Friday, October 13, 2006

Beware of So-Called "Fake" Facts!


We here at Very Little Known Facts have always taken our mission statement (appearing at the top of this page) very seriously. That’s why we are alarmed and disturbed by the growing trend of “fake” fact sites, websites that distort the truth or even make up so-called “facts” for entertainment purposes. (Or possibly even darker, more sinister purposes as well!)

A link to one of these odious, mendacious sites even appeared as an “advertising link” on Very Little Known Facts (see picture). Rest assured that we had the link removed immediately, and we have received proper assurances from the Use and Abuse department of Google that the perpetrators will be brought to justice.

DO NOT BE FOOLED! Fraudulent “fact” sites may look just like reliable, trustworthy ones. Be aware of the danger signs:


  • humorous content
  • absurd, unbelievable, or nonsensical “factoids”
  • confusing or non-existent source information
  • deliberately vague and ambiguous language
  • repeated use of personal opinion and conjecture as “fact”

Of course we at VLKF have always had a standing policy regarding revealing our sources. Naturally, many of these are of a sensitive and confidential nature, but in the interest of full disclosure we will send you a full catalog of sources for one singular factoid by writing the following address:

VLKF
Building 3, Postal Drop 3487
117 John F. Kennedy Drive
Nassau
The Bahamas


Be sure to enclose a money order for $7.85 for postage and handling. For multiple requests, include $7.85 for each request.

Alternately, you can send us the money via PAYPAL to the following email address:

freecreditreport@internetbank.ru

Once payment is received a full, confidential source citation will be mailed to your home within 6 to 8 weeks. A sample citation is shown below for the following Very Little Known Fact from our October 2, 2006 post entitled In Actual Fact...


  • JIFFY TIME: A “jiffy” is an actual measurement of time, although the measurement varies between 0.01 seconds, 0.0025 seconds, 0.001 seconds, and 0.00000000000333564 seconds.

SOURCES:

The dictionary.com definition of jiffy. The link is:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/jiffy

T
he wikipedia entry on jiffy. The link is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiffy_%28time%29

T
he Free On-line Dictionary of Computing definition of jiffy. The link is:

http://foldoc.org/?jiffy

T
he whatis.com definition of jiffy. The link is:

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci822188,00.html

3 comments:

Alice said...

I love my nonfraudulant, facty facts! Thank you, Fact Men!

!!!

Anonymous said...

Journaling Our Thoughts In today's world, it seems that almost any topic is open for debate. While I was gathering facts for this article, I was quite surprised to find some of the issues I thought were settled are actually still being openly discussed.

How do you begin journaling? How do you know what to write?

How do you find time? There are many questions when it comes to keeping a journal and someone who may not have ever done it before may have problems trying to see themselves doing it now.

Anonymous said...

American Politician

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http://heros4u.com/abraham_lincoln.htm