, I’ll tell a little tale about him. It begins in 1999 when I interviewed psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna in New York City. McKenna said he doubted a famous anecdote in Be Here Now involving […] a guru whom Ram Dass met in India in 1967[.] […] When Maharajji asked Ram Dass for “medicine,” Ram Dass gave him three pills, each containing 305 micrograms of LSD, a very strong dose. The guru gulped down all three pills. “All day long I’m there,” Ram Dass wrote, “and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothing—nothing happens!”  LSD didn’t affect Maharajji, Ram Dass implied, because the guru already had such a profoundly mystical outlook. […]

[Via the Wayback Machine]

https://web.archive.org/web/20061126230654/http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/scientific_curmudgeon/?p=32

The Scientific Curmudgeon

12 July 2006

Did Ram Dass’s Guru Really Take LSD?

by John Horgan

See also John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 185-6.

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https://www.starnewsonline.com/foodanddining/20191224/is-local-christmas-fish-tale-fishy-or-perfect-muse

Wilmington StarNews [NC]

24 December 2019

Is local Christmas fish tale fishy, or a perfect muse?

[…] [Newsman Paul Jennewein] first penned the tale of the Christmas Flounder on Christmas Eve in 1950 and it has been annually reprinted ever since. Apparently in the Great Depression, Wilmington folks, too poor for turkeys and hams on Christmas Eve, slipped out into local waters with lights and gigs. They would bring home flounder for Christmas morning, stuffing them with local delicacies like oysters, crabs, collards and grits. These dishes supposedly appeared on tables across the region, even after the bleak days of the Depression had passed. […]

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https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00789/japanese-urban-legends-from-the-slit-mouthed-woman-to-kisaragi-station.html

Nippon.com [Japan]

27 December 2019

Japanese Urban Legends from the “Slit-Mouthed Woman” to “Kisaragi Station”

The story of a terrifying “slit-mouthed woman” who approached children in the late 1970s kickstarted Japan’s modern urban legends.

[…] Compared with word of mouth, urban legends conveyed digitally tend to go to one of the two extremes, either staying completely the same or radically changing during the process. “When you pass on a story orally, you’re always going by memory, so even if there are small changes the main details stay the same. Online, you can copy and paste or transform it completely if you want.” […]

Carol Singers Burgle Houses

http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/Facebook-rumours-8216-Carol-singers-burgling/story-25618450-detail/story.html

Hull Daily Mail [UK]

11 December 2014

Facebook rumours of ‘Carol singers burgling Kingswood houses’ are urban myth

POLICE say widespread rumours about “bogus” carol singers visiting houses in Kingswood before returning to burgle them are false. […]

Winterval

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/08/winterval-modern-myth-christmas

The Guardian [UK]
8 November 2011

Winterval: the unpalatable making of a modern myth

Kevin Arscott

[...] Between them, the Times and the Sunday Times have in fact managed to repeat the myth 40 times in total since 1998, an achievement only surpassed by the Daily Mail, which leads the field with 44 mentions. The Daily Telegraph managed to repeat it 22 times, only slightly behind the Express (26), and a bit further behind the Sun (31). The Daily Mirror only seems to have repeated the myth on four occasions – less than the Guardian, which has repeated it on six occasions, even though it did eventually debunk the myth in several different articles.

The myth was not just repeated, either. It was also gradually distorted to become ever more removed from the original misconception. What started as a myth that one council had rebranded or renamed Christmas became a pluralised, open-ended narrative that "councils" and "authorities" were rebranding or renaming Christmas as "Winterval". [...]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/article-2058830/Clarifications-corrections.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Daily Mail [UK]
8 November 2011

Clarifications and corrections

By Daily Mail Reporter

We stated in an article on 26 September that Christmas has been renamed in various places Winterval.
Winterval was the collective name for a season of public events, both religious and secular, which took place in Birmingham in 1997 and 1998.

We are happy to make clear that Winterval did not rename or replace Christmas.