“How about we use that highly dubious twenty-three-year-old item as the basis for our Fly to South Sea Isles 2015 campaign? I’ll wager almost nobody will remember its first appearance.”

“I dunno…I mean, gosh, the rivet patterns don’t match at all.”

“Well, what about this: We release a photo with a caption that says they’re a perfect match and just superimpose the pattern we had hoped to find on the original in the background as if it were actually there. Attention spans are measured in milliseconds these days. Who has time to actually examine the photo?”

“I guess you’re right — I mean, who are they going to believe, us or their lying eyes? And since Discovery ‘news’ prints anything and everything we stick in our press releases and then every other news outlet on the planet snaps it up within forty-eight hours, with each succeeding slightly inflated rewording of our release making the evidence seem more irrefutable, we don’t even have to do any work, really.”

“Done.”

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride
If turnips were swords I’d have one by my side
If ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ were pots and pans
There’d be no need for tinker’s hands