Hoax Museum Blog: Places

Quick Links: Man Bites Panda, etc. — Man Bites Panda
A drunken tourist climbed in with Gu Gu the panda at Beijing zoo. When the startled panda bit him, he bit it back.
"I bit the panda on its back but its fur was too thick," Mr Zhang recalled.
He went on: "No one ever said they would bite people. I just wanted to touch it."

Jerusalem - There's No Such City!
According to a mistranslated sightseeing brochure, at least. The pamphlet, translated from Hebrew, should have read "Jerusalem - there's no city like it!".

Dog With Knicker Obsession Gets Surgery
Deefer, a Bull Mastiff has eaten at least ten pairs of knickers over the last year. Embarrassing surgery was required recently when the last two pairs became lodged in Deefer's intestine, costing his owners more than £1,000.

Sudanese Man is Forced to 'Marry' Goat
When Mr Tombe was caught having sex with his neighbour's goat, he was taken to a council of elders, who ordered him to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars, and gave him the goat. The neighbour is quoted as saying "They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife."

(Thanks, Accipiter.)
Posted: Fri Sep 22, 2006.   Comments (17)

New York Puppet Library — image When I came across this page descriping puppet lending libraries—one in Boston and another one in New York— I thought it had to be a joke. Especially given the New York puppet library's location: inside a memorial arch. But apparently these are real. A google search brings up quite a few articles about the New York puppet library, including this one from Time Out New York Kids:
A different kind of lending library makes its home in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza Arch. A small flock of birds occupies the fourth-floor landing inside the Grand Army Plaza Arch. One flight below, a grinning cat keeps watch over the spiral staircase. Walk down, and you'll see a swarm of insects and four sweet-faced ponies. There are usually eight ponies, but four are out on loan. Welcome to the New York Puppet Library.
It's nice to know there's a place to go if you ever need to borrow a puppet.
Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2006.   Comments (5)

Top Thrill Dragster — The following pictures of an extreme roller-coaster have been circulating around via email. Yes, the roller-coaster is real. It's the Top Thrill Dragster at the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Ohio. On their website they've got some cool point-of-view videos of the ride in action.

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Appended to the pictures of the rollercoaster is this next one, with the caption: "And this last picture says it all..."

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I'd be willing to bet that isn't really a picture of someone who just rode the Top Thrill Dragster. It's probably just a random picture that someone tacked on.
Posted: Sun Aug 20, 2006.   Comments (16)

Teddy Tourism — Teddy Tour Berlin, run by Karsten Morschett and Thomas Vetsch, cater for those who can't themselves afford to tour the German capital, but want the next best thing.

Expatica.com reports that customers send their teddies and the payment details to the company, who then take the bears around sites such as Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Olympic Stadium, and remnants of the Berlin Wall.

At each site, the visiting teddy is photographed in a snappy pose.

"They aren't photo-montages either," Morschett stresses. "We actually take the teddies to these places and pose them as stylishly as possible, just as their owners would want us to do."

If you want to send your ursine friend to Berlin, it will set you back between $25 and $150 for the deluxe tour.

Morschett and Vetsch say they both admire teddies as "a kind of soft art form" and that they take pains to ensure that their travelogue photos are stylish and not simply vacation snapshots.

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006.   Comments (10)


Quick Links, KFCruelty.com, etc. —
Mr. KentuckyFriedCruelty.com Changes Name
Last year Christopher Garnett officially changed his name to "Kentucky fried cruelty.com". (It was a PETA publicity stunt.) Now he's had enough and is changing it back. Anyone feel like changing their name to "Museum of Hoaxes.com"? I'll give you a free book if you do. (Thanks, Beverley)

Thames Town, China
image The cobbled streets, Georgian houses, and Tudor-style pub might make you think you're in England. But you're really in Thames Town, a faux British village being constructed in China. I've heard of faux English towns in Korea also, but the Korean ones are used for English-language instruction.

