Snapple shares one "Real Fact" with me for every product of theirs I buy. I find my "Real Facts" under the lid and it gets the entire juice experience off to a heady start. "Real Facts" have been around for a couple of years and they smack of Snapple's friendly, intimate patter. Yet the name "Real Facts" betrays a bit of corporate paranoia. Someone in Snapple's marketing chain of command decided that the word Fact needed to be qualified and recent campaigns have agreed. These days, where Snapple makes do with the simple adjective "Real," invocations of Facts have been bolstered by a liberal dose of testosterone.

Coors is out to sell me the world's coldest beer. To help with their pitch, a baritone announcer shares a Cold Hard Fact relating to beer production. At the same time, the word "fact" tears onto the screen, heralded by an industrial sound effect and a no-nonsense font. These are not your grandmother's facts. These bad boys mean business.

Ford, too, understands the raw power of Facts, provided they're sufficiently manly. With an even louder industrial noise and a still-bolder font, Ford drops the word "fact" onto the screen to announce claims about its line of trucks.

The implication in both ads is that someone has been telling me soft, warm facts that the announcer and I both know are so much hooey. Or, worse yet, someone's been peddling gooey opinions in my direction, and we all know how useless opinions are in today's sissy, politically correct, feminized world. I'm a beer drinker and a truck driver and, presumably, a man. I'm serious and, like Sergeant Friday before me, I only want the facts.

There was a time, when television was young, when ads peddled their product facts with the assurance that all facts are factual. Now commercials specialize in feelings, emotions, connotations and lifestyles that do not require reinforcement from manly trappings. Facts are being trotted back into the foreground in a new bid to hold off consumer skepticism and creeping subjectivity. But facts can't do it alone; they can't be trusted without some reassuring, steely masculinity.

Fifteen minutes before doors open, a line stretches across the walkway of the mini-mall that houses Cal Bowl, a Long Beach bowling alley with more than 65 lanes. A limousine is parked near the line and young men rest their beverages on its roof. Before long, a man dressed in a human-size, cardboard Ralph's half-and-half container gets out of a car and walks toward the end of the line. People hoot and holler. Another arrives wearing a foam "Sioux City Sarsaparilla" bottle. Wild applause.

It's clear at this point that this is not just another league night. This is the second night of Lebowski Fest West. The two day event is, as its website boasts, "a celebration of all things Lebowski." The opening night, which one festival-goer described to me as "a warm-up," took place at Hollywood's Knitting Factory. Tribute bands played. Vendors sold bumper stickers reading "Enjoyin' my coffee," "We believe in nothing," and "Mark it 8, Dude." A girl walked around with a stuffed tiger on her shoulders, apparently hoping to pass it off as a marmot.

As 8:00 PM draws nearer on Saturday, the second night, more people in character costumes show up. There are plenty of Walter Sobchaks, John Goodman's character; a few of Julianne Moore's Maude Lebowski; and countless Dudes, some spitting images, some not. A short-haired, beardless man wearing a bathrobe searches the line frantically for someone with an extra ticket. When I tell him I don't have one he's eager to assure me that he got his ticket long ago; he's trying to find one for a friend.

The Big Lebowski has the most devoted cult following of all the Coen Brothers' films, which is saying something. Ever referential and genre-toying, in Lebowski the Coens toss Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski into the detective role in a Los Angeles mystery ripped directly from the pages of Chandler. And for whatever reason, it draws a crowd.

Inside the bowling alley White Russians flourish, as do nutty costumes. There are more Walters, Dudes, Jesuses, and Maudes, but there are also many more inanimate objects. One man is dressed as the check The Dude uses to pay for the half-and-half. There's a woman who's a Kahlua bottle. Four people make up Mr. Lebowski's wall of achievement. Walter's dirty undies are present. Others are characters who are hardly in the movie, such as the owner of the Palmetto Walter smashes. Others still are characters who are simply mentioned in the movie, such as "the fucks down at the league office" and the duo of Moses and Sandy Koufax.

Within minutes, all 68 lanes are occupied by assigned groups of six per lane. Many more stand waiting for a turn. Other things are going on: trivia and costume contests, picture taking and appearances by cast members. The big activity, though, is bowling. Shouts of "Over the line!!!" echo each time a ball is rolled and plenty of threesomes recite the lines from any number of the scenes that take place in the bowling alley.

One of the men I'm sharing a lane with looks around. "How big do you think this thing can get?"

"Why do you think so many people come?" I ask in response.

"It's a great idea. It's a great movie," he says.

I nod. "It is a great movie..."

"It's so funny. And the Dude has an outlook we all admire, you know?"

Maybe true, but I'm not sure that's it. We live in a post-modern society. Our lives are one big reference joke and it cracks us up, leaves us in stitches. I heard an episode of Malcom in the Middle mentioned at one point and a conversation about the movie Kingpin at another. Both occurred simply because we were in a bowling alley. Everything reminds us of something else, usually something from pop-culture.

We can't help it. We are submerged in a stew of movies and television shows and commercials and sexy print ads and music videos and magazines. Many of them allude to movies and television shows and commercials and sexy print ads and music videos and magazines past and still remembered (because we have seen them so many times). The thing is, we love it. Fans of The Big Lebowski know that other fans of The Big Lebowski feel like they do when they watch a particular scene. The movie gives them a common identity because their appreciation of it is not universal. We love these things, our media picks. We connect over them. We throw festivals about them. Po-Mo, it turns out, is one giant party. It may isolate, but it isolates in groups, so why not grab a beverage and tie-up your bowling shoes?

On the other hand, most of the people at Lebowski Fest aren't thinking about this. They're either kids in their twenties wearing homemade tee-shirts that say "Strong Men Also Cry" who are so into cynicism and irony that they can't admit to genuinely admiring anything without emphasizing how ironic that thing itself is, or they are middle-aged people who are a little bit sad that they themselves did not grow up to become The Dude. I don't know how much substance there is to any of the evening's interaction. Maybe there's something miserable about the way we rely on mass-marketed pop-culture to connect us to other human beings, about our inability to significantly communicate with and meaningfully relate to other people through simpler, more personal means. It seems increasingly difficult for an individual to share a feeling, a connection, with another person without the use of media that neither person created, but when was it easy? What does this thing replace? I'm not sure it replaces anything. If this is a relatively new phenomenon, this ability to share without sharing anything of ourselves, then it highlights how isolated we've been from the get-go.

But Lebowski Fest is fun. We have a great time relating through a common, passive experience. In the end, it's how we live. It's all around us. What's one to do?

Fuck it, dude. Let's go bowling.

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