Hoax Museum Blog: Body Manipulation

Goldfish in Fake Breasts — I seem to have been posting a lot about goldfish, with recent posts having included items about blind goldfish, trained goldfish, forgetful goldfish, and swallowed goldfish. So when I came across this story about goldfish used as fake breasts, I knew I had to post it:

FISH have feelings, too, according to the folks at PETA, who are taking aim at writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell. The author, whose best-selling memoir, "I Am Not Myself These Days," chronicles his double life as an ad exec-cum-drag performer, was put on notice last week by the animal-rights group's "Fish Empathy Project" for alleged cruelty to goldfish. As his whip-cracking alter-ego, Aquadisiac, Kilmer-Purcell donned a pair of clear plastic breasts filled with live goldfish. Says PETA: "It would be, for you, like living in a covered bathtub that's constantly moving, tossing you around as you defecate in it. It's filthy, painful and terrifying for these animals."

When PETA puts it that way, it kind of reminds me of how I felt once back in college when I had a particularly bad hangover (minus the defecating part). But seriously, it does seem unnecessary for Kilmer-Purcell to use real goldfish in his fake breasts. He could substitute plastic fish for the real ones, and most people would probably never know the difference. (Here's an article about Kilmer-Purcell in the Fairfield County Weekly, where I found the picture of him as Aquadisiac.)

School For Ambidexterity — According to an article in NewKerala.com, the Veena Vadini school in Singrauli, India teaches its students to write with both hands, at the same time. And that's not all:

All these students are able to write simultaneously with both their hands. Trained from the early days at their school, these 72 young students are today at comfort with this rare art. They are also fluent in a number of languages.
Virangat Sharma, the principal of the school said that all his students are proficient in this art, which was started as an experiment. “The children are taught six languages Hindi, Urdu, English, Roman, Sanskrit and Arabic,” says Sharma. “I read somewhere that India's first President Dr. Rajendra Prasad used to write in two languages I also preferred to experiment developing such a skill among my students. All the children here can do this and also know the world's capital cities and their tables up to hundred. They can write on two different subjects and in two different languages at the same time,” says Sharma. Not just that these children can write with both their hands but they can also write in two different languages on two different subjects at the same time, tells Sharma.

Wow. And I thought my ability to write backwards in ancient Greek while doing a one-arm handstand and juggling two balls with my feet was impressive. Needless to say, I'm highly suspicious of the principal's claims. (Assuming that he exists and wasn't misquoted by a reporter.) The same story is also reported by ananova, adding to its credibility (note: sarcasm). I did a search for "Veena Vadini School" to see if they have a website, but only found links to this article about their instruction in ambidexterity. (Thanks to Kathy for sending me the clipping.)

Update:
SicTim (posting in the comments) remembered that Ripleys had once featured some cases of amazing ambidexterity. Checking the Best of Ripleys volume on my bookshelf, I found these examples. On the left, Lena Deeter of Conway, Arkansas, who "could write with both hands simultaneously — backwards, forwards, upside-down, even upside-down backwards! She could write in a different direction with each hand simultanously." (She appeared in a Ripleys cartoon on April 1, 1942... I assume she wasn't an April Fool's joke.) On the right is "a 1936 Dallas Odditorium performer [who] could draw three different cartoons simultaneously — with both hands and a foot!"

These cases indicate that it might be possible for someone to write in two different languages at the same time, but I'm still doubtful that an entire school could be trained to do it.

 

Free Breast Implants With Credit Card — The Plastic Assets credit card company is making an attractive offer: free breast implants if you sign up for their card. They promise that "With a low APR and bigger breasts, you will be ready for anything!" And you also get free lip injections for every friend you refer.

The site is well designed — well enough designed to plausibly pass for an actual credit card company site. But it's a hoax. The site is part of the Huffington Post Contagious Festival (as you can find out if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of it), which is a contest to create a high-traffic site. There have been contests like this before. Remember the Contagious Media Festival, which produced Forget-Me-Not Panties (panties with a built-in GPS device so that jealous lovers could track the whereabouts of their wearer)? (Thanks to David for the link.)

Related Posts:
May 5, 2004: Invest In My Breast

The Case of the Microwaved Penis — The following incident caught my attention because it occurred in McKeesport, which is right outside of Pittsburgh. This is where my mother grew up. My grandfather used to be mayor of a small suburb of McKeesport called Liberty Borough. I visited it often growing up. McKeesport is also where Andy Warhol grew up. Sadly, the city has gone way, way downhill ever since the steel mills closed, as evidenced by this incident:

Police in McKeesport said a woman who needed to pass a work-related drug test was the reason behind a fake penis being microwaved at a convenience store. A clerk at the Giant Eagle Get-Go store along Lyle Boulevard told police that a man brought what appeared to be a severed penis into the store and asked her to microwave it Thursday night. But police said the item was actually a fake, hollow penis that a woman planned to use to pass a drug test. McKeesport Police Chief Joseph Pero said the woman's male companion had filled the device with his urine, which the woman somehow planned to pass off as hers for a drug test. The couple stopped at the convenience store to have the device microwaved because the woman wanted the device to be warmed up to something approaching body temperature -- as part of the drug-testing ruse. Police said they plan to charge the man and woman criminally, although the exact charges haven't been determined.

