Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Hooker-vertising — Yahoo News! reports on a hoax website, http://www.instoresnow.nl, created by a Dutch design student, Raoul Balai. It pretends to be an ad agency that offers advertising space on the bodies of prostitutes. It also offers to place ads on zoo animals. Big Gary points out that this is basically a variation on the old 'advertise on my forehead... or other body part' stunt. (Imagine brothel patrons or zoo goers having to wear body-ad blockers.) Yahoo News! reports: I've been trying to check out Balai's site, but it won't load. The increased traffic from being mentioned on Yahoo News! must be the reason.

Bolibao - The Breast-Plump Pill — Chinese women are reportedly flocking to buy Bolibao ('Stay Fit' in English), a pill that, according to its manufacturer, can transfer body fat from a woman's hips to her breasts. Therefore it supposedly slims your hips and boosts your bra size at the same time. It's being heavily marketed on Chinese TV despite the fact that a) it doesn't work, and b) it causes a variety of negative side effects. The brazenness of the scam is pretty remarkable. The Shanghai Daily reports: The organization Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia further reports that: You can see an ad (in Chinese) for this stuff here.

Concrete Soccer Ball Prank — I probably shouldn't be amused by this. After all, it could cause someone to really damage their toes:

The Cumato (Cucumber-Tomato) — The Alvin Sun-Advertiser reports on a rare hybrid found by a local gardener — a tomato-cucumber. They're calling it a 'Cumato': Unfortunately the photo of Rodriguez holding the cumato is pretty bad. You can't see any details of the rare vegetable. I also want to know if he's cut it open. What's inside of it? Is it simply a tomato, or is it a combination of both? For now I'm skeptical of this. (Thanks to 't' for the link)

Breast Ironing — When I posted last week about the surgical procedure of hymen repair (and how it's used to fake the appearance of virginity) some people commented that the practice was so widely known that it scarcely warranted inclusion on the site. These same people will doubtless also be familiar with the Cameroon practice of 'breast ironing', but it's new to me, so I'm guessing it'll be new to some other people as well.

According to the BBC, breast ironing: It sounds extremely unpleasant, but the BBC notes that there hasn't been any medical research into the medical effects of it (though doctors warn that it could cause serious damage), so I wonder if it actually prevents tissue growth. And if so, is it only a temporary effect or permanent? I suppose that if you damage the tissue enough it will stunt growth, but I would think that heavy exercise would have a greater effect and be a lot healthier (thin, athletic girls such as ballet dancers and competitive swimmers are known to start puberty later).

Bicycle-Eating Tree — 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)

Shark Head — Museum of Hoaxers helped make last week's Real-or-Not Challenge at Divester.com it's most popular yet. So we're now getting a special heads-up (pun intended) each time they post a new Real-or-Not challenge. Their latest photo shows a shark in all its "bug-eyed, needle-tooth glory." I would vote real, but that's just my personal, non-expert opinion. Maybe it's a trick. I'll post the answer here (not in a new post) when it's revealed.

Update: It's real. This is a photo of a crocodile shark. It's a small shark with large eyes for hunting in deep waters.

Related Post: Shark Photos

Email Warns of Inflammatory Breast Cancer — I warn in Hippo Eats Dwarf that "Unsolicited e-mail is not a reliable source of information—about anything" (Reality Rule 7.4). This is especially true of all those random health-related claims that circulate via email warning of flesh-eating bananas, poisonous perfume, toxic tampons, etc. So it's refreshing to find an example of a health-related email warning that's actually true.

On May 7, Seattle's KOMO 4 News ran a segment about Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC), a deadly form of cancer that most women are totally unaware of. IBC doesn't present with typical symptoms (there's no lump), and it can't readily be detected with a mammogram. Instead women and doctors alike often mistake IBC's symptoms for rashes or insect bites.

The KOMO news segment soon inspired an email warning to start circulating. One version of the email, as reported on urbanlegends.about.com, reads: Within less than two months, this email had spread far and wide. So far that KOMO now reports that: It's cool that an email warning is actually serving a useful function, for once. But I think the advice that most unsolicited information received via email is garbage should still stand.

