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No such thing as fake news
Dick Yarbrough NEW 06062016
Dick Yarbrough writes about Georgia. - photo by File photo

According to our Tweeter-in-Chief, there is a lot of fake news running around these days. I think he is talking about the national television networks and the navel-gazers at the New York Times and the Washington Post. I don’t think he is talking about me but who can be sure what is going on inside this guy’s cranium.

Let me assure you that there are two things I don’t do: arias from Italian operas and fake news. You can go to the bank on that (assuming you can remember your PIN number. I can’t do everything for you.)

For example, you have probably read somewhere that broccoli is good for you because it has vitamins and a lot of other stuff in it. Piffle. You won’t read that here. That is fake news. You eat broccoli and your lips will turn bright green and everyone will laugh at you and no one will sit with you in church.

The only known remedy for such a malady is to eat copious amounts of banana pudding with vanilla wafers and topped with whipped cream. Banana pudding has more vitamins and all that other stuff than you will ever need and it tastes a whole lot better than broccoli. That’s the truth.

If you read or hear of anybody moving out of the Great State of Georgia to go resettle up North, you can bet your buttered grits that is fake news. Nobody in their right mind would ever leave a place with such a vast array of majestic mountains, silvery beaches and sweet Vidalia onions. The truth is that everybody up North wants to move to Georgia because all their buildings are rusted and it snows 10 months a year.

When someone moves into the neighborhood from up North, welcome them with a pound cake and a cutting of kudzu. Tell them the pound cake is made with butter, eggs and sugar, which is true, and that the kudzu makes a wonderful garden salad and to plant it as soon as possible because it takes time for it to develop a root system. That, of course, is not true but it will be a good way to get even with them when they make fun of your Southern drawl.

If anyone tells you Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart and the cast of Saturday Night Live are comedians, that is fake news. They are all smug supercilious liberals who appeal to other smug supercilious liberals. They deem themselves the nation’s intelligentsia and view the rest of us as doorknobs.

They aren’t funny. Real comedians are people like Jeff Foxworthy and Bob Newhart and reruns of the Carol Burnett Show. They are really funny. And that’s the truth.

Some of our intrepid public servants in the Legislature tell us that the only way to fix what ails our public schools is for parents to cut-and-run from our schools to private schools and take money out of the state budget in the form of tax credits for doing so.

That is fake news. I would like for these zealots to sit down with Cameron Charles Yarbrough, a precocious 8-year-old who gives new meaning to the word "great," (as in great-grandson) and have a discussion about a chemical element known as radium. Cameron Charles learned a lot about that subject and a great number of other things this year. In a public school. In the second grade. Without a tax credit. The truth is that he could probably teach the Kool-Aid drinkers a thing or two.

It is absolutely fake news that the University of Georgia, the nation’s oldest state-chartered university, located in Athens, the Classic City of the South is considering canceling the upcoming football season because of conflicts our scholar-athletes may experience with quantum physics labs being scheduled on Saturdays this fall. That is so not true. Everyone knows that quantum physic labs are held on Tuesdays. That rumor was no doubt started by that trade school in Atlanta. Football, football.

That’s all they can talk about.

I hope I have been able to quell your anxieties about what is real and what is not when it comes to the news of the day. Please be assured that there is no place for fake news here.

Never has been. Never will be. Now that we have settled that matter once and for all, it is my pleasure to perform for you the aria, "Non siate ritrosi" from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte.

You can reach Yarbrough at yarb2400@bellsouth.net.

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