Today I'm cursing my own stupid rules, as I found an unbelievable story about the Italian city of Naples, where corruption and outdated technology mean they've got nowhere to put their rubbish, and it's basically just piling up, all over the city, and has been ever since 21 December. It got me thinking about how thin the line between civilisation and anarchy really is; no-one collects your rubbish for 3 weeks and suddenly protestors are having fist-fights with police, disease is rife and people seem to be throwing stuff out for the sake of it, judging by the pictures. It reminds me of a few years ago in this country, when there was the vague possibility of a fuel shortage, so everyone went out and filled their car up, ostensibly to protect against the slim chance of a full-on drought, but in reality doing no more than filling their tanks up with precious petrol and worsening the problem. But anyway, as I stated in my rules that a fact has to be constant, and as I'd like to think that the good people of Naples will get their streets clear of festering rubbish at some stage, I had to look elsewhere.
Now I'm not proud of this, but in my desperation to get a fact down before dinner, I actually typed the word 'facts' into Google. Don't look at me like that. It yielded quite a few rumours and half-truths, but I was getting nowhere fast, until I stumbled upon this:
In the TV Series Star Trek, Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty".
Now I realise upon pondering this a little more, it's not really that surprising; Kirk rarely got "beamed" by Scotty alone (contrary to malicious industry rumours) and there are lots of phrases that define a character which they never said, but are rather an amalgam of their most popular utterances: Sherlock Holmes' "elementary, my dear Watson"; Humphrey Bogart's "play it again, Sam" and for the more highbrow readers out there, Frank Spencer's "oooh, Betty". Yet each time one of these phrases is debunked, it's still a shock to the system, like another very tiny flake of paint falling from the great facade that is my understanding of the world around me. I also find it fascinating because it says something about our culture, good and bad; it's bad that we as an audience are so ignorant as to accept a phrase as being so commonplace it becomes a catchphrase for the speaker, when in fact they never said it. It's also good in a way because it demonstrates a sort of collective quality control; we have created soundbites that sum up famous figures, real and imagined, much better than they or their creators ever managed to.
There are more examples here, just be sure to close the window as soon as you're finished reading, lest you be sucked headlong into a maelstrom of racist propaganda. They eat swans you know! To close this particular entry I'll leave you with another never-uttered phrase: Victor Meldrew never, ever said "I don't believe it".
Ok, not really, he said it pretty much every episode, but I had you going...
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