Interviewer Who Can’t Stop Laughing — A (foreign language) video clip is going around that shows a talk-show host interviewing a man and a woman. When the man starts speaking, the interviewer cracks up. The more the man speaks, the more the interviewer laughs. It's a funny video, because the guy's laughter is highly contagious. But was this a real interview? No. The clip comes from a Belgian comedy TV series called In De Gloria. Apparently the faux interview is about medical mishaps. The woman is paralyzed because of a surgical error, and the man's voice was altered by a throat operation that went bad.

eon8 — A couple of people have asked me if I know anything about eon8.com, a mysterious website that features a clock counting down to July 1 (tomorrow). Unfortunately I don't know anything about it. Though I guess we'll all find out what it is tomorrow, unless we just get another cryptic clue once the clock reaches 0.

According to Wikipedia, the leading theories are that it's a) an alternate reality game, b) some kind of distribution system for computer viruses (unlikely, I think), or c) a viral marketing scheme (perhaps a viral created by EON Productions to promote their next film, Casino Royale).

I can't think of anything else 'eon 8' would refer to. The poet WB Yeats developed an elaborate system of occult theory which held that history progresses through various spiritual eons each of which has their own special character. But I'm highly doubtful that the eon8 website is a reference to Yeatsian theosophy.

The domain registration info is also a dead end. It was registered via Domains by Proxy back in December 2005.

My hunch is that it probably will turn out to be option c: a viral marketing scheme.

Update: The eon8 site is now loading very slowly, if at all.

Update 2: You can check out an investigation of eon8 at http://eon8theinvestigation.ytmnd.com/.

Update 3: With the countdown completed, the secret behind eon8 has been revealed. It was a social experiment created by a 23-year-old web designer named Mike from Florida. He wanted to find out "the reactions of the internet public to lack of information." He discovered that a lot of people thought it might be a terrorist site (because of the ominous map it displayed with red dots over major population centers). Others, as I noted above, speculated it might be some kind of viral marketing scheme. Mike says that he's disappointed so many people assumed the site had evil intentions, but that reaction doesn't seem very illogical to me. After all, if you encounter someone that is obviously hiding something, why would you assume their intentions are benign? Also, looking at it from the perspective of social psychology, the site violated the norm of openness that exists on the internet. This would explain why it generated a hostile reaction from some. Groups always try to punish those who violate their norms.

Religious Devotees Worship Phony Phallic Symbol — 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: 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.

Nostradamus Predicts World Cup Victory — Via David Emery's Urban Legends blog I read about a Nostradamus prophecy now doing the email rounds which predicts a World Cup victory for Spain (never mind that Spain is no longer in the running):

At the end of the sixth month of 2006,
The King of Spain will cross the Pyrenees with his army.
The legions of Beelzebub await the battle on the central European plains.
Destruction and defeat will fall on the evil-doers.
The Holy Grail will be returned to Spain.

Nostradamus wrote no such thing. And as David points out, the World Cup final is in July, not June. But more importantly, when I was in Vegas over the weekend I placed a $20 bet on England to win, so I'm glad this prophecy has already proven false. Maybe what the prophecy really means is that The Da Vinci Code movie will open in Spanish theatres in June. (Can this be true?)

Of course, Nostradamus is famous for his sports-related prophecies. His most famous quatrain foretold the death of Henry II during a jousting contest (if you believe his supporters):

The young lion will overcome the old one,
On the field of battle in single combat:
He will burst his eyes in a cage of gold,
Two fleets one, then to die, a cruel death.

It sounds like gibberish to me. But then, all of Nostradamus's quatrains sound like gibberish to me.

Harassment Via Fart Machine — I've had obnoxious, noisy neighbors who have made me fantasize about using all kinds of noise-making devices in retaliation. (Instead I sent a letter to their landlord, and a month later they were gone.) But this guy, Brian Pemberton, took the harassment of his neighbor to an entirely new level: It doesn't sound like his neighbor ever did anything to inspire this behavior from him. He simply took an irrational dislike to her. He was sentenced to 20 weeks in prison, which he has successfully appealed. He's also promised to move. I would hate to be his new neighbor.

Canned Art — Kathy forwarded me these pictures of sculptures made entirely from cans. She notes that: "It says 'stacked can art' but I can't see how some of these are not glued together. How could they stand up that well, unless they got glued together?"

I agree. There's no way glue hasn't been used in some of these sculptures. Particularly the one of the butterfly, in which a few of the cans appear to be totally unsupported. The sculptures were created for the Canstruction Contest, which is a contest sponsored by the Society for Design Administration for the Design and Construction Industry. According to the contest blurb: So they say that the sculptures are made entirely out of canned foods, but they don't claim that no glue was used. Therefore I'm assuming that glue is permissible. Many more examples of Canned Art can be viewed at the Canstruction Slideshow.

