The take away lesson here is that the government lies and will go the whole nine yards to create an illusion to support their lies. Soooooo, kiddies, you really want the government in control of your doctors, nurses and hospitals?
Ahhhh... they didn’t grow up with Regan.
Trust, but verify....
He replied gravely, 'The whole of Saint-Omer believes in the existence of Putois. Could I be a good citizen and deny it? One must think well before suppressing an article of universal belief.'
( Putois was an imaginary handy-man who appeared to a new servant who had never heard of him. )
You mean there is fake stuff on the interweb? I don’t believe it.
My daughter teaches music to grades K-8 in a parochial school. The older children were supposed to turn in essays on music styles. Several students turned in nearly identically worded essays copied directly from Wikipedia. Their grades showed it, and the howling could be heard all the way to DC when she caught them cheating.
Pity the teachers of these kids when grading essays. The Internet makes it easy for them to lift information.
Tree octopuses. Anthropogenic global warming. Same thing.
I saw one in a museum once...right next to a Jackalope. That rabbit had the biggest set of antlers I’d ever seen.
Sometimes tree octopuses hitch a ride in Christmas trees harvested from farms on the Olympic Peninsula. When its tree is being jostled violently, a tree octopus will hunker down deep inside the branches near the trunk and camouflage itself to look like bark. This is a defensive mechanism to protect it from wind storms and sasquatch trying to shake octopuses to the ground. They may stay hidden like this for days after a particularly violent shaking, such as experienced by Christmas trees when they are chopped down and transported.
Many octopuses have a natural instinct to decorate their lairs with attractive baubles, and O. paxarbolis is no exception. When it finally comes out of hiding and explores its tree, finding it covered in shiny ornaments and sparkly lights, it will become so mesmerized by the baublely abundance that it’ll hardly notice that its tree is sitting in some human’s living room.
Scandinavian immigrants considered it good luck to find a tree octopus in their Christmas tree. Granted, that’s because they like to eat them. But for us more enlightened cephalopodophiles, we can consider it a sign of good luck that the species hasn’t yet gone extinct.
And to keep it that way, please remember to remove any octopuses you find before disposing of your Christmas tree. They can be put in a shoe box — with a bit of moist branch to make them feel comfortable and some tinsel to keep them distracted — and taken to your nearest chapter of the Friends of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus for reintroduction into the wild.
Wait a minute. Are you telling me those pictures of cats with machine guns aren’t real!?
Reminds me of the “Spaghetti Tree” film broadcast by the BBC in the ‘50s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree_hoax
This isn't a new phenomena. The proof: the election of Barack Obama to US president.
Next time they tell you that school kids are mature enough to make decisions on sex, remember this story.
Internet fiction doesn’t happen around here. Jim Thompson doesn’t permit it.