Of shoe mailers, conspiracies and piccolos

John W. Schoen Senior producer • Profile • E-mail

The end of the year is typically pretty slow in the news business. So this is a good time to revisit some of the — let's just say "more unusual" — questions we didn't get to earlier. Happy New Year to all.

Is there actually a movement for U.S. citizens to mail (President) Bush shoes before he leaves office?
— Wren W., Address withheld

Yes, there is. It looks like a talk show host in Chicago was the first to throw the idea out there. Ray Hanania, a comedian, former Chicago Sun-Timesman and talk show host on WJJG, says he’s mailed his shoes to the departing president and suggested others do the same.

He also set up a “Mail Your Shoes to President Bush” group on Facebook that has (at this writing) 127 members. Since then, Hanania has been joined by six other Facebook groups: How to Mail your shoes to Bush (777 members); Send a Shoe to the White House! (276 members); One Million Pairs of Shoes for President Bush (155 members); Shoe-Chuckers Unite: Shoe On You President Bush! No More Treadin On Us (96 members) and Ship You Old Shoes to the White House (19 members).

For those who don’t have the address handy, the president will be residing for the next few weeks at:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Hanania thoughtfully suggests shoe mailers label their package indicating it’s part of the “Shoe Protest” campaign.

Gives new meaning to voting with your feet.

How many miles of chain-link fencing do federal, state and local governments maintain within the 50 states?
— Mark S. G.

Most of them, we hope.

There's a guy named Lindsey Williams on YouTube, claiming that there is 200 years' worth of oil in Alaska's north shore, and that the IMF and World Bank, along with President Bush and Dick Cheney, are withholding that information from the public. How much of this is true, and if we drilled those fields, what would be the overall impact on the U.S. economy?
— Gail D.

Not true.

No one knows how much oil is underground, but geologists have made pretty extensive surveys of Alaskan oil. Even the most optimistic estimates suggest there might be enough to cover a decade’s worth of current U.S. consumption.

Obama outlines bailout for Main Street President Barack Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals, saying the U.S. must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" until more Americans are back at work. Bernanke: Too soon to tell if recovery will last theGrio: Black teens' unemployment rate spikes NYT: U.S. forecasts smaller loss from bank bailout Unexpected drop in jobless rate fuels optimism

But plenty of people are convinced that there are 200 years' worth of oil up there and that the reason we don't know about this is the cover-up. (Which, of course, would also have to include all the people it took to survey those oilfields along with the people who analyze the data.) You'll find plenty of people willing to explain how this is just a piece of a much bigger conspiracy to manipulate oil prices.

In fact, there’s a whole alternate reality available to viewers of YouTube documentaries, which help fill the Answer Desk inbox with a steady stream of endlessly amusing and increasingly absurd conspiracy theories. Apparently, to make one of these, all you have to do is "connect the dots." That must be why there are so many of them.

More and more readers, it seems, are happy to live in this alternate reality these days. Given the current state of the current real reality, we can’t really blame them.

Of course, many of these conspiracy “documentaries” also hint — or claim outright — that "mainstream" journalists like me are part of the cover-up.

So I guess you’ll never really know.

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