Imitation French Fries
In response to a ban on fried food in school cafeterias, some Arizona schools are now serving "imitation fries." Or so claims the headline of the article. In reality, they're just fries that have been baked rather than fried. I don't think that really makes them imitation fries. Baked fries can taste pretty good, especially the curly ones seasoned with chili powder.

Religion-Related Fraud Worsens
Scams targeting churchgoers are on the rise. One passage from this article caught my eye: "Leaders of Greater Ministries International, based in Tampa, Fla., defrauded thousands of people of half a billion dollars by promising to double money on investments that ministry officials said were blessed by God." Instead of Sunday school, maybe churches should offer classes in critical thinking. Just an idea.
Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006.   Comments (19)

The Road of Non-Starting Cars — If you park your car on Percy Road in Gosport, don't expect to be able to start it again. Residents of this road claim that "unknown forces" are preventing their cars from starting. They have to push their cars a few yards up the road before they'll start:
Wayne Dobson, 38, first discovered the problem when he came home from work, parked up as usual and tried to use his remote immobiliser to lock his V-registered Land Rover Freelander, but got no response.
When he later tried to start the car, he found it was completely dead. However, when he pushed his car a few yards up the road, it started again without complaint. After talking to his neighbours, he discovered they had experienced exactly the same problem. Mr Dobson said: 'It's all a bit Mulder and Scully. It's just these few car lengths outside our houses, and it started only at the end of last week. None of us can think of anything that would cause it.'
To me the problem is so obvious. Inner earth dwellers must be directing an electromagnetic pulse beam at exactly that spot, thereby causing any electrical system, such as a car starter, to become inoperative. What else could it be? Well, maybe it's just coincidence that their cars haven't been starting. But that theory isn't nearly as interesting. (via Fortean Times)
Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006.   Comments (13)

Self-Watering Miracle Tree — image Lucille Pope's oak tree has sprung a leak. Water is pouring out of it at the rate of a tenth of a gallon every minute, and no one knows where the water is coming from.

It all started back in April when a little sap started oozing out of the tree. The sap progressed to a dark stain, that eventually turned into a steady trickle of water. Lucille Pope thinks it's some kind of miracle tree, and that the water has special healing properties. However, her son Lloyd says "I ain't with that superstitious stuff ... There's no crying Mary here." (Good for him.) However, the specialists from the local water board are baffled. It doesn't seem to be a leaking pipe since Mrs. Pope's water bill isn't going up. Hydrologist George Rice said:
"I've never seen anything like this before. If you wanted to dream something up I'd say that somehow water pressure underneath is forced through some kind of channel in the tree. But that's still very unlikely."
I can't imagine how this phenomenon could easily be faked, so I doubt it's a hoax. I'm going with the underground spring that somehow forced its way up through the tree theory.
Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006.   Comments (34)

Weird Scottish Myths — The Scotsman has published an article on a number of slightly bizarre (well, very bizarre) myths about Scotland, ranging from Jesus holidaying in the Hebrides to Jerusalem actually being Edinburgh. Mostly avoiding the Da Vinci Code furore, the newspaper has given each theory their own marks out of ten on the probability scale.

0/10 - This whole theory seems as thin as extra-thin, thin crust pizza, that has been cooked very thin. It is hard to believe that the ancient Scots were busy sailing around the world sharing religion and genes when back home everything seems so, well, primitive. Wouldn’t Scotland have been a very different place if we were indeed being subject to such a wealth of world culture?

