I don't want truth, tell me the bad stuff

Everyone knows the tale of Lizzie Borden, the Massachusetts spinster who did whack her mom and dad with an axe 40 times, as the legend goes. What many people either don’t know, or choose to not believe, is that poor old Lizzie was acquitted.

• Fatty Arbuckle, the rotund silent film comic who did, it was said, force his drunken carnal attentions on a young party girl at a time she was in dire need of a pee. The result was, her bladder burst during the encounter, and she died of peritonitis. Fatty was charged. But, again it is not generally known is that he was exonerated.
  
  Whether or not the aforementioned were really guilty or innocent doesn’t matter, the point is that we choose to believe they were guilty because it makes the tale more enticing. Neither Lizzie nor Fatty will ever get a posterity break. Unfair? You bet it is. And it’s not far removed from one of us believing that a friend is involved in an affair because you saw him or her having a drink in a bar with a desirable person of the opposite sex. In fact, it was a sharing of a potable after a business meeting, and nothing more questionable than that. But how much more fun to believe the gossipy possibility. “Frank and Helen broke up? Well, I’m not surprised, because you know he was having an affair.”
  
  That’s because there is a human tendency to believe gossip more than truth, according to a study http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071015/sc_nm/gossip_power_dc_1 mounted by the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Even when we know the truth of the situation, we are (at least some of us are) more enticed by the seamier side of possibilities. We will listen to what others say rather than opt for that which is real. Eventually the falsehood assumes a life of its own and that part lives on in legend.
  
  As an example, most people know that British naval hero Lord Nelson was blind in one eye. And down through the years he has been pictured as having a black eye patch. In two films on his life (focusing his torrid affair with Lady Hamilton) he was depicted by Olivier and Peter Finch as sporting an eye patch. Truth of the matter: He never wore an eye patch. But, isn’t it much more fitting for a randy old seadog like Nelson to have a patch? Of course. Hence the patch.
  
  There are others who are so obsessed with their own version of the world, that conflicts with the reality, that they devote time and energy to finding validation of a belief that suits them best.
  
  Hence, you have:
  
  - A few thousand Elvis sightings every year.
  - A belief that Jim Morrison of the Doors is still wandering around Paris
  - An obsession that man never walked on the Moon and that the whole landing thing was filmed in a highly arid area of Arizona, Nevada, California or New Mexico
  - That there is an alien sequestered away somewhere around Rosewell
  - The Royal Family was behind a plot to bump off Princess Diana
  - A belief that Paris Hilton underwent such a transformation in jail she is truly going to devote the rest of her life to good works.