Watching Eyes Make Us Honest — An experiment described in a recent issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals a simple way to make people behave more honestly: display a picture of watching eyes. Melissa Bateson, a biologist at Newcastle University, conducted the experiment on her colleagues, without their knowledge, using the communal coffee pot in the departmental lounge as the set-up. She found that when she placed a picture of a pair of beady eyes above the coffee pot, contributions to the 'honesty box' (the box in which people are supposed to deposit money to pay for the coffee they've drunk) were three times higher than when she displayed a picture of flowers. Bateson explains that: In other words, we behave better if we think we're being watched, even if we're only being watched by fake eyes. It could be named the 'Big Brother Is Watching You' effect.

Hymen Repair and Fake Virginity Certificates — In Hippo Eats Dwarf I define 'Secondary Virginity' as: "Virginity regained by abstaining from sex for a time." But apparently many Muslim women in Europe are using other means of regaining their virginity. The Associated Press reports: Hymen repair struck me as a rather peculiar operation, and I wondered if it was real or just some kind of medical scam. But some quick research reveals that it is a real procedure, according to Hanne Blank, author of Virgin: The Untouched History: However, as the Wikipedia entry about Hymens points out, the condition of a hymen is a very poor indicator of a woman's sexual history:

Nigeria Warns of British Conmen — Nigerian travellers have been warned by their government to watch out for conmen while in Britain: 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).

Shark Photos — Divester.com offers a series of images of sharks and challenges their readers to guess whether they're real or fake. About half of the images have been posted here before, but that still leaves half that should be new. Here are a few of the ones I hadn't seen before.



They are, from left to right: fake, fake, and probably fake real. The diver attacked by a shark is from a Weekly World News cover. The girl swimming with sharks is an image created by Australian photographer Mike Berceanu (it's a composite of a number of different images), and the one of the shark approaching a kayaker just looks too good to be true (though there's no firm evidence that it is fake), but it's real. It appeared in the September 2005 edition of Africa Geographic.

Criss Angel Pulls Woman In Half — On YouTube there's a video of magician Criss Angel taking the old "sawing a woman in half" trick a step further. He actually pulls a woman in half, whereupon her upper half crawls away in horror while her legs remain behind wriggling. I, like many other people, have been trying to figure out how he does this trick. All I can conclude is that it's achieved by clever editing of the camera footage. (Which, if true, would make it less a magic trick than a special effect, but entertaining nonetheless.) My reasoning is that the (half of a) woman who crawls away at the end is probably not fake. She's likely a woman who, in real life, has no legs. But this cannot be the same woman who initially walks to the table and lies down on it. (No, I don't think she was using robotic legs, or anything like that.) They are two different women. Which means that at some point the camera must have been turned off, and the one woman replaced the other on the table. This also suggests that everyone in the crowd were actors. That's my theory. But I'm actually hoping it's wrong, because it would be cool if he could have done this without turning the camera off at some point. (Thanks to Captain DaFt for the link.) (And I could have sworn I once posted about another Criss Angel trick in which he crawled through a glass window pane, but for the life of me I can't find the post about this.)

Update: Archibold pointed out that Snopes has a page about this video in which they point out that Ricky Jay has written about a similar early version of this trick in Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women. Sure enough, he has. Participating in this early version of the trick was Johnny Eck, a legless & thighless man who starred in the movie Freaks. So I was right about the woman at the end of the video actually being a legless woman. But this leaves the question: was the woman standing in the crowd also the same legless woman? If so, that's amazing. If not, then I still have no idea how a switch could have been made without the camera being shut off. But I've now got to assume that it's a real trick and no camera tricks were employed.

Hope Against Hope — A new band called Hope Against Hope managed to cultivate an enthusiastic online fanbase, and leveraged this popularity into an invitation from Alan McGee (a music industry exec famous for discovering Oasis) to play at the trendy Death Disco club.
What neither Hope Against Hope's fans nor Alan McGee knew was that the band was fake. It didn't exist. So how did they all get fooled? Simple. Because although the band wasn't real, it did have a myspace profile. The Independent reports on the hoax: The Guardian also reports on the hoax, focusing on how the old practice of artificially creating "buzz" has now extended into cyberspace. (Well, people have been using the web to generate publicity for as long as it's been around, so it's really nothing new.) What I've concluded from this Hope Against Hope hoax is that Hippo Eats Dwarf obviously needs a myspace profile. Or better yet, I should create a profile for Hilda, the hippo who swallowed the dwarf.