Fact Check

So right after the state of the union address, I posted a thing about what came to be known as the salmon joke. The news media across the political spectrum seized on that as the moment of levity, light and airy, insubstantial. But at least it was substantiated, even the part where it gets more complicated once it's smoked (FDA I would think, and the IRS). Obama's speeches are a far cry from the Texas Tall Tales of yellowcake and mushroom clouds.

But the fact check is not so kind to my blog post. For one thing, I don't meet the verbatim  threshold, even if the punchline is the same. More seriously (arguably), I accused him of emphasizing a word he didn't. He did do what I was talking about a bunch of times, but not on that particular word, even though it would have been a hair better than his delivery.

So like so many others, my memory arranges things rapidly into a layout that makes sense to me, that seems true. Lazzitude and shiftlessness tag-team against my getting up and focusing on all the data details, smacking down facts here and there, bellowing misapprehensions. Then there is my own tendency to fictionalize, to express circles by their tangents, to go gonzo. Factuality suffers when a brain is so.

But maybe not truth.