My main question is this: Why did the woman need a fake penis in order to pass a drug test? Does that make any sense at all?

Update: It's been pointed out to me that the news report misspelled the name of the road. It's Lysle Boulevard, not 'Lyle' Boulevard.

Skinbags (bags made from human skin) — The front page of the skinbags site advertises that skinbags are "Organic objects, in synthetic human skin." That description isn't as clear as it could be, and could easily be misread to suggest that skinbags are actually made from human skin. Much of the rest of the site plays up this ambiguity. You come across passages such as this:

What is it? Could it be human skin? One asks oneself, reaching out a hand in an attempt to touch it : a reflexive gesture. This is what is fascinating – like a game made to scare oneself.

But don't worry. It's not really human skin. Skinbags (as you learn if you search around the site a bit) are latex designed to look and feel like skin. They're made by Olivier Goulet. The skinbag line includes purses, handbags, jackets, overalls, and laptop carriers. It looks like they all have to be special ordered. You won't find skinbags down at The Gap. (Thanks to Timothy Hunter for the link)

Stevie Starr, Professional Regurgitator — Stevie Starr calls himself a professional regurgitator. He's been doing his act for a long time, and is quite famous. (He's appeared on shows such as Jay Leno and Ripley's Believe it or Not.) But I just became aware of him through a video of one of his performances on Google Video, and I'm at a complete loss to explain how he does what he does.

His performance includes some of the following tricks: He swallows sugar, followed by a glass of water, and then regurgitates the sugar, completely dry. He swallows a live goldfish and regurgitates that a minute later, still living. (As he does this, he mentions the urban legend about goldfish having 5-second memories.) Reportedly he's also able to swallow a (miniature) rubik's cube and bring it back up — solved. (Though the Rubik's cube trick isn't shown in the google video.)

I can't find anyone on the web who has a decent explanation for how Starr is able to do all this. Obviously he has a genuine talent with his stomach. An article about him in the Amherst Student reports that:

he was born in a children’s home in Scotland, where he lived for the first 19 years of his life. When little Stevie was four years old, he discovered this unique talent by swallowing his lunch money and realizing he could bring it right back up. Thus, a freak of nature was born.

But this doesn't explain how he can swallow sugar, followed by water, and bring the sugar up dry. Or the trick with the rubik's cube. Does he have a second stomach, or something like that? To do the rubik's cube trick I assume he must have swallowed a solved rubik's cube before the show. But like I said, I'm pretty much baffled.

Incidentally, history is full of famous vomiters, so Stevie Starr evidently isn't the only one who has ever had this talent. In 1621 there was the case of the nail-vomiting Boy of Bilston (who had been trained by a priest to simulate the symptoms of being bewitched). This was followed in 1642 by Catharina Geisslerin, "the toad-vomiting woman of Germany," who, as you might guess, had a talent for vomiting up toads. In 1694 there was Theodorus Döderlein, who vomited up twenty-one newts and four frogs. (I'm getting this info from Clifford Pickover's The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits.) Pickover also reports that there have been cases of compulsive swallowers who don't later regurgitate what they swallow, including one guy in 1985 who had "53 toothbrushes, 2 razors, 2 telescopic aerials, and 150 handles of disposable razors" removed from his stomach.

Shot Glass Through Ear — I'm assuming this photo of a guy with a shot glass through his ear is real because it was taken by a Reuters photographer (Jorge Silva) outside the World Social Forum in Caracas on January 25, 2006. The guy with the crazy ear piercing is "Venezuelan tattoo maker Constantino." So when he doesn't have a shot glass in his ear, his earlobes must hang down like big fleshy loops. That's got to be attractive. (And is that a spike through his nose?)

Glasgow High School Offers Fake Tanning Lessons — Deprived of natural sunlight by geography, students in Glasgow high schools have taken to popping down to the tanning salon between classes. This has become such a problem (with school officials worrying about students damaging their skin) that some high schools have begun offering lessons on how to get a fake tan:

In the first of a series of such sessions, Lisa Fulton, a training expert with Fake Bake, will give pupils tips on how to apply fake tan next week. Ms Fulton also plans to tell the pupils about her celebrity clientele, in the hope that stars will have influence where health experts do not.

