Lies I Have Told

One day in college, a friend and I decided to park ourselves on the couch in the dorm lobby and tell nothing but lies to everyone who walked past. Not a single utterance of truth permitted! (Now I work in marketing. Odd.)

The only lie I can remember was this: The Iliad chronicles the adventures of Ileas. It makes sense, we explained to the hapless freshman. The Aenead has Aeneas; the Odyssey has Odysseus; the Iliad has Ileas. O how we laughed later! What cards we were! How clever!

My sordid history of lies neither began nor ended there. I used to tell my younger sister stories that started with "Hundreds of years ago ... this was an ancient Indian burial ground." Usually this was intoned in a hollow whisper.

One evening I capped the story (and my career as a big brother) by tying a Halloween mask to a stick and thumping it on her window after she'd gone to bed. What was even better was that her window was two floors above the ground. It was a long stick. For some reason she now lives 3000 miles away from me. On an ancient Indian burial ground!

More recently I worked hard to convince my wife that every 52 years we have what is known as "Leap Week." This was originally conceived during WWII as a way to conserve energy. But every 52 years the week is 12 hours shorter ... and they set the clocks back ... or forward ... and nobody, uh, ... notices. She was starting to doubt so I pulled out my trump card:

"I read about it in Time Magazine."

She was unconvinced.

When I was very young I convinced my best friend I had been given a lightsaber by aliens, and that I'd stuffed it under my bed. Later I told my brother I'd been selected for a moon landing mission in 1999, a year that seemed unimaginably distant and therefore perfect for my story. I should point out that these were both, sadly, untrue.

My most recent lie was pretending that I came up with this topic on my own. Never! Credit goes to Sarah Rees Breenan's recent post on "Lying Liars Who Lie."

Details are key, I think. After all, everybody may have heard of the Tunguska blast of 1908, but outside of Kazakhstan few people know of a similar blast in 1948. See, most of the scientific records were wiped out when the Soviet Union fell apart in '89, but a doctoral student in Bucharest came across some documents while doing research. Yeah, it turned the sky green for seventeen or eighteen days, I think, but just over the impact site. It's pretty grown over now but you can still see the topography on GoogleEarth. I read about it in Time Magazine.

Plus there's this ancient burial ground there....