Body of lies

I'm not in the business of killing rumors, but I'd like to believe that slowly but surely I'm doing my part to cast skepticism on a particular one.

Last July I wrote a blog entry taking on the knitting world's burning question: does Russell Crowe knit? I concluded that in spite of news stories claiming that the actor knits, there's no evidence to support it. This "fact" about him gets repeated but has only the flimsiest of support. Maybe it is true, but the reporting on the matter is less than convincing.

I don't check site traffic nearly like I used to, but it never fails that the Russell Crowe knitting question gets hits on a regular, if not daily, basis. Out of the 1300+ entries on this blog, I'm fairly confident that it is the most read one. And now it's been referenced in a Los Angeles Times blog entry about the star's falsely rumored death.

The funny thing is that the writer of a story about an internet rumor initially passed along the usual line about Crowe being a knitter before a commenter chimed in that he isn't. My blog post on the topic is the top search result on Google for the question, which is likely why it's now linked in the LA Times piece. I expect this has expanded the exposure for my take on the matter, and maybe, just maybe, getting it in any form in a major media outlet will begin to erode what's always been a mostly unsupported claim.