Who's Snoping Snopes?

     I fully admit that when I succumb to assorted bits of total naivete that I've been known to forward internet emails and photos without thinking about whether I should or not, and, as a result, I'm sure I've propagated along the way certain ideas.  To wit:  Three daily slices of burnt toast as a cure to male pattern baldness?  Automatic forward.  Joe Biden's teeth secretly harbor alien life?  Ditto.  GOP budget stubbornness to blame for Florida sinkhole?  Click.
     I mean, I did this all the time.  Something looked interesting and it was my interest - nay, my duty - to let others know.  An awful habit.  But then one day the clouds parted and I saw the light.
     Enter snopes.com.
     Oh, I had heard of snopes but had never visited that particular site so I didn't know what it was "for."  It always sounded "funny" to me, reminding me so much of the Scopes Monkey Trial which involved the Tennessee public school's prohibited teaching of evolution and the prosecutorial skills of Lincoln, Nebraska's own William Jennings Bryan.  But being the responsible person that I hope I am, I checked it out.

     It turns out that snopes.com is a website dedicated to either stopping from spreading or otherwise confirming popular urban myths.  Started in 1995 by Barbara and David Mikkelson, it now records at least 300,000 visits a day, and has apparently garnered enough respect to have become the go-to place when people wonder about stuff including usage by media outlets such has CNN and Fox News.  Snopes covers a lot of potential misinformation bases, including pop culture, media, sports, history, language, and many other categories.  In one famous debunking, snopes dispelled the rumor that the nursery rhyme "Sing A Song Of Sixpence" was actually a coded tune used by pirates to help recruit members.  Important work.  Probably.
     But eventually if I walk down a certain path the inevitable cynic in me rears its head, and in this case I think:
     Who's Snoping Snopes?
     In one delicious orgy of misguided optimism, a Wikipedia post on snopes states, " In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on the internet as authority, the Mikkelsons assembled..."  So they promote their authoritative internet site as a definitive place to go to protect against reliance on all things internet.  Is anyone hearing this?  Seeing the irony?  Who died and made snopes the point and click god?  Is it because there was a vacuum that needed to be filled and snopes - to their credit in that regard, I admit - filled it?  Just because they say something is so, we're to believe it without checking their checking?  I just don't do and never will do the blind loyalty thing.  I trust two things completely and totally:  God and my family.  Snopes is neither.
     Snopes has received  more complaints of liberal than conservative bias but insists - again, IN SNOPES WE TRUST - that they use the same methods in researching all potential myths.  FactCheck, in another example of the fox guarding the hen house, found that according to their research snopes was by and large on the up and up in re political bias.   They further state that Barbara was a Canadian citizen unable to vote in American elections and David was once a registered Republican, going out of their way to take both of the Mikkelsons off the hook and with "once" being the operative word.  Again, with age comes cynicism.  I've got both.

     In an article in the February 1, 2013, edition of National Geographic, a story appeared concerning a red-footed tortoise who had somehow survived thirty years trapped in a wooden box that had been stored away in a shed.  When I heard of that story, my heart warmed.  The animal lover in me was doing numerous low-fives with the little reptile for making it through.  Then I thought:  This sounds too good to be true.  I bet it's fake.  I bet snopes has already gotten their self-righteous claws in this one and....
     But I don't care if it's fake.  Not this time.  I don't care if I'm believing in something false.  It's a great story, this little poor soul put away and forgotten with only its shell, the darkness and quiet for company and only termites to eat and condensation to lick for water.  For thirty years.  30.  It's a great story.  And snopes is not going to ruin this one for me.
     Although I bet it probably would love to try.