Encore! Fatherly fibber stirs skepticism (2008)

No foolin', I just love April 1st. I've already pranked the girls twice, once bringing the youngest to near tears. I told her Mommy, who's been visiting her sister for three days, was staying an extra month. She's only 5 and doesn't understand the spirit of April Fool's Day. Now, after her baptism into the day's cruelties she gets it with a vengeance. She's been a carnival of evil pranks and I couldn't be happier. So I thought this 2008 post about telling strategic lies to the girls would be a good one for Re-run Sunday.

It began to dawn on my daughter sometime earlier this year that I haven’t been getting into telephonic shouting matches with President George W. Bush every month or so.

That’s what I’d pretend I was doing every time the Caller ID indicated some pesky telemarketer was calling to go through his or her monotonous spiel.

“Well, if it isn’t President Ding Dong again!” I’d say (I call him Ding Dong because, like a bell, his apparently empty head is still capable of producing loud, jarring noises that reverberate around the globe).

“Seriously, George, I don’t know why you keep calling here when you never take my advice. Now for the last time, if you don’t do something to shore up the housing market, it could trigger financial collapses in the banking and credit industries. Then we’re all in for a hell of a mess while you skip down to Crawford to clear brush and sip nonalcoholic beer. Please, for the good of the country, act now. And stop bothering us during the dinner hour!”

Then I’d slam the phone down and resume eating like nothing unusual had happened.

Really, it might seem to even casual observers that President Bush has been for the past eight years soliciting advice from spastic and underemployed jokers like me, but I’ll wager my shouted suggestions to the confused telemarketers are better advice than anything Bush has ever heard from Dick Cheney.

For a while at least, the 8-year-old thought her Daddy was a pretty important fellow, someone sought by famous and important leaders and celebrities around the globe.

She’s heard me have similar strategic conversations with Steeler coaches, Catholic popes and the dreamy young actor who plays Troy in High School Musical (“Kid, I’m telling you the sequel’s gonna be gold. Gold, I tell you! You gotta do it!”)

But now she’s becoming more skeptical of my little games. This pleases me and makes me work even harder to fool her.

I know I shouldn’t do it but I often find it irresistible to tell Josie a really big lie. I try to be forthright with her in nearly every regard, but I think it might be helpful to once in a while tell her whoppers of such audacious blather that she’ll learn to question everything, even the specious wisdoms of fatherly fibber.

Like the time this summer when I told her some scientists believe the entire vast sum of the oceans’ origins stem from dinosaur urine.

We were standing on the sandy shores of the Atlantic at Virginia Beach, the warm foamy waters lapping at our legs.

“I’m not saying I know it’s true, but I have read some respected scientists who say that all this water, for as far as your eyes can see, really comes from vast ancient releases of dinosaur pee.”

And that much was true. I had read it in a prominent national magazine. It was in the late and much-missed Weekly World News (favorite headline: “Baby Born with Wooden Leg!!!”), but it was a national magazine and I had read it.

That points to another supportive lie I still shout in adult arguments: “The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says you can’t print it if it isn’t true!” You’d be surprised by how many arguments that helps me conclusively win, but I digress.

Back at the ocean, Josie’s eyes scanned the horizon and I was happy to see she was engaged in critical thought. She turned to question me, but I was already dashing into the water to dive in head first. I came up with a big mouthful of salt water and fountained it up over my head as she raced to her mother to have her confirm her suspicions that Daddy’s an idiot, a confirmation Mommy’s always ready to invoke.

I think part of it, too, might be so much of what our ancestors held as sacred wisdom has been revealed to be folly.

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about: The world is flat. The earth is the center of the universe. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.

I think a healthy skepticism is important for a curious child, and I lament so little of it in the adults they look up to for guidance. So much of what passes for conventional wisdom these days is worth little more than a great big steaming bucket of dinosaur pee.

And that’s the truth.

Inner earth: the true final frontier

Russian scientists have succeeded in drilling through two miles of solid Antarctic ice to reach a lake that’s been sealed from human contact for between 15 million and 34 million years, give or take an eon or two.

They are hoping to find microbial life within so-called Lake Vostok that could hint that life could exist on the frozen moons of Jupiter.

I’m hoping they find a copy of my 2003 book, “Hole in One! The Complete Book of Fact, Legend and Lore on Golf’s Luckiest Shot,” current Amazon rank: 1,845,777.

If I could script it, lead scientist Valery Lukin would say, “It was found bookmarked to the page where Arnold Palmer says he remembers his first ace with more clarity than his first kiss because it meant more to him.”

Imagine what that would do for sales. Yes, finding my 9-year-old golf book beneath miles of ancient ice would be ... hmmm ... what’s the word?

Cool?

It would certainly be better than finding Adolph Hitler.

Proving once again it’s impossible to out-crazy the crazies, Russia’s state-run news service, Ria Novosti is reviving a theory that Nazis sent a secret submarine to the lake to deliver the remains of Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun for future DNA cloning.

He’d certainly add philosophical spice to the chow hall debates at Gitmo after Seal Team 6 works their magic.

The report sounds like something you’d read in “The Weekly World News.” Favorite headline -- all together now! -- “Baby Born with Wooden Leg!!!”

I mention The News here because the diggings at Lake Vostok also remind me of another one of their great crusades: purifying the global air by simultaneously popping the tires on vintage cars from the 1950s. The logic is the gush of released air from 60 years ago would crowd all the bad air out of the atmosphere.

It is roughly 4,000 miles from the soles of your sneakers to the center of the earth. The deepest anyone’s ever drilled is 7 miles. What’s beyond that is mere speculation.

Here in Pennsylvania, thousands of my hillbilly neighbors are being enriched by Marcellus Shale natural gas deposits. What other natural wonders await down there?

These lakes are water created by pressure and warmth from below the ice. Who knows? Maybe there are perfectly pure pockets of ancient air.

Air from umpteen millions of years ago would be the respiratory equivalent of moonshine. It would be like 999 proof. One whiff and you’re 10-feet tall and bulletproof.

Because it was Capt. James T. Kirk that first told us that space was the final frontier, we’ve taken it at face value. We could have it completely backwards.

Our future may be beneath our feet. Maybe the world going to hell will lead the world to go to hell.

With climate change, extreme weather, Biblical flooding and drought, I’ve for years predicted that adventure vacations of the future will be anything above ground and out of doors.

So much of our discovery these days seems to hinge on the theory that sooner or later the surface atmosphere of Mother Earth will be too poisonous for people and plants.

Why else would Jupiter’s moons be in the mix?

All I know about Jupiter is the cruel rhyme my daughters use on me when they want to feel superior: “Girls go to college to get more knowledge! Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider!”

Poor grammar aside, I have no intentions of validating their taunt.

So I’m looking forward to a subterranean future where neither lawns will need mowing nor snow shoveling. Put up a basketball hoop, a cool stereo, a pool table and a big screen TV -- cable, not satellite -- and it would be just like home.

Think about it: Earth, the ultimate man cave.

Can you dig it?