Myth

Anyone who has booked a last-minute flight knows you pay more when you wait. But you also pay more if you book too early. What's too early? What's too late? Pity the poor fare geek trying to hit that elusive sweet spot. Discount travel site Cheapair.com has crunched a year's worth of booking data and found some answers to these and other eternal travel questions, including: - Best time to book a domestic flight? Seven weeks in advance. - Best time to book an international flight?

A Market Intelligence report from Kelley Blue Book said that more than 80% of new car shoppers are not considering diesel-powered cars. In almost half of those cases, diesel fuel's higher price was the reason. But about 45% appeared to be laboring under old -- and inaccurate -- beliefs, including the notions that diesel engines are too loud and bad for the environment. Diesel sales were up nearly 10% in the first quarter, to 88,582 vehicles from 80,185, according to Autodata Corp.

So let's get this straight. A guy in the raspberry business from western Serbia smashes and grabs his way through a heist eight time zones away in Tokyo and scoots off past shopping centers and sushi bars with a $31-million necklace known as the Countess of Vendome. It happens. Djordjije Rasovic graced arrest warrants, a thief with brazen nerves, part of an international Balkan crime gang known as the Pink Panthers.

Here's a question for you: Is there a single example of consumer prices going down and market competition increasing after deregulation of a U.S. industry? I'm serious. The phone industry? The cable industry? Regulatory oversight for both was eased - and in some cases eliminated - and look where that's gotten us. And now look at the airline industry, which witnessed its latest multibillion-dollar deal Thursday with the merger of American Airlines and US Airways, creating the world's largest carrier.

Whenever I hear about some amazing way to boost resting metabolism, my male-bovine-droppings detector goes berserk. Take the perennially popular one stating that 1 pound of muscle burns an extra 50 calories a day while at rest — so if you gain 10 pounds of muscle, your resting metabolic rate (RMR) soars by an extra 500 calories each day. Awesome! And also drivel. I'm more likely to believe bears use Porta-Potties and the pope is a Wiccan. Though its origins are uncertain, any number of fitness magazines have made the "50 calories per pound of muscle" statement.

Beware of the story that might be shared today when Michael Jordan is inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame: the one that involves him getting cut as a sophomore from his high school varsity basketball team. It is inconveniently false, Ruby Sutton, physical education teacher at Laney High in Wilmington, N.C., told the Charlotte Observer. "Back then, [most] 10th-graders played JV; that's just the way it was," Sutton said. "Nobody ever 'cut' Michael Jordan." Laney High Athletic Director Fred Lynch, who was then an assistant basketball coach, told the Observer that the team did make an exception that year, though, permitting one sophomore to play on the varsity.

Attention dieters: Many of the “facts” you think you know about obesity and weight loss are wrong. So says a report published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. An international team of dietitians, doctors and other experts examined more than a dozen ideas about obesity that are widely believed to be true but aren't actually supported by reliable medical evidence. It's not just dieters who buy into these mistaken notions, the study authors note - much of this incorrect conventional wisdom is espoused by physicians, academic scientists, government agencies and (gulp)

Re "What has Obama learned?," Opinion, Sept. 25 Jonah Goldberg asserts that President Obama was "easily among the least experienced major party nominees in U.S. history. " This assertion is dubious. Obama had more experience as an elected official before wining the presidency than many of his successful predecessors (nearly 11 years total - seven in the Illinois statehouse and almost four as a U.S. senator). Abraham Lincoln served eight years as an Illinois state representative and two years in the House before becoming president.

Re "Holocaust deniers gather in Iran," Dec. 12 I'm not sure that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be able to convincingly prove his contention that the Holocaust is a myth, but his conference has conclusively proved that any belief that anti-Semitism isn't more of a threat than ever before in the last 70 years is a myth. Hitler didn't host conferences with international attendance. RICHARD T. RASKIN Encino

Congratulations, Tim Rutten, on being able to regurgitate the handful of known (and notably some dead) Republicans in Hollywood ("Left-Leaning Hollywood: A Myth Dies," Aug. 23). Their names drift so easily to mind because they are/were oddities in the otherwise overwhelmingly liberal landscape of Tinseltown. Didn't you notice that your list spans about 60 years with a result of only about 10 Republicans? I suspect that if you were to start reeling off a similarly known list of vocal liberals who inhabit this industry today, it would far exceed The Times' allowable space for publication.

