I saw last night that Snopes had posted that and wrote an email to them, basically saying, “Hey! I wrote a book with that title.”
I also offered them my suspicion that a version of the Hippo Eats Dwarf tale posted at “Plastic Thoughts”—http://members.shaw.ca/mcramer1/urban.html—could possibly be the original version of the tale that subsequently got shortened and began its career as bogus real news.
Everything else on the Plastic Thoughts page seems to be weird little fake news clippings written by the Plastic Thoughts people. However, the dates seem to be wrong. The original Hippo Eats Dwarf clipping dates to before 1995, as evidenced by a version of it having been posted in a <a href=“http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tasteless/browse_thread/thread/c45680d813600bc4/6da7dac77710b70d?lnk=st&q=&rnum=1” target=“_blank”>Usenet group</a> on Nov. 15, 1994. But the Plastic Thoughts page seems to have been written after 1995, going by the copyright date on their page. I’ve had no luck contacting the Plastic Thoughts people to ask them if they were the original authors of the tale. None of their email addresses work.
