truth.

I couldn't make up my mind between "in" and "of"...

In Praise of Lying.

Society must have a problem with us lying. There's a new show on Fox called Lie To Me where the investigators observe human physiological changes and facial expressions to divine when one is lying. Police dramas are always trying to get a confession from a suspect. Forensic pathologists try to assemble the truth of the crime from fragments of evidence.

But lying is different. Everyone lies. Mostly we just withhold truths, but when pushed, and the truth is too valuable to reveal, we all lie.

Lies are comforting in that they diminish immediate stress. Lies are difficult for most people in that they need to be remembered and tagged with the same labels as their sibling truths, similar but different, like twin Haley Millses sharing parents.

If cornered, I would lie about authoring this blog. And on the Internets, I would lie about my age, gender, or species. But how could you tell if you don't know me. You can't see my face, my lazy eye, my hump back, my excessive drooling.

But some people think they can tell. This guy says he can tell who is lying.

But I don't know what the fuss is. Lying is far superior to truth because it's creative. Are all lies equal? No. Some lies are hurtful, but many more lies are fun. Lying is adaptation. Truth may remain static, but lies evolve.

Truth is passive. Lying is Active.
The Truth just happens. Lying takes work.
The Truth exists through observation. Lying requires invention.

LiveScience.com says that Lies Take Longer Than Truths. What else takes longer? Home-baked bread: delicious. Good sex (or so I'm told, repeatedly): ditto on deliciousness.

So maybe some people have learned to spot lies. Should it matter? Not if you're a good liar. If you lie consistently and if you lie to everyone, then no one will ever really know.

I just assume everyone is lying on the Internet. And that everyone is telling the truth. Just like me.

Why we need libraries.

I like movies. No, I love movies. No, wait, I [heart] movies. I'd be willing to draw a little heart to express how much I love movies.

So when I was just watching, Duck, You Sucker, it made me glad to see a little truth expressed in the plot by Rod Steiger, one of our greatest Mexican-American actors, stating his strong feelings against violent revolutions:

"The people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books, the poor people, and say, 'We have to have a change.'
So the poor people make the change, huh?
And then the people that read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables and they talk and talk and eat and eat, eh?
But what has happened to the poor people?
They're dead."

So I like to think that libraries exist to make poor people a little less dead.

I can only remember 3 new things a year.

I hope I can say this without sounding like an idiot, but, the majority that I know it, learned from the furious department.
(Sorry. I was playing the Babel Fish game where you translate something over and over into different languages then back to English to see if you get something funny. Or in this case, not remotely funny.)

What that means is, most of what I know I learned from Mad magazine. (Yeah, it sounds worse this way.) But this is what I'm doing today: translated English appears in quotes and original English in parentheses. "Division with it" (Deal with it).

After I read that Beloit college thingy where they list idiotic facts about college students so the faculty can understand their "mindset," I started to wonder about my mindset, and I remembered that one of my most important cultural references when I was young was Mad magazine.

It's funny that Mad (MAD) was considered a kid's magazine, but it dealt with (when I read it, don't know about now) politics and culture. If it really had been for kids, each issue would just have the banner: Now with MORE boogers and farts, and the issues would have flown off the shelves. (Funny, but Babel Fish has no words in French, German or Spanish for boogers. Isn't English the best!)

My dad used to come back from the "market of chips" (flea market) with a bag full of ancient Mads. And I would read parodies of 1960's advertising and television shows and Eisenhower and Nixon and hippy jokes and movies I wasn't old enough to see like "An orange of the mechanism" (A Clockwork Orange).
And so I had some understanding of stuff that was important to people 25 years older than me.
And I think most kids are the same way.

For example, your parents grew up with Dark Shadows and you grew up with Buffy:

Martha: (walking in on her step-daughter, Chloe, watching Buffy, the Vampire Slayer)
I remember how that Barnabas used to terrify me when I was a girl.

Chloe: F**k off, Fartha.

My bonding with my father mirrored that tender scene.

But I still have a lot of that useless information I got from Mad taking up valuable real estate in my brain.
Is it better to replace my memories of "The Demonstration Of The Gongo" (The Gong Show) with new ones from America's Got Talent? Should I trade The Beatles for Fall Out Boy?

No. So I know nothing about AGT or FOB. I really don't have room for it all.

I have to fall back on one of those immutable truths: reality is agreement.

We can both look at the same wooden chair, but we can have different thoughts about it:
That chair is for sitting.
That chair is for dancing.
Those legs can be made into four stakes for killing vampires.

In the appropriate situation, all three are true.
Crap.
But I don't have room in my brain to remember all three. So I remember the most important:

• "the legs of the chair can be made in four piles as regards vampiros massacre,"
• "as for the foot of the chair to vampiros holocaust something which relates can make with 4 these sticks,"
• (chair legs can be made into four stakes for killing vampires).

And that explains why if you come to my house, you have to sit on the floor.