This is from one of John Scalzi’s blogs.

“Weekend Assignment #181: Present three facts about yourself. Have two of them be true. Have one of them be false. Encourage people to guess which one is the false one. When do you reveal the false one? On Monday, in a new entry.

“Extra credit: Have you lied about something today (aside from the Weekend Assignment)? You don’t have to say what the lie was. Just whether you’ve lied today. Little white lies count.”

Okay, here are my three statements, two of them are true.

1. A Libyan government cabinet minister (loose translation, as they don’t call it a cabinet but a committee) used to leave his rather fancy car in our garage for weeks at a time. We were supposed to drive it occasionally to keep the battery charged, but I never dared. I mean, would you?

2. When I first went to live in Malaysia back in 1970, I stayed for a while in a village. The loo was out the back down a little path. In the middle of the night I needed to visit it (all those chillies…!). When I came out again and wanted to return to the house, there was a tiger lying across the path making a meal of a village cat. I slammed the loo door shut and stayed there, shivering with fright for two hours, eaten alive by mosquitoes, until the sun came up and I could peek out again to see if it had gone.

3. I once spent two months on the road, hitch-hiking. I remember one night spent sleeping on the floor of a tiny closed up tourist information booth in the middle of the pavement in a medium size town on a busy Saturday night… Didn’t get much sleep.

Have I lied about something today? Come on, I am looking after a three-year-old. I lie all the time. “Eat this dear, you’ll love it.” “No, I didn’t skip a page…” “I’m sure the Big Bad Wolf didn’t really eat him up…” “I said ‘ship’.”