"From Me to You"

A friend of mine posted a picture of this house with a caption that said "This guy was told by his Homeowners Association that he couldn't fly the American flag in his yard. So..." Many people left comments giving much credit to this man for being a "true American" with his protest. I found this pretty interested and wanted to read the whole story, so I googled it. I was quite surprised when I found out that the truth behind this house's interesting decor actually had nothing to do with the American flag at all! While there have been cases where homeowners associations have made rules about flying flags that wasn't the case for this guy. He was protesting the fact that his windows were not up to historical code. He found no rules about what colors to paint his house so he painted it like this. He painted his other Victorian house in black.

After reading that it led me to look up another interesting story I read recently on facebook. This was a picture I myself re-posted because I thought it looked cool. One of the most popular versions of this picture has a caption claiming that a young boy chained his bike to a tree in 1914 and went off to war never returning again.  People have lots of pride in 

our country and love stories like that. It sounded too easily made up to me. I did some digging and found tons of stories about this bike in the tree. There's even a children's book written inspired by the tree that some claim as truth. Key word is INSPIRED! 

After about an hour of searching the only reliable thing I'd found was that was in fact real and not photo shopped. I was beginning to give up thinking that this was one of those stories to remain a mystery... 

Until I found a story on snopes.com. The true story is that Don Puz was given a bike back in 1954. He and some friends were out playing in the woods. Don was the only one that had ridden his bike out to the woods. He didn't really like it all that much and didn't feel like carrying it home, so he left it there and forgot about it.

Years later when the bike was discovered Don and his mother paid a visit and he recognized the bike right away. Although the war story does sound much cooler it's not the truth.

What I find interesting about all of this is how easily we take facebook news as actual news. A little over a year ago I changed the name on one of my ultrasound pictures of Abigail. I took out my name and stuck in my friends name. I didn't change anything else about the picture and then hacked onto my friends account (with her permission so I guess it wasn't really hacking) and posted the picture. The amount of people who automatically assumed she was expecting was astounding! Especially those who'd seen these exact pictures on my page!

Next viral facebook photo:

Youngest snake handler in the world!