Did you know that Michelle Obama is sick of the President's cheating ways or that aliens are building a strip mall in Nevada or that the guys from Duck Dynasty are really Russian spies?
Up until ten minutes ago neither did I. But that all changed as soon as my mom went out to the mail box and saw her latest issue of the National Enquirer had come.
Growing up that magazine and others like it were my mom's main source of news. She quoted alleged facts from those tabloids to me all the time as a kid.
And people wonder why I had a hard time in school.
Teacher: Jim... who shot JFK?
Me: A secret shadow organization made up of aliens and corrupt highly positioned government officials.
Needless to say, I'm pretty sure my history teachers would have paid a pretty penny to figure out where I was getting my 'facts' from.
While my mom continued to constantly tout these tabloids as being the only news sources brave enough to risk printing the truth, I was finally starting to question how legitimate their sources were.
For instance, I remember one story reported how an alien space craft had teleported the entire state of Texas into their ship and replaced all the humans with identical alien - human hybrids. That was the article that finally made me go "Really?".
It wasn't too long after I decided these articles were fake that my mom stopped sharing her little ' facts ' and I stopped seeing them laying around the house.
At the time I assumed my mom had arrived at the same conclusion I had and placed a secret ban barring all tabloids from being in her home.
Turns out she had just started keeping them under her bed because she didn't want to have to keep defending them.
I guess now-a-days she could care less what people think because the National Enquirer and the Star magazines are all over her house. Actually, if you can find a surface in her house that isn't covered by them then you should give Ripley's Believe It or Not a call.
When she not only started quoting 'facts' from those tabloids again but also told me she had subscriptions to them, I almost went into shock.
I wanted to shake her until she came to get senses and realized these tabloids were nothing but lies. But I figured what difference does it really make if she wants to believe those stories are real.
So... I took a deep breath and asked her what else was new in the news. After about 15 minutes of listening to story after story, I came to the conclusion that only about 3% of what she told me was probably true. The rest was probably made up by a bunch of college kids while smoking a huge amount of pot and watching late night tv.
Ohhh.... Now she is telling me that Miley Cyrus is a creature from outer space with the all-to-cliche dream of ruling the world. Hmmm. That one could be true.
