In this age of social media and engagement politics, it is easy to forget the distinction between facts and opinions. As a PSA, we at "Running With Scissors" would like to offer you a crash course on how to differentiate the two so you can tell your uncle Mike that no, the government is not using chemtrails to control the outcome of the World Series. That would be silly. It's actually Reptilians.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We must first define both terms to better understand how to differentiate them.
A fact is a statement that refers to something real, verified by hard evidence, documentation, or objective observation, which is non-debatable, and that has universal acceptance. An opinion, on the other hand, is a judgment based on subjective observation, based on beliefs, and not backed by evidence, using assumptions instead.
If we said, for example, that the Sun is hot because of the constant nuclear fusion changing hydrogen to helium generating heat, that would be a fact. To say that the Sun is hot because it's God's Easy-Bake oven would be an opinion. A weird, disturbing opinion.
Of course, the distinction between the two is not always a clean cut, mainly because humans have a weird tendency to twist facts to suit their opinions. Let's take climate change for example.
The world is getting considerably more vulnerable to God's Easy-Bake oven, mostly because of our own emissions destroying the atmosphere. That is a fact. Some people have a different opinion, saying that climate change doesn't actually exist, since demonstrating it does would mean that humans are, generally speaking, disgusting water bags.
As a fun fact, "disgusting water bags" is actually the direct translation of the word Glorbians from the planet Andromeda Gamma use to describe humans. "Yg'rrrre't'oath," they say, with their three extra tongues.
Now, it would be easy to disprove said opinions, but those climate change deniers do go to great lengths to disguise their opinions as facts, doing stuff like commissioning biased studies, or having snowball fights in the middle of summer in a parliamentary setting. As such, they muddy the line between facts and opinions, making humans everywhere worse for it.
It would come to no surprise that there are some people who make a living from disguising one as the other, and vice-versa: Lobbyists, Easy-Bake Oven salesmen, and Lawyers.
One Peter Katz was particularly good at mixing both of them up for the benefit of their client, a fact that he proudly advertised in his business card that read: "Peter Katz, Esq: Will Generously Lie For You."
He once convinced a jury that a pharmaceutical company was dumping massive amounts of mercury in the river, not because they wanted to save money by illegally throwing it away, but as a form of population control for a supposedly predatory fish species he named "Caribbean Fukital."
When the District Attorney pointed out that there was no such thing as a "Caribbean Fukital," Peter threw a handful of confetti into the air and said "Not anymore. You're welcome!"
Please, don't be like Peter.
Thing is, when you're so used to mixing those two concepts, it becomes very hard to separate them when needed, a fact Peter was coming to terms with when, against his previous opinion that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were a bunch of monkeys in nutcracker suits that wouldn't chase them over the border, the complete opposite was happening.
Again, please, don't be like Peter.
As Sarah drove the suicide bus at full speed south, at least ten Canadian Mounted Police vehicles—that's what they call their horses, we believe—were chasing them down with machineguns at the ready. Behind them, the less impressive and considerably less badass American Border Patrol were giving chase with their vehicles, which sadly, weren't horses.
"They should've realized by now that the man we killed was Massimo!" yelled Sarah, leaning her whole body forward, as if that action alone would make the bus run faster.
Actually, she was sorely mistaken. Her assessment that the man she unceremoniously stabbed in the neck with a pen was actually Massimo was less a fact and more of an opinion made by a series of biased observations.
Yes, the man had scars all over himself, and yes, he was missing an eye and a few fingers, and yes, his smile was so sensual it could melt butter. But those facts don't make a man Massimo. In fact, the man she had killed was actually called Alfreed Realname, a war veteran, and father of three. He had been hit by an IED while on duty, blowing a few fingers, an eye, and leaving him intensively scarred and with a speech impediment.
It was a simple mistake, but one that could've been avoided if she stuck to the facts and not her opinions. The man had been missing an eye, but it was the wrong one, not to mention the man still had most of his hair. That's a fact we could've mentioned, but didn't, just to make a point about facts and opinions.
To Sarah, we say: please, don't be like Peter.
"It doesn't matter," said Peter, stating a particularly dumb opinion once you think about it. "What matters is how we're gonna get rid of this heat."
"It's not even warm!" yelled Sarah, swerving to avoid a deer on the road.
"I mean the cops!" yelled Peter back. "We gotta lose 'em!"
Sarah tried to step deeper on the gas pedal a few times, but it was already at full speed, which was around 40 miles. It wasn't a particularly fast bus. "This is as fast as it goes! Try looking for something we can use!"
