unvalidated myths?

songs playing: only when i leave and sunlight--paolo santos' version

during the days when pirated dvds were not yet available to public, a movie ticket would cost you merely 30 bucks, sm malls were everybody's favorite movie theaters, and people weren't seriously conscious of the time the film starts and ends, movie horror stories, or should i say myths scared the shit out of overprotective parents.

the most famous would definitely be the random HIV injections. according to the myth, there were HIV positive people who appearantly couldn't contain the virus just to themselves, so they felt the need to pass the virus to other people. according to the stories, these people either stick the needle to your arms or worse, they stick it to your ass, thanks to the hole of the foldable chairs. my mother would therefore make us wear longsleeved shirts and jackets if we insisted on catching the latest hollywood flick. when i was in fourth year high school, this story resurrected. this time, instead of sm megamall, it was sm manila. and if i remember it right, the virus was no longer HIV but e-bola.

there's also the unforgettable rat-in-the-kentucky-fried-chicken-bucket story. there was a group of teenagers who went to watch a movie while enjoying colonel sanders' original recipe fried chicken when suddenly, this guy grabs what he thought was a drumstick. well, of course it was moving so he freaked out and everyone else in the room panicked and raced to the outside of the theater. a lot of people really bought that story. i'm pretty sure KFC sales definitely declined. since then, we refrained from eating KFC... and years later, we couldn't bear it. so to hell with the myth.

how can we forget the famous alice dixon seeing a snake in a robinsons galleria dressing room story? this was funny. there were so many versions of this story. some people thought that it was alice dixon who actually brought the snake in the mall. then again, a lot of people bought this stupid story. robinsons galleria then became one of the places to avoid.

oh, and there's the burger mcdo made with worms. hey, i have to admit. i kinda bought this one. well, i'm just not sure if my mom was playing a joke on me, but she would always tell me that one of her odd jobs then was to raise worms to be placed as beef substitutes in burgermachine burgers, so she was insisting that there is indeed a high probability that mcdonalds has decided to join the cheating bandwagon. yuck.

there's also the old jollibee fries made from kamote, not really potatoes. i'm no food connoisseur so i can't really validate or disprove this one. mcdonald's, on the other hand, are being accused of not really serving apple pies but sayote pies. again, this is still a big question mark.

are we really stupid when we buy these stories? can we help it?