An scare e-mail claiming that gang members are placing a deadly LSD/strychnine combination on public telephones shows no signs of being true.

Forget the killer tomatos, the bananas are the ones you need to look out for. See they've already wiped out the monkey population in Costa Rica, and have landed advance troops in major North American cities. Run for your lives!

Or not. You see, the "necrotizing fasciitis" infected bananas don't exist. And now, two years after I first wrote about this, I'm happy to say that they still don't exist.

The lurk, deep beneath your hair, nesting close to your scalp, waiting patiently to hatch and wreak destruction upon the landscape of your head. No, they're not head lice. Or fleas. Or ticks. They're spiders ... swarming, nasty, black spiders and they're going to devour your skull!

Or not.

Mutant chickens are running amok in the fast food industry! In an effort to save costs, Kentucky Fried Chicken ditched its full name, switched to KFC and began using genetically engineer quasi chickens that taste like chicken, but are kept alive through dubious means.

Unfortunately for chickens everywhere, this is a hoax. I first debunked this in 2000, but decided to go back and update it a bit. This version has a few more links debunking the hoax.

Freedom-loving individuals have the chance to nominate and vote for books in Free-Market.net's annual

Yahoo! Groups gives you the tools to keep your campaign connected online, but its up to the game master to make it work and get people posting to it. Here are a few suggestions on how to do that:

• Post campaign news to the group:If you have news about your campaign world that can be handled outside of the game -- such as between session updates -- post it here. Also use it to post summaries of what happened during the last session. This gives players a reason to use the group and gives them something to think about between sessions.

It's been around on the net for years -- AOL and Intel are merging, and they want to give you lots of money for forwarding their e-mail. Actually, they want Microsoft to give you lots of money. No, actually, it's Microsoft that's urging the forwarding, and Bill Gates is funding the excercise in personal, exponential economic destruction himself. And if you act now, Time-Warner will throw in a certain Bridge in Brooklyn...

Iterations of this hoax -- in which AOL, Intel or Microsoft give away money for annoying one's friends with a gazillion forwards -- have been around for years. The hoax is a convuluted hybrid of at least three different earlier hoaxes, and stopped making sense (if it ever made sense) sometime in 1999.

The Sims is a strangely compelling simulation game that let's players micromanage someone else's life.

Does the fact that RPG gamers are getting older spell certain doom for the hobby? I don't think so.