Caught in the fact
Or, surprising, creative, and possibly true
It’s a fact about facts that any given fact can be two of surprising, creative, and true — but not all three.
For instance, here’s a creative wording of an unsurprising truth:
“Eyes in the front, animals that hunt. Eyes on the side, run and hide.”
And here’s a surprising truth that is not in itself creative:
“F. Scott Fitzgerald once got so drunk at a party that he pledged his love for James Joyce by attempting to jump out a window for him.”
And finally, a surprising, creative falsehood:
“Any given fact can be two of surprising, creative, and true — but not all three.
The first two of these were actual submissions to Shari Kasman’s fact box. Over the course of three years, the Toronto artist collected “things known to be true” in front of her west-end house. Index cards and a pen were provided; feelings, opinions, suggestions, advice, suspicions, and conjecture were unwelcome. She’s now published Rocks Don’t Move: And Other Questionable Facts, a collection of 100 such submissions diligently confirmed or denied by her research.
The results are occasionally enlightening, sometimes funny, and often about animals.
“Sea otters find + choose a favourite stone that they keep in a flap of skin on their body!”
And as per Norm Macdonald’s ideal of a joke as the simple statement of an odd truth: Isn’t that just a fact?
“Did you know that deaf people invented the football huddle?”
Kasman annotates each of the submissions, providing context and sternly labelling opinions but taking a gentler tone with emotional revelations.
“Here is a fact for you: As of today, I am a free person,” one card reads, to which Kasman responds: “A person free of what? Free of laundry?”
“Alzheimer’s is hell,” another submission submits.
“Opinion,” she replies. “Alzheimer’s disease destroys brain cells, resulting in impairments in cognition and memory that worsen over time. There’s no cure, so describing it as hell is justified.”
The way you word a statement directly affects how factual it sounds. Exclamation points don’t help, perhaps because shouting sounds like lying.
“My cat Taxi lost two pounds!!!!”
(“Assuming this is about a cat named Taxi and not a vehicle called a ‘cat taxi,’ this could have been true, and exciting to at least one person, at a certain point in time.”)
Being asked for a fact out of the blue is like being asked for a joke: Do you have one at the ready?
Finding out what people think is interesting enough to commit to memory is pretty close to what they think is funny enough to remember. It tells you something true about them, even if what they’re saying is questionable.
“You can buy a fox and domesticate them for $9,000.”
Different types of foxes cost different amounts, but only one type of person would share this fact.
Quick quips; lightning
“He checks his facts until they weep with boredom”
—Clive James on Bob Woodward
“Oh, don’t tell me of facts, I never believe facts; you know, Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures”
— Sydney Smith
“The degree of one’s emotion varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts — the less you know the hotter you get.”
— Bertrand Russell, definitively proven wrong by the climate crisis
Fact: That was GWQ No. 118. Suggestion: You can test the Iron Triangle of project management at fastgood.cheap. Suspicion: The dot-cheap domain has limited value. Fact: This newsletter is a spinoff of my 2014 book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Suggestion: Tap the ❤️ below.