Attention dieters: Many of the “facts” you think you know about obesity and weight loss are wrong. So says a report published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. An international team of dietitians, doctors and other experts examined more than a dozen ideas about obesity that are widely believed to be true but aren't actually supported by reliable medical evidence. It's not just dieters who buy into these mistaken notions, the study authors note - much of this incorrect conventional wisdom is espoused by physicians, academic scientists, government agencies and (gulp)

In 1954, psychologist Benjamin Karpman wrote a prescient book about "sexual offenders" in the United States. Karpman focused especially on homosexuals who were drummed out of government jobs on the grounds that their sexual orientation made them security risks. If you were gay, the argument went, you were susceptible to blackmail by communist spies. But the real problem lay in the taboo on homosexuality, which paved the way for exactly the kind of extortion that the government feared.

If you needed another reminder of the implacability of time, the Rolling Stones are currently celebrating 50 years in show business - a fact that might blow the minds of people old enough to use the phrase "blow my mind" and at the same time mean less than nothing to people young enough to regard 50 years as an imponderable abstraction. As part of the band's several-pronged multimedia anniversary - a two-year party, dating either from the initial 1962 confluence of blues fans Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards or to the January 1963 addition of last original Stone Charlie Watts - HBO will premiere Thursday a new documentary, "Crossfire Hurricane.

With the election over and the votes counted, we now have data to refute a couple of persistent electoral myths -- one involving economics, the other polling. Myth One: “No president has been reelected with an unemployment rate higher than ... .” This hoary notion never made much sense. Put the unemployment rate and the incumbent's vote percentage on a graph and you can immediately see that the two bear almost no relationship to each other. Two main reasons explain this. One is that the unemployment rate sometimes goes up when times are getting better and down when things get worse.

The Story of America Essays on Origins Jill Lepore Princeton University Press: 416 pp, $27.95 For Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor and New Yorker staff writer, the story of America is part myth, part tall tale, and never less than engrossing. "All nations are places," she writes in her stylish new collection, "but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable.

Two new voices have entered the fray to criticize affirmative action. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor have been ubiquitous in recent weeks on panels, talk shows and in their Times Op-Ed article Sunday, "Do race preferences help students? " They claim to bring a new story to the affirmative action debate in which their concern is the beneficiaries, and their contribution is empirical. The story they are telling is that black and Latino students have been harmed rather than helped, their legal and scientific careers curtailed by the "preference" that led them to attend a highly selective law school or college.  Scholars who have examined the research -- virtually all of it by Sander himself -- have found it deeply flawed.

The warning: When checking out of a hotel, never return the room key card! The myth: Computerized hotel key cards are routinely imprinted with guests' personal information, including names, addresses and credit card numbers. The truth: Hotel companies and law enforcement agencies have said repeatedly that such information isn't put on the cards. How it started: In 2003, a Pasadena police detective spread the warning without checking its veracity.

Another media-inspired myth about homosexuality. Cheryl Crane--a "model" lesbian--wants us to believe that 2 1/2 years of sexual abuse and murdering one of her mother's suitors due to his abusive treatment of her mother didn't have anything to do with her sexual preference. Give me a break. Crane cops to the ludicrous pro-gay tenet that homosexuality is innate and has nothing to do with one's early environment. Such a rationale is clearly self-protective. Crane needn't deal with her tragically acquired ambivalence toward men; mama Lana in turn is relieved of facing the horrific effects of her own sexual brokenness upon Crane.

Are men fast becoming obsolete? Are women seizing the reins of power in the nation, becoming the major breadwinners and decision-makers? Are women naturally suited for the new economy while old-fashioned males thrash about, clueless? Today, the idea that men are fading and women rising frames the latest scary story of the sexes in newspapers, magazines, on the Web and in bestselling books. Hanna Rosin writes in "The End of Men" that the U.S is fast becoming a "middle-class matriarchy" as women become the major breadwinners.

Re "Middle class loses in his kind of 'reform,'" Column, Oct. 3 Although I haven't taken a penny from billionaire Peter G. Peterson, whom Michael Hiltzik excoriates for his deficit-reduction proposals that target social programs, I can say with confidence that Hiltzik's indefatigable defense of entitlements pivots on the myth that beneficiaries are only getting back what they are "owed. " Until the left acknowledges that these programs are massively redistributive, it is difficult to imagine how we will ever get our debt under control.