Peter scrambled to the back of the bus, only to return a few seconds later. "Use for what?!" he asked.
"To chuck at them!" she said, smashing the bus on the side of a Border Patrol car that had been approaching her. "If we can't lose them, we'll have to stop them."
"I'm deeply disturbed that blind violence is your standard answer to everything," said Peter, who began searching everywhere for some sort of blunt object. All he could find were soda cans and scorpion poop.
"If you have a better idea," said Sarah, slamming her brakes to smash the windshield of a car right behind her, "feel free to share it!"
Incidentally, that brake slamming made a bag come loose from under one of the seats. It was filled to the brim with make-up, costumes, and prosthetics. He had found Massimo's costumes bag.
"I have an idea!" said Peter. "It's gonna be easy!"
That was, again, an opinion, not a fact. Please, don't be like Peter.
The bus suddenly came to a stop in the middle of the highway. Both horses and patrols suddenly swarmed it with guns drawn and ready to shoot.
"This is the United States Border Patrol!" yelled the oldest guard. "Put your hands up and slowly exit the vehicle!"
"This is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and we are sorry to interrupt," said a Canadian officer, "but we also support you going out of the vehicle with your hands raised, please."
The bus door slid open, with two people coming out with their hands raised. The first one was a small woman with red hair and fake eyelashes, but only on one eye. She was wearing a tight one piece gala dress and her breasts were perfectly and unnaturally even.
"Oh, goodness me!" she said in a surprisingly masculine voice. "You're not going to hurt a lady, right?"
"No, they won't darn wouldn't," said the other person, a cowboy with a surprisingly feminine voice and pink vest. "They're good ol' officers of the law. They won't shoot a lady and her man, right?"
"We know that's you, Mr. Katz," said the American officer. "Your disguise ain't fooling no one."
"Very well crafted, though!" said the Canadian. "Prime materials."
"Crap," said Peter, throwing his wig away. "New plan: just shut up and follow my lead," he whispered to Sarah.
"Just for the record," she whispered back, "this is all your fault."
"That's just your opinion," he said, knowing full well that it was a solid fact.
He raised his hands again and took two steps forward, making every officer raise their gun again in unison.
"We surrender!" yelled Peter. "But before we do, I just want to know: who is going to arrest us?"
The senior American officer laughed a sinister laugh, making his bushy mustache shiver. We forgot to mention he had a mustache before. We are sorry about that.
"We, of course!" said the man. "You're wanted for murder and assault. You think you can get away with it?"
"Excuse me, sorry!" said the Canadian officer, who didn't have a mustache. "They killed a Canadian officer. It's our jurisdiction."
The American officer waddled over to the Canadian guard—we should've mentioned that he was also very fat, and again, sorry about that—and stood an inch in front of his face. "If you think we're gonna give those American criminals to a bunch of pasty-looking Canucks, you must be of the opinion that we're dumb as rocks!"
The Canadian officer removed his hat, giving it to another guard nearby. "It's not an opinion, it's a fact. Sorry," he said in the calmest, a most passive-aggressive voice he could muster.
"So it's gonna be like that?" said the American officer, pulling up his pants up to his gut. "You know there's only one way to resolve this, right?"
"Yes," said the Canadian officer.
All of the other American and Canadian officers formed a circle around the two of them, each of them trying to stare down the other side.
The Canadian officer raised his hand as high as he could, and snapped his fingers, breaking through the silence. From one side of the circle, a horse emerged, hauling what was basically an oversized boombox.
"This is a dance-off!" yelled the American officer.
The boombox began playing "Bye Bye Bye" by N'SYNC, and the crowd went wild with the display of moves both officers were pulling, which we sadly don't have time to describe, as Peter and Sarah used that moment of distraction to run away while nobody was looking.
Generally speaking, a bar is both the best and the worst place to hide if you're on the lamb, second only to a popular New York pizza parlor.
It's a very good place because it's usually dim and full of inebriated people who can barely remember what they had for lunch, much less remember a face. Simultaneously, it's a very bad place because, more often than not, the person who is hiding will also get drunk and will eventually do something stupid to blow their cover.
"What can I get you two fine people this evening?" said the old bartender of the Slippery Slope, Pennsylvania's number one sketchiest bar according to "Bad Decisions" magazine.
"Jack and coke," said Peter. "Hold the coke. And some French fries. Hold the French."
The bartender placed a bottle of Jack Daniel's on the table, and a plate full of raw potatoes. "And for the lovely lady?"
"A soda," she said dismissively.
"A what now?" asked the bartender.
"Soda. S-O-D-A," she replied, slower this time.
