Collects both well-known stories and shady rumors, including "The Stolenidney," "Naked at His Own Surprise Party," and "The Scuba Diver in theorest Fire".

This revised edition of the original reference standard for urban legends provides an updated anthology of common myths and stories, and presents expanded coverage of international legends and tales shared and popularized online. From roasted babies to vanishing hitchhikers to housewives in football helmets, this exhaustive and highly readable encyclopedia provides descriptions of hundreds of individual legends and their variations, examines legend themes, and explains scholarly approaches to the genre. Revised and expanded to include updated versions of the entries from the award-winning first edition, this work provides additional entries on a wide range of new topics that include terrorism, recent political events, and Hurricane Katrina. Entries in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, Updated and Expanded Edition discuss the presence of urban legends in comic books, literature, film, music, and many other areas of popular culture, as well as the existence of "too good to be true" stories in Argentina, China, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and several other countries. Serving as both an anthology of stories as well as a reference work, this encyclopedia will serve as a valuable resource for students and a source book for journalists, professional folklorists, and others who are researching or interested in urban legends.

With more than one hundred-fifty books and three hundred published articles on proverb studies that have attracted wide attention of folklorists around the world, it is little wonder that international scholars look upon Wolfgang Mieder as the modern-day Pied Piper of paremiology. For this festschrift, some of the world's leading proverb and folklore scholars have come together to commemorate Mieder's sixty-fifth birthday. Authors from Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, Israel, and the United States have contributed essays representative of the scope and breadth of Mieder's own impressive scholarship. The Proverbial «Pied Piper» honors Wolfgang Mieder's legendary contributions to the study of proverbs and contains new scholarship by some of the best paremiologists in the world.

Chronicles the urban legends that have arisen following the events ofeptember 11, 2001 in addition to such others as scams for getting paid forending e-mail messages and surefire methods for avoiding points on driversicenses.

“Tick, tock, tick, tock.” Thanks to Peter Pan, this sound, if heard near water, means run: a hungry crocodile is on its way. J. M. Barrie isn’t fully to blame for spreading the word that crocodiles are our enemies, or at least the enemies of one-handed pirates—innumerable songs, stories, and legends have characterized these reptiles as a symbol of pitiless predation and insatiable appetite. Tracking twenty-three crocodilian species from India and Egypt to Africa, Australia, and beyond, Crocodile advocates that we do a complete one-eighty in our views of these magnificent creatures. Dan Wylie traces the crocodile in myth, art, and literature, demonstrating that though we commonly associate the reptiles with ferocity and deceit, they have also often been respected and revered in human history. Discussing how crocodiles were all but wiped out in the middle of the twentieth century by hunters and skin traders and are now making a comeback, he reveals that, as apex predators, they are today an increasingly important indicator of the health of an ecosystem and may outlive humans like they did dinosaurs. Presenting a concise, cogent case for why we should respect these fearsome animals, this beautifully illustrated volume is a tribute to one of the world’s ultimate survivors.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

Absolutely true stories that happened to a friend...of a friend...of a friend.