By Jimmy Magahern

It is illegal to hunt camels in Arizona. In Maricopa County, no more than six girls may live in a single house. Cars may not be driven in reverse in Glendale. In Mohave County, anyone caught stealing a bar of soap must wash themselves with it until it is all used up. And throughout the state, donkeys are not permitted to sleep in bathtubs. If you’ve spent considerable time on the Internet, chances are you’ve read a few of these so-called “dumb laws” — improbable and out-of-date bits of legislation that somehow remain on the books. Every state has its share: In Ohio, it is supposedly illegal to hunt for whales on a Sunday. In Massachusetts, it is said that a man must first obtain a license before wearing a goatee.

Many of these loony laws are the stuff of urban legend and inherited folk tales. As in the old childhood “telephone game,” where a sentence whispered into someone’s ear gets passed along repeatedly until the final version bears comically little in common with the original, some of these laws actually have roots in truth, but have become wildly exaggerated and altered over time — an effect multiplied now along the information superhighway. Once-legitimate ordinances transmogrify into stranger-than-fiction shtick for stand-up comics and a reliable source of absurdist humor for lazy bloggers. Indeed, at least one site on the Web (nonsense.sourceforge.net) offers randomly generated dumb laws that are often reposted as factual — to the amusement of the algorithm’s creators.Read Full Story...