Reports of Jared's death--well, you know

Mark Twain once quipped that a lie will spread halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. With the internet, that’s obviously a gross under-estimation, especially with a hot area of interest like restaurants.

We’ve already heard about the young man who supposedly left a McDonald’s burger in his coat pocket in 1989 and forgot about it. When he discovered it years later, according to the urban legend, the sandwich looked and smelled the same. Intrigued, he bought a bunch of burgers and stored them in his basement, where they failed to decompose during the next 12 years and counting. The assertion: There are more preservative than ground meat in those patties.

I know this because the burger preserver caught his experiences on videotape, including the purchase of the original sandwich back in 1989. You can see it here, in a YouTube posting called The First Bionic Burger.

But that whopper is nothing compared to the myth that one prankster put forth this morning, much to the presumed chagrin of the Subway sandwich chain. According to that carefully cultivated rumor, Jared Fogle, the volunteer spokesman who lost a ton of weight on Subway’s fare, has munched his last footlong, dying last week precisely at 4:43 EST, just a few days short of his 33rd birthday.

The cause: Complications from a gastric bypass in 1998. In other words, he lost weight through a surgical fix, not a diet built on Subway turkey heros.

A website has already been set up to support the fib: http://jaredremembered.com. Visitors can leave their memories, not only in the form of reminiscences, but even poems.

Better check it out before the authorities shut it down. It’s a hoax of superb craftsmanship.