Lars has tagged me with one of those “award” memes, where you’re supposed to tag a bunch of other bloggers and so forth. While grateful to Lars, I’m sufficiently unmoved by this sort of thing that I’m not about to play it to the hilt (and Lars, I’ll note, titled his post on the subject “Supposedly An Award”).

However, there’s one cute bit:

Tell up to six outrageous lies about yourself, and at least one outrageous truth – or – switch it around and tell six outrageous truths and one outrageous lie.

So, here are some outrageous lies about me, and one outrageous truth.

1. Last year I won the Tour de France while wearing a Lance Armstrong suit.
2. Last Christmas I trained a troop of wild gibbons to devour a pine tree. (Most of it, anyway.)
3. My dog has his own talk radio program on a college radio station in Wyoming.
4. I have a map of the world. It’s life-sized.
5. I have sailed around the world, accompanied only by a manatee, a parrot, and an aardvark named Simon.
6. When I was a small boy, I burned down the family home while roasting marshmallows. Fortunately, it was the family across the street.
7. Pope Benedict asks me for help with his encyclicals.

(With apologies to Steven Wright for the outrageous truth.)