I received a weird email today from my sister that had been forwarded several times. The email claimed that the comedian Sinbad had died. He’s best known for his role in the TV series A Different World. He played a guy named Walter, I believe? He also starred in a few other TV series as well as a few movies. Well it turns out that his death is a hoax. He’s still alive! But tons of people were thinking he was dead because apparently, somebody had gotten into Wikipedia and edited the encyclopedia entry for Sinbad, giving him a date of death (yesterday’s date). They also said that he’d died of a heart attack!

If you look at Wikipedia now, they’ve corrected Sinbad’s encyclopedia reference and the death date no longer exists. They’ve also locked Sinbad’s entry so that it can’t be edited by new users.

A story was recently posted this evening on the reuters website about this legend:
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=411852007

For some reason, urban legends have always fascinated me. It’s strange, that in a matter of a few hours(or minutes) you can have tons of people believing such untruths!

What a world we live in!

Cecelia Dowdy
www.ceceliadowdy.com