(Thanks, Dave.)
Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006.   Comments (6)

Ocean Dome —
Status: Real place (fake beach)
A couple of people have sent me these pictures of an artificial dome-covered beach.... located a few yards away from a real beach! Yes, it's a real place. This is Ocean Dome, located outside of Myazaki in Japan. Its motto is "Paradise within a paradise." David Boyle, author of Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life (which is a pretty good book, by the way), has an article about it on his website. He speculates that it's possibly the most artificial place on earth. Here's a short clipping:
Ocean Dome is bigger than many ocean liners - over 1,000 feet long - and has space for 13,500 tons of salt water and 10,000 people, without the mild inconvenience of real salt water, real crabs, real seaweed or fish... It was pleasantly warm, but it felt faintly like a gymnasium - and they always remind me of exams. Also, the palm trees were too perfect to be real. The fruit behind the counter turned out to be plastic, and the backdrop was painted with small clouds and a deep blue sky as the Pacific view outside probably should have been... I wondered if it ever occurred to James Michener or Oscar Hammerstein, writing Tales of the South Pacific just after VJ Day, that their imaginary island would one day make it into a Japanese theme park.

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Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006.   Comments (10)

Feckenham’s Declaration of Independence —
Status: Hoax
image Earlier this spring, while digging up an oak tree, residents of Feckenham (a small British village) discovered an 800-year-old scroll written by King Henry III. The scroll stated that the village should remain independent forever. This prompted the villagers to declare their independence from Britain, set up border-patrol checkpoints around the town, and lower the taxes on beer. The Ottawa Citizen reports:
The scroll, of course, is a joke. The story started earlier this spring as a way to involve locals in a town festival, which wraps up tonight with a dance in the local hall. Villagers followed through with the tongue-in-cheek idea and created their own national flag, t-shirts, and moved to get rid of the government's infamously high alcohol tax. But now villagers feel the line between reality and fiction is starting to blur.
Not everyone realized it was a joke. One businessman reportedly contacted the village to inquire about the possibility of opening an import/export operation to take advantage of the town's tax status.
Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006.   Comments (4)

Book A Fake Vacation —
Status: Weird News
The Los Angeles Times reports about a Russian travel agency, Persey Tours, that sells fake vacations:
For $500, nobody will believe you weren't sunning yourself last week on Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That's you, arms outstretched like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado! Persey Tours was barely keeping the bill collectors at bay before it started offering fake vacations last year. Now it's selling 15 a month — providing ersatz ticket stubs, hotel receipts, photos with clients' images superimposed on famous landmarks, a few souvenirs for living room shelves. If the customer is an errant husband who wants his wife to believe he's on a fishing trip, Persey offers not just photos of him on the river, but a cellphone with a distant number, a lodge that if anyone calls will swear the husband is checked in but not available, and a few dead fish on ice.
So now who believes that I really did travel to Edinburgh in May for a Museum of Hoaxes get-together? 😉

The broader focus of the LA Times article is how awash in fakery Russian society is. You can get fake versions of almost anything in Russia: clothes, food, electronics, university degrees, art, legal documents, etc. One line in the article I thought was particularly ironic:
The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade has estimated that 50% of all consumer goods sold in Russia are fake; the counterfeit trade, Minister German O. Gref announced in January, has reached $4 billion to $6 billion a year — no one knows exactly, because the books are cooked.


Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006.   Comments (23)

Bicycle-Eating Tree —
Status: Real
image The bicycle-eating tree is probably familiar to most residents of Washington, since it's located on Vashon Island, Washington (and won a 1994 contest to select the most unusual places or events in the Washington-Oregon area), but it's new to me. Apparently someone, decades ago, left their bicycle leaning against the tree, and as the tree kept growing it enveloped the bike and now lifts it seven feet off the ground. I think it's amazing that a) the tree actually grew around the bike instead of pushing it over, and that b) in all that time no one ever moved the bike. The bicycle-eating tree has been featured in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and also inspired a children's book by Berkeley Breathed, Red Ranger Came Calling. Breathed used to live on Vashon Island. (via CaliforniaTeacherGuy)
Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006.   Comments (48)

