Are you making this up? Did someone really send you a survey or you distorting the information to favour your own opinion?

They really did.

Yet I am falsity itself as I note the following opening paragraph from the email sending the link to the survey:<blockquote class="smalltext">I am an undergraduate from the School of Communications and Information, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). My fellow course-mates and I are conducting an online survey to study the practices and attitudes of bloggers on ethics and blogging as part of our honours thesis. We hope you can help us by taking part in our survey.</blockquote>

I hope they email me. (I've been getting hits from Singapore recently, so maybe soon!)
I'd be tempted to tell them how I lie and make stuff up all the time.. "In fact, I'm distorting the answers to this survey to favour my own opinion."

Having taken a Sociology class in which I had to poll people about some fairly personal issues, I can appreciate what they're trying to do. The desired result is some empirical data about how honest bloggers are. I'd love to see the Excel chart they come up with at the end.

But with most blogs, our opinion <i><u>is</u></i> the content, and vise versa. How can you measure people's honesty anyway? A liar tells lies, even on surveys.

Well that is the weird thing, isn't it. How do they know I am not a big fat liar about it all - even to myself.

PS: You will be glad to know, Brian, that I now have borscht and jerky so my "Borscht to Bagdhad" mission can finally be launched. For the longest time I felt bad enough to not send just dehydrated beet soup but not bad enough to do anything about it. Now I can sleep with a clear conscience.

In fact, it's been determined by some guy in a lab somewhere that most people unconsciously alter their memories to make themselves appear better or other appear worse; how would you really know that you were just making shit up? I'm not a fiction author, I'm a diarist. Unless somebody wants to start paying me: I can make stuff up, really I can!

I was thinking of applying for a sociology position at that very university. If I had been running this course I would have pointed out some of the difficulties in asking blatantly biased questions. But then I could be making all this up (except I'm not) (or am I?) (bwa ha ha!).