Too Good To Be True? It Usually Is.

Occasionally, the most bizarro queries end up being true. Sort of. Yes, Barack Obama did say that he'd visited 57 states during his campaign. But according to the video footage David and Barbara provide, it appears to be a flub born of exhaustion: He had actually visited 47. The Mikkelsons found no evidence, FYI, that Obama was secretly referring to the 57 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Each of their sources is cited, each of their entries is marked with a color-coded circle standing for true or false (and occasionally, undetermined).

Ah, Snopes. What a stalwart it has become, a sort of go-to intellectual Drano clearing out the apocryphal political sewage that clogs our brains more and more each day.

It's morphed into its own verb -- Snopesed, Snopesing, Snopesifying -- part of an information-overloaded election where stuff needs to be fact-checked, where believing everyone is lying seems more like smarts than paranoia. "I was Snopesing about last night," a user on a parenting message board writes in wonder, "and I discovered that the bulk of [Cindy McCain's] good deeds are more than just right-wing wonkery."

It's a one-sentence rebuttal to even the bat-craziest of e-mail forwards: Dude. Snopesify that junk.

Such oracle-like power was not the original intent of David and Barbara, who met cute in 1994 on a user group dedicated to discussing urban legends. Barbara moved from Ottawa to be with David, setting up a rudimentary Snopes in their Los Angeles area home. Their site takes its name from a particularly pernicious family peopling a William Faulkner trilogy -- and papering academia with hundreds of doctoral dissertations.

A few years ago, David left his job as a computer programmer to join his wife in full-time myth-busting (income is from ad space purchased on the site), and recently they hired an assistant whose sole job is reading through the massive piles of nutty that seem to signify everything from mudslinging partisanship to the death of satire.

Just the other day, they received a note from someone wanting to know the veracity of a newscast entitled "2008 Election Results Leaked," in which a voter complains, "If you can't trust the shadowy overlords that run your election, who can you trust?"

The video was from the Onion, a satirical newspaper whose current headlines include "No One on SWAT Team Wants to Wait in Ventilation Duct With Howard."

The Mikkelsons, who consider themselves apolitical -- Barbara's still Canadian -- opted not to debunk that particular story. They try to reserve precious Snopesifying man-hours for the stories they think have the most legs, the highest likelihood of going viral.

But they couldn't overlook another query, not after it was e-mailed by dozens of concerned readers. Branded as a series of Palin quotes, the document contained such ramblers as, "God made dinosaurs . . . so that when they died and became petroleum products we, in his perfect image, could use them in our snow machines, pickup trucks and fishing boats."

This text, as you, dear elite intellectual reader, may have suspected, is meant to be a joke. The Mikkelsons traced it to a blog labeling it as satire, not once but three separate times.