"Real facts" (2 Oct 2007)

For the first time in a long time, I bought a bottle of Snapple yesterday with my lunch and noticed that they were running "real facts'' printed under the cap. It's not often that "facts" are used in marketing campaigns; they tend to deliberately steer clear of facts if at all possible and evoke feelings. Advertising seems designed to undermine the tyranny of the fact and let us loose in the playground of fantasy and solipsistic belief that needs no petty substantiation from the outside world. Anyway, with my lime-flavored green tea I got "Real Fact #36": "A duck's quack doesn't echo."

That the facts are numbered struck me as interesting. They are probably numbered in hopes that it will trigger some collecting habit in someone out there who will then start trying to acquire every single bottle cap in the series and procure that sense of accomplishment unique to advanced, decadent consumer societies. But the numbering also had the effect of making it seem as if the Snapple company had cataloged every fact and determined there were 46,785, or something.

I also wondered what made a fact "real." it was troubling to think that Snapple was implying that there were plenty of false facts floating around, and they were making the truth contingent on drinking a lot of sugary tea. If I were deeply curious about the slippery nature of so-called facts, I suppose I could consult historian Mary Poovey's book, A History of the Modern Fact (I'll spare you the title's post-colon elucidation), which declares the fact to be, in the words of the reviewer Amazon cites, a "pioneering epistemological designation" that was more or less invented during the Enlightenment. Before that, presumably facts were even stupider things than they were in Reagan's time.

But the particular real fact on my Snapple cap seems a bit questionable to me, less a fact along the lines of "Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald" or "Mercury poisoning causes birth defects", and more like a folk saying or a cryptic aphorism you could pull out of a Zen Buddhist text. I find myself doubting whether or not it's a real fact after all, and not some compressed parable about how one shouldn't say silly things if one wants to be heard and remembered and have one's words live on in future generations or something.

The real fact comes with a website address attached, so I'm guessing it's a newfangled interactive marketing ploy hoping I will live the brand a little bit. I assume I could go to the site and supply some user-generated content Web 2.0 style and offer up my own real facts. I have only a few so far:

A Key lime pie tastes best when sliced into quarters.
If you drink black coffee, you are more likely to burn your mouth.
An accurate count of pigeons in a public square is impossible to pin down.
Mosquitoes won't bite a bald head.
A good night's sleep won't improve your dreams.
You can't boil the flavor out of unripened fruit.