“Come and listen to a story ‘bout a man named Ned / a poor Texas Sharpshooter barely kept his family fed. Then one day he was shootin’ at his barn / and he came up with a plan to spin a silly yarn. ‘Specifications,’ he said, ‘making of… the easy way.’ ” What do a Texas sharpshooter and specifications have to do with each other? And what do you do when your humble author has an old TV show theme song stuck in his head? Let’s find out…

Long-time readers (of two months or so) will know that I found a website with logical fallacies all organized into a snazzy tree diagram.

“Geeky,” says you? Like a fox, says I.

This month I thought I would explore a fallacy that we see all the time in industry, and which coincidentally has the funniest non-Latin name of them all: The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. (The Latin ones are only funny if you are into Latin double-entendres… then they are hilarious. Trust me. Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.)

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