"Bagel" and "Biden" have the same number of letters — could they make it any clearer?

     My faith in humanity is such, that I can have trouble with extreme stupidity. I think: "They must be joking, right? This can't be serious." This makes scrolling through social media a challenge. Dry humor. Or sincere idiocy? 

      Usually, alas, it's the latter.

      Take the meme to the right. What they're saying is, here is this 1967 medal, showing a plane flying into the Twin Towers. They knew 34 years ahead of time. It's all preordained, part of a long term Jewish plot.
     Now look closely at the medal, and the supposed World Trade Center. See the little nubs on top? See the writing? It's clearly a torah. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out. All you have to do is look closely.

     It's the same mistake of those who see an oblong object in somebody's hands in a photo from the 1920s and declares that it's a cell phone and time travel exists. Can people be so dumb? Again, alas, yes.

     This is not news. So why am I writing about this?
     Good question. I guess Saturday was busy — working on Monday's column (AND Wednesday's column. AND preparing a string of posts to run after some upcoming surgery. AND working on the book — news about that this week. And visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo. And dinner on Wells Street, at Topo Gigio).
     So I needed to write about something. And this meme...
     I write about what interests me. Mostly. Sometimes I write about something suggested by an editor, or a reader, but I suppose that's still about something I find interesting, with a helping hand.
     Occasionally that thing that caught my fancy will resonate with readers — such as the column on Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, which pinballed across the country — so much so that an editor mentioned it to me, which seldom happens. But I knew I'd grabbed the brass ring, after John Williams asked me to talk about it with him on WGN. To me, that means I've snatched the brass ring.
     During our conversation, I said something to the effect that, if I made a practice of writing about stupid stuff found online, it's all I'd ever do. That's true. Low-hanging fruit. A duck in a bucket. Too easy. And too common. All the deniers and misunderstanders and toxic haters and glint eyed fanatics pushing every subject through the keyhole of their fixations. It's endless.
     However, sometimes something is just, well, too good to pass up. Like this meme.
     A reminder that conspiracy theories are history for stupid people. They prefer airy fictions to actual facts, I suppose, because the latter require thought, and reading, and a base of knowledge, while the former you can grab one fact — or, in this case, one mis-perception — and run with it.
     When I look through Instagram (I don't do TikTok or Threads. Instagram is plenty) and consider how much political opinion is formed by this process, and how little is formed by essays such as this one, well, the temptation is to abandon all hope. But that doesn't strike me as a success strategy either.