Hoax Museum Blog: Websites

Bimpco — Bimpco offers a variety of ingenious products that will help you to keep your cellphone bills under control. The site is really a front for Cricket Wireless, but it's amusing.
Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2004.   Comments (1)

Online Tanning Salon — Are you getting a little pale and pasty sitting inside all day staring at your computer screen? Then head over to the sunnysite periodically and catch a few rays. Warning: you may want to wear protective eyewear. (via Bifurcated Rivets)
Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2004.   Comments (0)

The Mini Cooper Autonomous Robot — image Colin Mayhew, an engineer at a British division of BMW, decided to convert a mini cooper r50 into an autonomous biped robot. The results are quite impressive. In particular, check out this video. The no-frills design of the page makes it seem quite believable. But sleuths on Slashdot have determined that it's a hoax. The url is registered to an ad agency working for BMW. (via Things Magazine)
Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2004.   Comments (80)

Coalition to Promote the Use of Child Soldiers — There are quite a few satirical hoaxes that I find myself comparing to Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country (by feeding them to rich people). The Arm the Homeless prank was one such satire. This is another. It's the Coalition to Promote the Use of Child Soldiers. Yeah, I'm assuming it's satire.
Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004.   Comments (1)


The X-Files of Music — image Did you know that David Duchovny released a record of trashy love songs with titles such as "Alien to Your Arms," "You Must Be From Venus," and "X-File of Love"? Or that Herman Melville wrote a novel called "Symmes' Hole" that was lost for decades but has been recently rediscovered and is now available as an audiobook read by David Byrne of the Talking Heads? I certainly didn't. So I was surprised to discover these rare CDs (and others) discussed at the Entropic Empire. Now I've decided that these rare CDs are all fake, but I only concluded that after spending fifteen fruitless minutes searching for that rediscovered Herman Melville book on Amazon.com. Why would someone make this stuff up, I kept thinking. The attention to detail is certainly impressive.
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004.   Comments (0)

Feline Bewilderment — image If your cat has been feeling a little down lately, then you may need to hire the services of Confuse a Cat, Ltd., the world leaders in feline bewilderment. One of their highly trained technicians will come to your house and proceed to bewilder your cat, thus restoring it to its former self.
Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2004.   Comments (4)

Kingdom Hospital — image Kingdom Hospital. It's the 'Hospital that brings out the best in you.' From its website you would think that it's a real hospital, until you start poking around it a bit. Then it gets creepy. It's a tie-in, of course, with ABC's Kingdom Hospital miniseries. But it's pretty well done. (submitted by Brian Flynn).
Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004.   Comments (3)

Brains for Zombies — image It looks like Amazon.com is branching out into a lucrative new market: brains for zombies. They're offering celebrity brains and tasty brains in addition to the more generic brains. In reality, the site is a spin-off of goats.com, the 'tasty yet morally ambiguous' webcomic. (Thanks to Charles Martin for the link).
Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2004.   Comments (2)

Decomposition Cam — image The folks over at SeeMeRot.com have engineered something rather unusual: a webcam set up inside a coffin so that you can see their friend's body decompose. At least, that's what they claim. The 'webcam image' appears simply to be an animated gif that cycles between a blurry and an in-focus image to simulate how a real webcam might behave. Plus, they have rather odd sponsors for a project of this kind... sponsors offering 'live sexy girl cams'. I suppose the logic is that once you get tired of watching the dead girl (they say it's a woman in the picture), you can head over and watch some live sexy girls. The site is registered to someone at 7985 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood. No suite number is given, so it's impossible to tell which business there registered it, but most of the stores in that area are in the 'adult entertainment' business. I suspect that SeeMeRot.com is a weird promotional gimmick dreamed up by someone selling porn. In other words, it's fake.
(By the way, the idea of a decomposition cam isn't unique to seemerot.com. Joey Skaggs included this concept in his FinalCurtain.com cemetery hoax. Skaggs's fantastical cemetery theme park was going to include a grave constructed by an artist named Joseph Sullivan that would show Sullivan's decomposing body on an above-ground monitor.)
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2004.   Comments (28)

