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  • 2000-01-22 (xsd:date)
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  • The $50 Porsche (de)
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  • The version of this legend in which the wife is directed to sell the car by her husband's will has circulated in England since at least 1948 and is sometimes claimed to have originated with an actual event printed in English newspapers that year. The husband ran off with his secretary version of this legend was reported as true in Ann Landers' column of 4 November 1979, sent in by a reader who claimed to have seen it in the Chicago Tribune. Even though Ann admitted no one at the Tribune could locate a copy of the article, she stated the incident did happen as reported and was a news story somewhere. Ann Landers ran the piece again (with the same claim of veracity) in her 24 August 1990 column, even though Brunvand had covered it (and her reporting of it) in The Vanishing Hitchhiker nine years earlier. Examples: Variations: In any form it's a neat little revenge tale, even if a bit implausible. If you were going to run away from your spouse, wouldn't you take your car (especially an expensive one) with you? And if you found someone who was selling a like-new, expensive car for a ridiculously cheap price, would you really wait until after the transaction was completed before asking why? In June 2005, either an act of ostension or yet another prank engineered by a man with a taste for them played out in the British press. According to This is London, the £25,000 car belonging to controversial disc jockey Tim Shaw of Kerrang 105.2 was sold by his wife, Hayley Shaw, for 50p on eBay after the DJ announced during a live interview with model Jodie Marsh he was prepared to leave his wife and two children for her. Either a fed-up wife found inspiration in a decades-old urban legend, or a shock-jock was up to more of the usual. In January 2015, someone posted to an Australian revenge sales site claiming to be a woman offering her unfaithful ex's 2010 Porsche 911 Carrera 997 for sale at a bargain price of $20,000: The posting was quickly unmasked as a hoax: Sightings: A gender-switched version of this legend shows up in Judith Van Gieson's 1993 novel The Lies That Bind. If you prefer it the more traditional wife nails errant husband form, you'll find that in the 1996 film First Wives Club, a 1998 TV commercial for Route 66 jeans, and in an episode of television's Alice from the 1982-83 season (Mel's Dream Car). A version involving a record collection instead of a car appears in Nick Hornby's 1995 novel High Fidelity. John McCutcheon's 1989 song The Red Corvette is a telling of this legend: (en)
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