Rumors are hilarious. Never is the one disparaged consulted. It’s human nature perpetuating and embellishing lies.

You know that kindergarten game where you seat all the children side by side in a line, and the teacher whispers the word “green apple” to the first child, and without using the same words, each child describes the initial object in their own words, and the final child repeats what the next to last child just told them?

The Telephone Game.

The point of this game is to show how a simple concept can propagate and evolve to something of no resemblance to the initial concept.

In this instance, I ran this experiment with 25 kindergarteners lured in with a stolen ice cream truck, promising to let them have stolen ice cream and to go home after my experiment was run to a statistically viable data population of my satisfaction. It took only three days of crying . . .

Anyway, as an example, I said to the first child “green apple” and what came back was “I want my mommy!”

After dispensing with these blubbery whimpering statistical outliers,  I obtained true statistical relevance. I said to the first child “green apple” and  at the end of the line the last child shared  “Timmy has a bootleg copy of ‘Two Girls,  One Cup, and Three Shaved Wombats.'”

That, lassies and lads, is how the rumor mill churns out such unrecognizable bullshit. And we learned this in kindergarten.

Green apple. Go.