Cannabis Window — image This UK website offers you the chance to buy cannabis online. No seeds. No hydroponics. Just cannabis itself, delivered to you by a special courier. Sounds like a stoner's dream. But if you actually try to place an order, it's all revealed to be a joke. (Thanks to Paul Farrington for the link).
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004.   Comments (2)

Shards O’ Glass — image Sitting here watching the Superbowl, and out of the blue a hoax website is featured in one of the ads: ShardsO'Glass.com. This company supposedly sells freeze pops embedded with shards of glass. It's a satire of how cigarette companies sell products that they also know are bad for people's health.
Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004.   Comments (8)

Eat Babies — baby Discover all kinds of recipes for cooking and eating babies at eatbabies.com. For instance, you might want to try baby soup or baby stir fry. The site is plastered with warnings announcing that it's all just a joke (I guess they must have got complaints), but I suppose it'll still attract criticism from people who think it might provide sick and twisted individuals with bad ideas. Personally, I think the site would have been funnier if it had provided recipes for eating the babies of poor people, thus playing off of Jonathan Swift's classic work, A Modest Proposal. (Thanks to Antonia for the link).
Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004.   Comments (5)

Caravaners Revolt — caravanBob and Denise are caravaners. In other words, they live in a caravan as they drive around the country. But they resent the way non-caravanners treat them. For instance, the way people in flashy sports cars sometimes make rude gestures as they speed by their caravan on the road. So Bob and Denise are organizing a campaign "to secure equality and respect for caravanners." They're hoping to mastermind a 'ring of aluminum' that will circle London on June 5th, created by thousands of caravanners going slow as they drive along the M25 that circles London. That's all well and good, but something smells fishy about Bob and Denise. They're just a little too offbeat and cutesy for their own good. Could they possibly be the creation of an advertising agency, along the lines of the recently seen Travelocity Gnome?
Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004.   Comments (0)

RYT Hospital — The RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center has been on the forefront of recent medical advances. They've developed a transgenic mouse with the cognitive abilities of a human. They've helped a man give birth. They've even developed nano-robots to deliver gene therapies and repair tissue. Pretty amazing stuff. And they've got a very slick website. Too bad none of it is real. (Thanks to Ross Harvey for the link).
Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2004.   Comments (24)

I See Jesus — Pareidolia is defined as the perception of meaningful images in random patterns. In other words, seeing things that aren't really there. For instance, people might see a face in a cloud. Or they might see the Virgin Mary in the window of a Boston hospital. When people start seeing religious images on the walls or windows of buildings, it almost always leads to good business for the business affected, as massive crowds flock there to see the image. So now there's a company calling itself ISeeJesus.com that will facilitate the appearance of religious images at your place of business via 'special prayer techniques.' How you take advantage of the crowds that will then flock to see the image is up to you.
Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004.   Comments (0)

Flatulent Technologies — Flatulent Technologies is a company that is committed to "extracting energy from everything that stinks or rots." Sounds like a great idea. The company's NYSE ticker symbol is even better: FART. Too bad a little disclaimer at the bottom of the company's webpage admits it's a parody.
Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (2)

Real Dog — Why own a living, breathing dog that you have to feed every day, when you can own a RealDog instead?
Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (2)

Haggis Hunt — Here's an interesting hoax website, courtesy of Anson Kennedy. It's haggishunt.com, which punctures the common misconception that a haggis is a sheep's stomach stuffed with meat and oatmeal. In reality (according to this site) a haggis is an extremely rare animal hunted by the Scottish. The site offers many educational haggis facts, such as that the sound the haggis is most sensitive to is plaid rubbing on underpants (I never knew!). And definitely check out the Haggis Cam.

Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (0)

Philanderers International — Here's another site that makes you wonder if it's real or fake: Philanderers.com. It's a service to help people who are married have extramarital affairs. My first thought was that it was a joke. But upon looking around it for a while, it appears legitimate. I wonder if any single people use this who want to have an affair with someone who's married? And here's an evil thought: if you ever try to cancel your membership, they could threaten to tell your spouse.
Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004.   Comments (114)

Taliban Reunited — Have a hankering to find out what your old terrorist chums are up to now that Afghanistan is occupied by the American military? Then check out Taliban Reunited, the site that lets terrorists get reacquainted with their former friends and acquaintances.
Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004.   Comments (0)

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