972 Fabulous Prizes.

You might think I recently used this title for another page, but you’d be wrong by a question mark. XD

A few years ago I was talking to a friend of mine about The Adventures Of Pete & Pete and he told me that one of the cast members had died, which was why they never did reunion shows. (For those of you too young to remember it was a live action show on Nickelodeon about two brothers, of different ages, named Pete Wrigley. Their world was populated by many strange people, including a very young Michelle Trachtenberg as Nona Meklenberg. It was a series of shorts at first, if I remember right, then it had a run as a regular show. Several famous people guest starred on it too, like Adam West and Steve Buscemi. ) Anyway, at that time, and mind you this was literally, like, five years ago, there really wasn’t a way to check. A lot of information wasn’t online back then, so these legends could perpetuate for ages. Anyway, the character in question was Artie The Strongest Man in The World, played by Toby Huss. He supposedly had a fatal heart attack. Toby Huss is alive and well, or at the very least alive. I’m familiar with a lot of his work, but I didn’t realize he was the same guy. I only put two and two together the other day, and it was weird because for all this time I’ve been wandering around with wrong information in my head. Information I’ve shared with people. Infecting them with my ignorance. The internet put that urban legend to bed, and yet it hasn’t destroyed the urban legend. Unless you can find a reputable source it’s just as easy to make a lie the truth as it ever was. I think that’s really amazing.

More recently I heard about a strange rock formation underwater someplace. People were convinced it was a sunken alien spaceship, and that story is the dominant one on the internet, but it’s been proven to be a formation of stone common to natural harbors. The thing is the truth isn’t fun. People want the lie to be real, so they make it real. I had to dig for a while before I found out the real story of this sunken alien ship, but logically I knew it had to be a natural formation, because if it wasn’t the world would have had a fit. I know that some people think govenments cover that stuff up, but the American one can’t keep a secret for shit. Why would this be the thing that they managed to keep under wraps?

On some level people like being lied to. That’s what makes it so easy to do. As long as it’s in keeping with their worldview, and not so outlandish that their suspension of disbelief kicks in. That bar is a little different for every person, but the range of stuff people are willing to buy into is pretty vast. Not just because they are gullible, but also because the wolrd is pretty crazy sometimes. When it comes to sorting out fact from fiction the deck is stacked against us. There’s no better time to observe this all than an election year. Both sides are already doing it and, for most people, it’s just too much work to try and sort out truth from the candy coated, or venom soaked, lies.