The reaction of the students to this seems mixed. The Daily Record reports:

MORE controversy at the Glasgow school that's called in a fake tan firm to stop pupils going for sunbeds. A fourth-year girl has been suspended for disrupting the home economics class by stripping down to her underwear and lying under the grill.

What kind of grill are they talking about? A sunbed grill? (Which means they have a sunbed in the school itself?) Or was this some kind of protest on her part? We never had anything as exciting as a girl stripping down to her underwear during class at my high school, if only because it was an all-male school.

Digital Plastic Surgery — For those who still don't realize that all those beautiful models you see in magazines have benefitted from the aid of photoshop, the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs has created an online tutorial to demonstrate exactly how photo editors manipulate appearances. They write:

The media world is becoming increasingly fixated on appearances. And the number of tricks used to achieve the increasingly exaggerated ideals is growing. Many models have plastic surgery and even more are retouched so they appear to have bigger breasts, smaller stomachs or fuller lips. We wanted to show how easy it is to change someone’s appearance in this campaign.

Now they should do a companion tutorial to show what real plastic surgery can do.

Penile Weight Lifting (A Follow-Up) — I feel compelled to post something about this simply because I've posted about the sport of penile weight lifting before, expressing a few doubts about its reality. (I also had a few questions about the actual mechanics of the process). Inside Bay Area has this report of a recent demonstration of penile weight lifting in action:

Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng, best known for his Iron Crotch, attached himself not once, but twice, to a rental moving truck and pulled it several yards across a parking lot in Fremont. In lace-up leather boots and a black tank top, the 50-year-old tied a strip of blue fabric around the base of his penis and testicles and tugged to make sure it was on tight. An assistant kicked him hard between the legs before he lashed himself to the vehicle.

Here's the best part of the article:

Jin-Shengs performance drew a hearty applause (and only a few gasps) from the sparse crowd. He wrapped a piece of fabric around his waist to conceal his genitals from the crowd, but in the heat of the second truck pull, when he tied the cloth around his testicles only, it was pushed aside to reveal a ball of flesh that looked ready to burst.

Lovely. So apparently this sport doesn't involve muscle training, per se. It's more like hoping your skin and connective tissue don't rip apart as you lift (or pull) the weight. The description of the event sounds credible enough for me to categorize it as real.

Fake Body Parts — An Alex from Colombia sent me these pictures and the following note:

I came across these images and sincerely speaking I have no idea what they are. Is there any logical explanation for such thing? I suppose that they are either stage props or someone with a very disturbed mind and undoubtedly very good skills in clay or meat modeling made them, staged them and took the pictures.

Unfortunately I can't identify what's going on in these pictures any better than Alex from Colombia can. It looks to me like body parts being produced in a Hollywood special effects shop. But that's just a guess. At least they're obviously not real body parts.

15-Inch Waist — The picture to the right has not been photoshopped (would that it had). That woman's waist really is that thin. She's Cathie Jung, who holds the title in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Smallest Waist on a Living Person:

Cathie Jung's waist is about the same size as a regular jar of mayonnaise. She's been wearing a corset every day for the past 12 years, and she now wears one 24 hours a day. "I probably have around 100 of them," says the corset queen.

The pictures of Cathie remind me of the Stomach-Sucked-In picture I posted earlier this year. (via The Presurfer)

Human Upgrades — I've received a couple of emails calling my attention to the Human Upgrades website. This group claims to be some kind of futuristic outfit offering bizarre DNA modification procedures such as Simplenose (giving people one large nostril instead of two), Simpletooth (fusing all the teeth into one long, continuous row), and other more sexually explicit modifications (some of the images are not safe for work). The site states that:

Human Upgrades was founded in 2001 by Doc. MUDr. FaVU. Petr Skala CSc. and his team from Institute of DNA Modification in Brno in Czech Republic. Since the contacts around the world and first class expiriences of the team Human Upgrades was able to offer unprecedented portfolio of surgeries based on the newest discoveries in the field of DNA manipulation.

All the text on the site is written in broken English, complete with misspellings. It seems that someone paid a lot of money to design the site, but never bothered to run the text past someone who can speak English. Anyway, the whole thing is obviously a hoax. The Institute of DNA Modification doesn't exist. The question is, who created the site? The main clue I can find is that all the contact information provides the addresses of European offices of the Bosch Group (makers of automotive and industrial technology). So either the contact information is a deliberate red herring. Or Human Upgrades is part of a strange marketing campaign created by Bosch's PR company.
Update: Another theory (because I find it hard to believe Bosch is responsible for Human Upgrades): There's a Czech film director named Petr Skala (same name as Human Upgrades supposed founder, and the registrant for humanupgrades.com). Perhaps he or one of his students created the site. Or perhaps this is yet another red herring.