Religious Devotees Worship Phony Phallic Symbol —
Status: Strange News
image Inside the Amarnath Cave, located in Indian-administered Kashmir, can be found the ice Shiva Linga, one of the holiest objects in the Hindu faith. Basically it's a large, naturally occurring, phallus-shaped ice stalagmite. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus make the pilgrimage to visit it each year, despite a high amount of terrorist activity in that area. (Wikipedia has an entry about it.) But this year the pilgrimage has been marred by allegations that the Shiva Linga has been faked. The BBC reports:
Governor SK Sinha - who is also the chairman of Amarnath Shrine Board - said on Thursday that he had asked a retired high court judge to investigate allegations that a man-made stalagmite was placed in the cave after the naturally occurring one failed to materialise. The BBC's Altaf Hussain in Srinagar says that this has been blamed on a shortage of snow combined with the wrong temperatures. Our correspondent says that a naturally-occurring ice stalagmite has now begun to appear, but it is far smaller than in recent years.
Now that the Shiva Linga has gone fake, I figure it's only a matter of time before it starts appearing on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006.   Comments (3)

Nigeria Warns of British Conmen —
Status: Strange News
Nigerian travellers have been warned by their government to watch out for conmen while in Britain:
Fraudsters in Britain might pour tomato juice or other substances on your dress and then offer to help remove it, robbing you in the process, the information ministry warned in its first-ever travel advisory obtained by Reuters on Thursday. The conmen, who are mainly white, but also include east Europeans and north Africans, might also pretend to pick up an object from under a potential victim's seat to distract his attention while he robs him, it added. "Nigerian travellers are hereby warned not to carry large amount of money on their body and ensure that their air tickets, passports, expensive wrist-watches as well as trinkets are securely hidden," the advisory said.
The advisory seems sensible enough, though given Nigeria's reputation for crime it seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. The Reuters article points out that, "Nigeria itself has seen a sharp rise in violent crime since President Olusegun Obasanjo was elected in 1999, ending 15 years of military rule. Africa's top oil producer, ranked by Berlin-based sleaze watchdog Transparency International as the world's seventh most corrupt country, is also famous for junk mail scams."

Big Gary (who forwarded me the article) wonders who are the other six most corrupt countries, if Nigeria is number seven. As best I can find out, the other six would be (starting with the most corrupt): Chad, Bangladesh, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Haiti, and Equatorial Guinea. This is from the 2005 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (on which Nigeria was actually ranked #6, not #7).
Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2006.   Comments (7)

Yellow Lines Become Wobbly —
Status: Strange phenomenon
image The residents of Aqueduct Street have an unusual problem. Their lines are going wobbly. Specifically, the double yellow lines on their road. When the city laid down the lines earlier this month, they were straight. But now they've begun to take off in random directions. At first some suspected the work of a prankster, but apparently the truth is much more sinister: The lines are doing this of their own accord!

This idea really appeals to me. Double yellow lines get fed up with being straight and decide to rebel. What we are seeing in Aqueduct Street might merely be the beginning. What if it became a worldwide epidemic of wandering lines? But the government, as usual, has decided to cover up the truth and is blaming the wobbly lines on the use of yellow marker tape. Says a Preston Council spokesman:
"We have had to use yellow marker tape for the double yellow lines, which will not damage the road surface when it's removed. This type of marker tape has been used in the past and we've never had any problems, but some of the tape on Aqueduct Street came loose towards the end of last week, which meant the yellow lines were no longer straight."
A likely story.
Posted: Tue Jun 20, 2006.   Comments (13)

