) The story is considered an urban legend.

Less illustrious uses refer to folklore and urban legend and a variety of explanatory narratives which are constructed with methodological flaws or biases.

This story was later confirmed to be an urban legend by the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

If a story is found to be untrue, it is disqualified, but particularly amusing ones are placed in the urban legend section of the archives.

Contemporary narratives common in the Western world include the urban legend.

An urban legend has it that the phrase refers to an old English law under which a man could legally beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb ( though no such law ever existed ).

Groucho was the subject of an urban legend about a supposed response to a contestant who had nine children which supposedly brought down the house.

Candyman, for example, examined the link between an invented urban legend and the realistic horror of the racism that produced its villain.

Thus, freethinkers strive to build their opinions on the basis of facts, scientific inquiry, and logical principles, independent of any logical fallacies or intellectually limiting effects of authority, confirmation bias, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, popular culture, prejudice, sectarianism, tradition, urban legend, and all other dogmas.

* Kosher tax, an urban legend and antisemitic conspiracy theory

A widely disseminated urban legend tells of a radio conversation between a U. S. or British naval vessel and what is believed to be another ship on a collision course.

Further, modern mythopoeia such as fantasy novels, manga, and urban legend, with many competing artificial mythoi acknowledged as fiction, supports the idea of myth as ongoing social practice.

An urban legend claims Dolophine was named for Adolf Hitler.

There is also an urban legend that the first game of polo in America was played in Boerne, Texas at retired British officer Captain Glynn Turquand's famous Balcones Ranch.

* Paul Is Dead, a 1960s urban legend that Paul McCartney was dead

These ersatz tales — which included the notion that Prince Albert invented the piercing that shares his name in order to tame the appearance of his large penis in tight trousers — are widely circulated as urban legend.

The existence of for-profit snuff films is generally considered an urban legend.

The original story of Sweeney Todd was quite possibly based on an older urban legend, originally based on dubious pie-fillings.

A late ( 1890s ) reference to the urban legend of the murdering barber can be found in the poem by the Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson — The Man from Ironbark.

It was something of a success, and the story spread by word of mouth and took on the quality of an urban legend.

An urban legend claims that the doomed tank might have been overfilled in late 1918 so that the owners could produce as much rum as possible before Prohibition came into effect.

While an urban legend, a 1999 television documentary, part of the Modern Marvels ' Engineering Disasters sub-series, argued that — even if there was no specific plan to make alcohol to beat Prohibition — there may have been some general idea of increasing the volume at the last minute so as to prepare in case total alcohol prohibition might occur.

Despite this, the identification of the tarot cards with the Egyptian Book of Thoth was already firmly established in occult practice and continues in modern urban legend to the present day.

An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true.

He initially hides his ability, with the " Atlanta Blur " regarded as an urban legend, but when Hyperion is publicly revealed Stewart also goes public, becoming a celebrity with numerous endorsements.

For a number of centuries Highlanders came south to Crieff to sell their black cattle whose meat and hides were avidly sought by the growing urban populations in Lowland Scotland and the north of England.

The map, based on provincial borders, also hides an additional sharp disparity between urban and rural areas.

One social-class factor which plays a large part in educational policy today is the fact that a great many school and college teachers are upward mobile from urban lower-class and lower-middle-class families.

" Although such similarities have given rise to arguments for the existence of a standardized system of urban layout and planning, the similarities are largely due to the presence of a semi-orthogonal type of civic layout, and a comparison of the layouts of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa shows that they are in fact, arranged in a quite dissimilar fashion.

" From its earliest beginnings, Christianity spread much more quickly in major urban areas ( like Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, Corinth, Rome ) than in the countryside ( in fact, the early church was almost entirely urban ), and soon the word for " country dweller " became synonymous with someone who was " not a Christian ," giving rise to the modern meaning of " pagan.

In fact, after 1945, urban planning became one of the methods through which capitalism could be managed and the interests of developers and corporations could be administered ( Irving 1993, 479 ).

But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable.

According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the actual de facto desegregation of U. S. public schools peaked in the late 1980s ; since that time, the schools have, in fact, become more segregated mainly due to the ethnic segregation of the nation with whites dominating the suburbs and minorities the urban centers.

As urban planning in Germany is the responsibility of city government, the integration of East and West Berlin was in part complicated by the fact that the existing planning frameworks became obsolete with the fall of the Wall.

This, together with the fact that the motors were made by Polymotor in Italy, started the urban myth that the C5 was powered by a washing machine motor.

At first, Warner Brothers did not promote Bonnie and Clyde for general release, but instead mounted only limited regional releases that seemed to confirm its misgivings about the film's lack of commercial appeal, despite the fact the film was doing excellent sustained business in select urban theatres.

Most " cities " are not, in fact, cities in the traditional sense of the word ( that is, a large urban area ) but are local government districts that have city status and often encompass large rural areas.

This gave students free rein in urban environments to break secular laws with impunity, a fact which produced many abuses: theft, rape and murder were not uncommon among students who did not face serious consequences.

In fact, in terms of its urban sprawl, medieval Angkor even approaches the size of modern Los Angeles, and is said to have been seventeen times larger than Manhattan Island.

This fact also contributes to a major difference from typical suburbs ; rather than being composed of new developments and urban sprawl, many of the structures in town are older, including a downtown area of brick storefronts.

Around the turn of the century, many huge and expensive buildings were erected and became symbols for the area's wealth ; massive chapels and a new Grammar School were built in Cleckheaton, and to mark the new urban district and the fact that it was the centre of it, Cleckheaton built a town hall in 1892, paid for by public subscription.

In fact this Ligurian influence is still visible in the urban layout as well as in the types of buildings and decorations.

In fact, the city's urban area has grown so much during the last 10 years, that it has surpassed the boundaries of the neighboring municipality of Jesús María, annexing its municipal administrative head town to the metropolitan area of Aguascalientes, converted now into a suburb.

Thracian civilisation was not urban and the largest Thracian cities were in fact large villages.

In fact, with feral pigeons existing in most every city in the world, they may form the majority of prey for several raptor species who live in urban areas.

If one lives in a large urban metropolis, this sort of trip might also be extended, taking a train or coach to get to a more convenient starting point, and may in fact take a lot longer than 24 hours, making it a weekend tour, but it otherwise still works on the same planning principals.

This rule targeted the ethnic-Chinese, who dominated both the rural and urban retail economy despite the fact that at this time few of them had Indonesian citizenship.

Another area of criticism comes from the fact that, since a greenbelt does not extend indefinitely outside a city, it might spur the growth of areas much further away from the city core than if it had not existed, thereby actually increasing urban sprawl.

After Green's death from lung cancer, Botham wrote the exposé story, also in the News of the World, of Green being the biological father of Jess Yates's daughter, TV presenter Paula Yates, a fact she had first learned after the tabloids printed the story ( although Green being her father had been an " urban legend " for many years ).

With a length of 13 km, including a 6 km promenade, the Marina is considered the world's second longest urban beach, although there exist in fact several longer beaches, including Praia do Cassino ( 254 km ) in Brazil, Cox's Bazar ( 120 km ) in Bangladesh, Padre Island on the U. S. Gulf Coast, Ninety Mile Beach in Australia and Ninety Mile Beach ( 88 km ) in New Zealand.

Beginning roughly in the 1960s, the wholesale privatization of public space ( especially in urban centers ) has become a fact of western society, and has faced criticism from citizen groups such as the Open Spaces Society.