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.

19 Comments

Whoa, when did the ear numbers get so complex? I’m not imagining that am I? They used to be simpler, right?

Also, the timestamps I see on the comments are wrong. I posted that last comment at 01:48 EDT and it’s showing 10:48. It might be some kind of time zone issue, but then the implementation of daylight savings is wrong too. Unless they think I’m in Pakistan for some reason, Google says they don’t have daylight savings there.

The ears designs have evolved along with the art in general. They’ve been more ear than number like for a while now. The time stamps are wrong because the server time is that way. I don’t think it’s ever been right.

I am typing this on a Krebstar keyboard, while my Excalibur garage door opener sits on my spice rack next to a mini marshmallow Martin Van Buren head. “Fact”.

Hmm, this one looks familiar. Like I’ve already seen them both on a similar pose in similar clothes…

The truth I think is plenty fun, or at least finding it out. It’s the reason why we have scientists, philosophers, and simply why it’s so much fun to watch a good cop or medical mystery drama. Hell science is very fun and it’s precisely about peeling back misconceptions and finding out the truth.

That’s like the opposite of what XKCD did today… they told the truth, and it’s awesome~

To be fair, there’s amazing stuff happening everyday, but most people don’t hear about it because the news doesn’t care about awesome things, they care about popular things…

Same reason everyone’s so shocked my wearable is so very powerful…

I remember seeing a show years ago on the History or Discovery channel about the Bermuda Triangle. They traced the idea back to a tabloid reporter in the early 20th who basically cooked up the idea out of a couple incidents ’cause he needed an article. Then they went and dug through the records of a major maritime insurance company, and found that that kind of stuff happens all the time all over the ocean, and that was true for as far back as the records go (a few centuries). Basically the Bermuda Triangle doesn’t exist, because every part of the ocean is just as good a place for stuff to get lost in.

It was a pretty good debunking, but it hasn’t really caught on. People still believe and repeat the “mystery”. There seems to be a lot of modern myths like that, where all the individual roots have been systematically uncovered and debunked, yet the tree lives on as strong as ever. Like some kind of existential zombie… faith tree?

Anyway, yeah: people are crazy, and will fully believe in stuff they have every rational reason to know is false because the idea grips them emotionally. Insert witty-yet-safely-vauge comment about American politics here.

When Carol’s line to Mike is delivered properly, suspicion can be kept pretty low or eliminated (especially with a guy like Mike). Then again, if that line were delivered to, let’s say, Nina, me thinks there would be no chance of avoiding the inevitable. Which would probably happen pretty darn quick. Nina’s no Bill or Karolyn Slowsky.

Wow…I haven’t thought about Pete and Pete in years! Amazing how quickly things come and go.

Fact vs. fiction. To a certain degree, why not love them both? In a healthy way, I mean. So it is just a rock formation. Should that be cause for disappointment that rocks are boring? Why not enjoy the fact that we do find order in chaos and let our imaginations play with the “spaceship” in the harbor.

And on that note…yes, people are crazy. Even more so in groups.

WOW. So the Strongest Man in the World did the voice of Cotton Hill on King of the Hill? Amazing how certain things connect. Now you got me lookin’ him up all over – no idea he did so much!

Man, I miss that old show.

And then… they get caught, lose their jobs, end up ticked off at each other for losing perfectly good jobs and now being broke, end up resenting their choices, break up and never see each other again, while letting all their friends down. Really?? Both of these characters were presented as being far too smart to do something so incredibly stupid. Having known some people have done exactly this, and lost everything, there is nothing “HOT” about being an idiot.

Sorry, Russell Brand exists. I win this round.

For the record, it’s never explicitly stated, but they are in the passcode locked back room. It’s only been shown one other time in the black and white times, so it’s no surprise if nobody knows where they are. I didn’t want to throw off the flow of things by adding a line about the door.

Although… It would actually work if I changed it. Maybe I’ll edit it a little. I kind of like the potential shift in tone.

Anyway, Thomas is being a bit of a puss about things if we’re honest.

I was once sitting in exactly the right (or wrong) place to see the mirror in a high-end Vegas magic act. I could see how they did the trick. It was devastating, and ruined the rest of the show for me. We DO NOT want to know the truth. We spend our lives trying to find ways to hide how sucky life really is ..

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