Fake Happy Families Sell Homes —
Status: Strange, but true
California realtors have devised a new way to sell homes. They're hiring actors to play "happy families" during open houses:
Attractive film and stage actors are cast in the roles of cheerful-looking parents and their angelic children, recreating scenes of domestic bliss that they hope will impress prospective buyers...
With Hollywood just down the road, there is no shortage of photogenic and unemployed actors, for whom the alternatives are normally bit parts in television advertisements and waiting on tables. Centex recruited Jaason Simmons, 35, best known for his three-year stint as a lifeguard on Baywatch, to play the father of the fictitious family. Camille Chen, a television and film actress, is "mother" while two children from a local theatre company are the couple's offspring. While the "family" cooks, eats, chats, plays games and watches television, a stream of house-hunters passes through. The viewers are encouraged to treat the occupants as "real" people and quiz them on the items such as the oven or refrigerator, for which the actors are given fact sheets to mug up on beforehand. Normally, the "guests" will find themselves gatecrashing an uplifting family occasion, such as the baking of a birthday cake. "We do it as a free-flowing improvisation - set the parameters and make it like a play, with specific acts," said Mr Garfield.
My wife and I often go to open houses in our neighborhood, partially because we like seeing what other people have done with their homes and partially because we're thinking of moving. Just last week we went to one in which the homeowners were there with their kid. They seemed like nice people, but now I'm wondering if it was all fake. Maybe they were just actors.

My favorite part of the article is this line: "A second show day at the development, which features three to five-bedroom homes from $500,000 (£280,000) to $610,000, is planned for Saturday. The cast will be the same except for Miss Chen, who has a previous engagement and will be "changed out" for a new mum." This immediately brought to mind Lucy Clifford's short story "The New Mother", in which misbehaving kids learn that their poor suffering mother is going to be changed out for a new mother (a mechanical one with a rat's tail). So I'm thinking that parents who visit the Centex open houses can now warn their kids that if they misbehave they'll be sent to live with one of these fake happy families. That would scare me if I were a kid. (via J-Walk)

Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006.   Comments (9)

Inflatable Pub —
Status: Strange, but real
image Speaking of fake Irish bars, now it's possible to have an instant fake British pub, anywhere you like. It's advertised as "the Worlds first fully functioning Mobile Inflatable Pub." This comes from the same people who brought us the world's first inflatable church. Ideally it should come with a bartender who fakes a British accent.
Posted: Sun May 14, 2006.   Comments (3)

In Memory of Father Noise —
Status: Believed to be a hoax
Here's an interesting news report from Ireland:
It has emerged that a joke bronze plaque found on Dublin's O'Connell Bridge has been there for three years. The plaque claims to mark the spot where a Father Pat Noise drowned when his carriage plunged into the Liffey, in suspicious circumstances, in 1919. But Dublin City Council says the priest is a fictitious figure, and wants the mystery sculptor to come forward. The plaque is arousing great public interest, and flowers and candles have been left on the bridge in memory of "Father Noise".

The Irish Sunday Tribune (no link) has a few more details:
The plaque, which even contains a picture alleging to be that of the mysterious religious figure, claims to mark the spot on which Fr Noise died "under suspicious circumstances when his carriage plunged into the Liffey on August 10th, 1919." The plaque states that Fr Noise was an "adviser to Peader Clancey."
After being informed by the Sunday Tribune of the plaque's existence, council officials inspected it on Friday afternoon and hope to identify when and how it was placed into a hole on top of the wall on the bridge. The plaque is located on the Ha'penny Bridge side of O'Connell Bridge, near to the traffic lights on Bachelor's Walk.
The plaque claims to have been erected by an organisation called "the HSTI", although the heritage department of the city council said it had never heard of a group by this name.
"Council officials had a look at the plaque (on Friday) but they said they had never seen it before," said a spokeswoman. "It is certainly very unusual for this to happen."
The council said that it was possible the plaque was erected legitimately a number of years ago, although this would seem most unlikely given that nobody seems to have noticed it until last week.
The rough manner in which the plaque is inserted into the wall would also suggest that it was placed only recently. Although it appears expertly made, it is too small for the hole, which has several rough edges.
Council officials will now attempt to pinpoint the age of the plaque and the historical significance of 'Fr Pat Noise' before making a decision on whether or not to remove the memorial.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any pictures of this plaque.