"He's gonna make you say it," said Peter, taking a bite out of the raw, crunchy Potato.
"It's stupid, and I won't say it," said Sarah.
"When in P.A...," said the bartender, displaying a row of half rotten and mostly missing teeth.
"Fine, give me a pop," said Sarah, slumping on the bar while the bartender placed a soda in front of her. She didn't know what was more annoying, that she got somehow dragged into a bar in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, or that Peter kept eating raw potatoes with his mouth open.
"How can you even eat raw potatoes? That's disgusting," she asked.
Peter grabbed one, studying it closely. "You know that the French call them 'Pomme de Terre' which means ground apple?"
"What does it have to do with anything?"
"They don't taste anything like apples," said Peter, taking another bite from a particularly dirty spud, "but they sure as hell taste like ground. They're a pretty good source of fiber, and I need fiber if I wanna crank out the old soft-serve machine, if you know what I mean."
"Are you an ice cream maker?" asked Sarah, not knowing what he meant. "And how can you stand the taste?"
Peter grabbed the bottle, and chugged a quarter in one hit. "That's what the booze is for."
Sarah sipped on her soda, very well considering turning him in and running away to Mexico to live her days as an Asistente Administrativa to some veterinarian in a beach town. She had always loved animals. But Dr. George's voice still nagged her, reminding her to be patient.
"What are we even doing here?" asked Sarah. "Shouldn't we be running?"
"We're not listening to She-Hulk right now," said Peter, swallowing an extremely dry piece of potato. "We're waiting until the sun is down, then we sneak away. That dance-off is gonna last until late, and by the time it does, they're gonna be too tired to chase us. They're not gonna be bothering us anytime soon."
Again, that was a statement that was presented as logical, like a fact, but was fueled like the sheer stupidity of a man who ate raw potatoes and jack, like an opinion.
Please, don't be like Peter.
It was such a wrong opinion that not even five seconds passed before he was proved incredibly wrong.
"That was a mighty good dance-off," said the Canadian officer as he entered the dingy bar and-in-arm with the American guard. "That split at the end really wrecked us!"
"You weren't half bad, Canuck," said the American. "A double Bye-Bye Birdie? Crazy!"
Sarah and Peter dove into the other side of the bar, startling the bartender.
"We're not here," said Peter, slipping a $100 bill into the man's hand. He gave them a complicit wink.
"Hello! Good evening!" said the Canadian as he took the seat previously occupied by Peter. "We are officers of the law!
"And newly minted friends!" said the American.
"We are looking for two individuals," said the Canadian, taking out a piece of paper with Peter's picture. The paper also had a piece of fan art of Esmeralda imagined as a furry from DeviantArt. "Have you seen them?"
The bartender cast his eyes downwards to a very panicked pair of people.
"Nope!" said the bartender. "You're the first customers of the night!"
The American pointed at the still sweating glass of soda and half-eaten potato. "And that's all yours, I suppose?"
The man began to get nervous, his hands sweating like crazy. He needed something to dry them, like a new piece of legal tender. He made that abundantly clear by making eye contact with Peter and rubbing his fingers together.
Peter slipped him a $50 bill.
"Yep!" said the bartender, taking a bite out of a potato. "Tasty lunch."
"I see," said the American. "We're offering a handsome reward for any information that leads us to the capture of both individuals."
"We decided that, since they were two, each country can take one!" said the Canadian.
"Are you sure you haven't seen neither of them?" said the American.
Again, the bartender demanded money, and Peter slipped him a $20.
"Pretty sure," said the bartender.
"It's a real shame," said the Canadian. "You could afford lots of improvement with that money."
"A new spittoon, even," said the American.
The man gave a last look at Peter who, having run out of money, slipped him an old condom and a Starbucks card with $3 bucks on it.
"We gotta get out of here," whispered Peter. "I just ran out of money."
That was the only fact Peter had said that day, and a dangerous one at that. The bartender was about to crack, and men like Peter didn't last long in jail, and not precisely because of his cancer.
He wondered if they would send him to an American prison or a Canadian one. The sodomy would be the same, of course, but in Canada they would feel bad about doing it.
He could've sworn he was hallucinating in his weird, impending-doom vision, as he could've sworn he saw a floor tile move up, revealing the face a hipster mime under it.
"Come with me if you wanna not die," he whispered, diving under the floor to reveal a ladder descending into darkness.
Peter, not wanting to die, believed that was his best shot at not being brutally sodomized for the rest of his days, and followed the hipster mime downward. That would soon to be an opinion that would prove disastrous, and that's a fact.
Please,and we can't stress this enough, don't be like Peter.