Sunday morning skepticism

I woke up pretty early this morning ... too early actually. But that's what happens with two boys. The wife and I kept them up late last night, tired them out during the day -- hoping in vain that they would sleep past 7 a.m.

Yeah, well it didn't work. They were both crawling and clamoring in to our bed, making noise and putting cold feet in places they shouldn't. I had to resort to starting a video in the playroom. The boys watched a couple episodes of Blue's Clues while the wife and I stared at the back of our eyelids wishing for a few more minutes of sleep that wouldn't come.

Naturally, while staring at the ceiling, I daydreamed about the old days. The days before children when we could sleep in on Sunday, rise mid-morning to a strong pot of coffee, and leisurely peruse the Sunday paper reading interesting tidbits and facts to each other as the a.m. became p.m.

Those were the halcyon days, the days when I was well-rested, the days when peace and quiet were not foreign concepts, the days when a nap on Sunday was likely not a pipe-dream ...

Those were also the days when I believed almost everything in the Sunday paper.

For our most recent blog assignment we were supposed to tell someone the "bathtub hoax" and see how that person reacted. Did they believe it, when did they figure it out, etc. I told my wife. However, she knows that I am both skeptical and full of shit, so she quit listening less than 20 seconds in. I figured as much.

The idea of the assignment was to start a discussion about the verifiability of the news and history. Well, I have worked in a news room. In fact, one of my main duties as a news assistant was to fact-check -- to make sure that everything in the paper was true and verifiable. Let me tell you, I caught many mistakes nightly. Most were harmless mistakes, spelling errors, style and the like. But every now and then I would catch a big one -- a whale-sized, lawsuit-inducing mistake.

For example, imagine the fallout if a picture on the front page of the City section depicting an accused sexual offender was actually a local high school coach that was awarded for helping inner-city kids. Someone in the art department had accidentally swapped the photos in setting up the page. Fortunately that one was caught, but there were plenty more that I and others missed.

The point is, don't believe everything you read -- current or historical. Little mistakes or hoaxes can grow to become accepted as fact, just like the supposed visit by Millard Fillmore to Adam Thompson's "first" real bathtub in Ohio.

When I read the Sunday paper now (earlier than I used to and not so leisurely thanks to the boys) I'm skeptical. I see a factual or spelling error and I doubt the entire story. If I read an article that is especially flattering to a company, I discount the piece as a P.R. release.

I don't enjoy my relaxing Sunday mornings anymore ... but maybe that is for the best. Now they are full of skepticism, noise, chaos, little cold feet and little sticky hands. Sunday morning is much less peaceful and infinitely more complicated ... but a hundred times more wonderful.