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Comedian Dennis Miller is well-known for his rapid-fire, acerbic rants on the day's hot-button topics. While the letter above approximates his style, it lacks several tell-tale signs of a Miller Rant. He usually flavors his work with pop-culture references and starts out with the appropriately cynical claim "Now I don't want to get off on a rant here . . ." Both are absent from this piece.
Celebrity attributions in e-mail chain letters often occur simply because the work seems like something they'd say. There is a law of generalization on the net. Any set of redneck jokes can be attributed to comedian Jeff Foxworthy. Any surprising story with a conclusion you may not have expected can be taken as the work of radio personality Paul Harvey. Any amusing, ultra-liberal essay is often assumed to be the work of comedians George Carlin or Dennis Leary. Likewise, any patently conservative monologue can be blamed on the likes of Ted Nugent, Rush Limbaugh or Charlie Daniels. We believe them because we want them to be true. E-mail cannot be relied upon to distribute information. BreakTheChain.org recommends that you never forward anything written by another person without first verifying that it is his or her work and that it is circulating without changes and with his or her permission. Break this chain.
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(3/28/2003) One constant on the Internet is that a chain letter is inevitably more popular if we think it came from somebody famous. Unfortunately, more often thatn not, these attributions don't check out.