[Update:] Here's a picture of the plaque, though it doesn't let you see it very well.
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Posted: Tue May 09, 2006.   Comments (11)

Did Idaho Get Its Name As A Result Of A Hoax? —
Status: Undetermined
Following a post about how California got its name, Boing Boing added an interesting reader comment alleging that Idaho got its name because of a hoax:

"When a name was being selected for new territory, eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing suggested 'Idaho,' which he claimed was a Native American term meaning 'gem of the mountains'. It was later revealed Willing had made up the name himself, and the original Idaho territory was re-named Colorado because of it. Eventually the controversy was forgotten, and modern-day Idaho was given the made-up name when the Idaho Territory was formally created in 1863."

I had never heard this before, so I did a little research. It turns out that Willing did indeed claim to have invented the name Idaho. But whether he did or not is uncertain, since his claim was first published fifteen years after the first appearance of the word. Plus, he was a bit of a self-promoter and not entirely trustworthy. I found the following discussion of the Idaho question in an article by Erl H. Ellis published in Western Folklore, Oct. 1951:
The first known use of this name was by or before a Congressional committee early in 1860, when the proposal to create a new territory of the Pikes Peak region was before the Congress. In the April 18, 1860 issue of the Rocky Mountain News, Mr. S.W. Beall wrote back to Denver and stated that this name Idaho seemed the most popular suggestion before the committee. On May 10 and 11, 1860, the Congressional Globe mentions the proposals for the Territory of Idaho, and noted that Idaho was an Indian name signifying "Gem of the Mountain." When the territory with Denver as its center was later created, the name Colorado was substituted at the last moment for Idaho. How this name came before the Congress very early in 1860 is unknown. If this was an Indian name known to the miners who flocked to the gold fields in 1859, no mention of the fact was ever made in the newspapers of those days. So perhaps the name was invented by one Dr. George M. Willing; at any rate he claimed to have done so. Willing came to Denver in 1859 from St. Louis and became a candidate for election as delegate to the Congress, despite the lack of any right of the gold miners to have a delegate in Washington. Even though Willing lost the election, he went on to Washington and posed as the properly elected delegate. He claimed that he there invented the name Idaho, it being suggested by the presence of a little girl, Ida. His relation of the matter was published by a friend of his, William O. Stoddard, in the New York Daily Tribune for December 11, 1875...

The Territory of Colorado was actually created February 28, 1861. That was the end of the official interest in the word for the Pikes Peak area. It was after these "Colorado" events that we find the word being used in what became the state of Idaho. In December, 1861, the territorial legislature of Washington created an Idaho County, and it later became a county of the state of Idaho. Joaquin Miller, the "poet of the Sierras," was responsible for several versions of how the word Idaho was first put into that form by him in the winter of 1861-1862. In one of these accounts Miller spells the name "E-dah-hoe" and says that it was an Indian word meaning "the light or diadem on the line of the mountain." A number of historians of the state of Idaho have accepted this story from Miller, but others have noted that the name was well known and used before Miller appeared upon the scene. The Territory of Idaho was created on March 3, 1863, again after the Congress nearly adopted another name, Montana.

Even if Idaho did get its name from a hoax, Des Moines can lay claim to a funnier name origin. The Peoria indians told the first white settlers that the tribe living in that area (their rivals) was named the Moingoana, which became the root of Des Moines. But it turns out that Moingoana was really the Peoria word for "shitfaces".
Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006.   Comments (11)

Giant Laser —
Status: Real
image Found on Flickr: a cool picture of a giant laser beaming out of the MMT Telescope, on top of Mt. Hopkins in Arizona. The guy who took it, Filip Pizlo, says it's not photoshopped, and I'm willing to believe him, if only because when I was a grad student at UC San Diego there was a green laser beam similar to this visible in the sky over La Jolla almost every night. I never figured out where it was coming from or what the purpose of it was. It couldn't have been coming from the MMT Telescope in Arizona because that would have been too far away.
Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2006.   Comments (18)

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