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Back in my youth and young adult years in the 60s I had an outrageously bad personal game of telling absolutely preposterous stories. I thought of it as mind expanding for the hearers of those stories, because they were based on infinite human foolishness. Over the years it became obvious I was making a grievous error, because many of the fables were believed to be true.

If I had told the same stories as Aesop had done, using animals as the characters, there would have been no problem, but I didn’t. Instead I used people known personally to our group, such as local politicians. That became a problem because the stories spread, and because they were so preposterous, there came a time when even the most foolish of persons would realize they were simply prefabricated hoaxes. The problem came when they realized that they had been believing falsehoods. One would hope they would become more cautious in the future as to what they believed, but no – they would typically blame the person who told the story. And, more probably just found someone else to blame, and not question their own critical abilities to think. Here is an example of one of those stories:

Everyone has seen the traffic diverters, and traffic bumps the Berkeley City Council has been putting up all over town. The problem is that everyone hates them so much they have been doing whatever they can to defeat them. For example most cars have a certain speed they can go over the speed-bumps and barely feel a bounce. Usually it’s an exact speed with each given car and each given speed-bump, so you have to experiment a little with different speeds. The City Council is responding to the bump scofflaws by experimenting with a new idea, a speed-ditch instead of a speed-bump. I think you can see one over on Fulton street, it’s about eight inches deep and about eighteen inches wide, running straight across the pavement. It has been said that if you run over that one at just the right speed you don’t feel the bump, but there are other speeds where the wheel has a harmonic amplification and it will rip the axle right off a car. Hust’s Towing service is making a fortune removing wrecked cars. Have you seen how many towed cars there have been going by lately?

To me that was a hilarious story and I only told it once at the Med coffee shop, but those folks I told it to apparently liked it so they told it to others, but without the ironic smirk and wink, and so it spread around town for a few days. The speed bumps remain, but apparently the speed ditches have been filled in. The City Council was so embarrassed about the whole episode they repaved the ditches but you can still see the filled in ditches running across the street. The speed ditch experiment was tried briefly in other towns, but so far as I know they have all been filled in.