The Silent Movie Actress Archive (Corporeal Memorabilia) — The website of the SMA (Silent Movie Actress) Archive claims that:

We are a small and dedicated organisation based in Baltimore, USA. Our aim is the ‘resurrection’ of actresses from the Golden era of silent cinema. To do this we are securing a large body of quality genetic material from a variety of sources which is subjected to rigorous testing to ensure its validity. Samples range from small tissue and blood samples to full bones and several preserved organs.

Is this real? Well, the site it's located on, bonetrade.gregorywhitehead.com, is so elaborate that it would be easy to believe it was real. It delves into all kinds of bizarre aspects of "corporeal memorabilia," which is the trade in the body parts of dead celebrities. Now, I realize there definitely is a market for body parts of famous people (see Rasputin's penis). However, the elaborate corporeal memorabilia of the SMA Archive and everything else on bonetrade.gregorywhitehead.com is fictitious. It's the creation of artist Gregory Whitehead. He wrote a short movie called The Bone Trade about Walter Sculley, a (fictional) dealer in corporeal memorabilia. In the movie, Whitehead plays Sculley. (Also check out this mp3 file of Whitehead interviewing Sculley.) The website about corporeal memorabilia appears to be an outgrowth of the movie. For more weirdness by Whitehead, you can read his article in Nth Position Magazine about bibliovoria (people who love to eat books). (via The Presurfer)

Wall of Fake Breasts — Retailers are always coming up with new gimmicks to help their customers. I'm surprised none of them have thought of this before (reported in the Hindustan Times):

Men who want to woo their ladies by buying them sexy-scanty upper garments, but don't know their sizes, need not look confused anymore, as a designer in Netherlands has made their job much easier by creating a wall of fake breasts to help male shoppers buy bras that fit their wives or girlfriends. Wendy Rameckers, who works at the Piet Zwart Institute for Retail and Design in Rotterdam, has made a wall consisting of rows of silicon breasts in all sizes. She believes that by look and touch, male shoppers can work out the right size.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate a picture of this breast wall. But why stop at a wall? Why not display differently proportioned mannequins to help men find the right size?

Boy With 12 Fingers (and 13 Toes) — The photos of his hands and feet look like they were photoshopped to add an extra digit (kind of like this ad), but they weren't. Devender Harne was born with twelve fingers and thirteen toes. That seems like it would be pretty useful. It certainly helps him type faster. It may also earn him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. (via J-Walk)

How Smart Is Your Right Foot? — Below is an email that's going around. Maybe it's been circulating for years, but I received it for the first time today. It makes a claim that seems dubious at first. But, upon experimentation, appears to be true. At least, it's true for me. There must be a scientific explanation for this phenomenon. The question is: does it hold true for everyone? And is it possible to counteract this reflex through force of will?

This is so funny that it will boggle your mind. And you will keep trying it at least 50 more times to see if you can outsmart your foot. But you can't!!!
1. While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles with it.
2. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction!!!
I told you so... And there is nothing you can do about it.

Soylent Green Collagen — If you live in the UK and you've ever had collagen injections for lip or wrinkle treatments, do you have any idea where that collagen has come from? According to this Guardian special report, it could come from skin harvested from the corpses of executed Chinese convicts. "The agents [for the collagen import firm] say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is 'traditional' and nothing to 'make such a big fuss about'." The special report goes on to state:

Peter Butler, a consultant plastic surgeon and government adviser, said there had been rumours that Chinese surgeons had performed hand transplants using hands from executed prisoners. One transplant centre was believed to be adjacent to an execution ground. "I can see the utility of it, as they have access and no ethical objection," he said. "The main concern would be infective risk."

I think there have been several horror movies made with premises similar to this.

Skinny Women — Here are two images going around that feature skeletally skinny women. The image of the woman on the beach is captioned "I think I've changed my mind about 'fat chicks'" and the image of the woman walking is captioned "Implants last forever." They could be real, but given how easy it is to fake images like this (see Too Skinny), I suspect they're photoshopped.

Real-Life Ken and Barbie Dolls — Steve Erhardt boasts that he's had over 30 plastic surgery operations, at a cost of over $250,000. These include pec, bicep, and butt implants. The results look a little creepy, but he claims to be happy with his new look, even though he really does look plastic. Another real-life Ken doll is Miles Kendall, who has spent about the same amount of money to transform his appearance. In terms of real-life Barbie dolls, there's Cindy Jackson, who describes herself as a "bombshell who wasn't born that way." Of course, Michael Jackson easily retains the title of King of Awful Plastic Surgery. (via J-Walk)