Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

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.

Dog Gives Birth to Green Puppy — A golden retriever has given birth to a green puppy, appropriately named Wasabi. Local 6 News reports:

The dog is healthy and green, according to the report. Local 6 News showed video of the puppy rolling around with its normal-looking newborn brothers and sisters. Skeptics said the dog had to be dyed green but the owner said the puppy was born green. Veterinarians said it is possible for a newborn puppy's fur to be green because the placenta, which is green, rubs off at birth.

This reminds me of the guy whose sweat turned green. I'm inclined to think the dog case might be real, because if you're going to dye a puppy, why do such a bad job? Go all out and make him glow in the dark. The puppy in the pictures hardly looks green at all (though maybe that's just because of the poor quality of the video images). Of course, if their next move is to sell the puppy on eBay, then I might suspect a hoax.

Gene Guess — I received this polite request this morning:

Dear web master ,
Please review this website that is able to determine a persons sex just by four visual questions.
Name : Gene Guess .com
Link : http://www.geneguess.com
Thank you ,
Pras Til

So here goes: it worked for me, correctly guessing my gender. I suppose it was an interesting ten-second time waster. I don't know why it worked. Obviously it has a 50/50 chance of getting the answer right (unless you're a hermaphrodite, which might trip it up a bit). My theory is that the color choice question must be an important clue, since guys probably tend to pick darker colors than women.

Update: Based on everyone's comments, the gender guesses it makes appear to be totally random. The trick is apparently that it will be right half the time, thus half the people will think it works. And yet it did fool me into wasting time with it.

Fake Cavities — An Indiana dentist has been charged with diagnosing patients with cavities that didn't exist. This is the kind of thing that feeds the popular paranoia about dentists:

The attorney general's office said Dunlap diagnosed three patients with cavities, but the patients sought second opinions and were found to be cavity-free. State officials said Dunlap diagnosed a child with 10 cavities in June, but another dentist found that the child did not have any cavities. A similar complaint was filed by a patient in May 2004, said Staci Schneider, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's office.

Personally, I've never had a cavity. But one time a dental assistant cleaning my teeth told me I had three or four cavities. Luckily the dentist who checked her work recognized that the 'cavities' were just grooves in my teeth.

Japanese Urban Legends — The blog of Mari Kanazawa has an interesting post about Japanese urban legends. Here are some of the highlights:

Turbo Gramma: When you drive on the highway at a blistering speed gramma knocks on the car window. If you see her, you will have a car accident. Someone made a turbo gramma game.

Touch the Red G-String: The delivery company trade mark of Sagawa is "Hikyaku", a traditional Japanese postman. Hikyaku wore a traditional red Japanese g-string Fundoshi! The legend was 'if you touch a red g-string on a sagawa truck, you will have good fortune, if you could touch it on a moving truck, the fortune would be bigger, and faster was better.' As far as I checked this story on the internet, many people wrote that they had tried touching it. I heard sagawa had to change their trade mark red g-string to red pants. ha ha ha

The Skylark Bellybutton: Skylark is a chain restaurant that we can find anywhere in Japan. The trade mark of the restaurant is a bird that has a bellybutton. The legend is if you can find one without a bellybutton, you can eat food free in the restaurant.

Hanako san in Toilet: There were many variation of the story but the basic one is very simple. It happens in a toilet at school: You knock three times on the toilet door, and say "Hanako san?" and you can hear someone reply "ha----i" quietly somewhere from empty toilet room. Because of this Hanako san boom, many kids could not go to toilet alone in those days. This Hanako san story was arranged and made into 4 movies.

Hippo With Tortoise — This is a slightly old story, but very heartwarming. A baby hippo in Nairobi that survived the tsunami has apparently adopted a tortoise as its surrogate mother:

"It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother'," ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP. "After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together," the ecologist added.

As far as I can tell, this story is completely true. But the real reason I'm posting about it is because I think it might provide me with a great title for my next book: Hippo Eats Tortoise. Kinda catchy, don't you think?

Upside-Down Christmas Trees — Target.com is was selling an upside-down Christmas tree for $499.99. (Thanks to Travis for the link--which has now gone dead, therefore I removed it) I'm not religious, but my first thought when seeing it was that it would be a perfect holiday decoration for a family of Satanists, to accompany their upside-down crosses and crucified Santa. I know it's not a joke, or some mistake on Target's part, because Hammacher Schlemmer is selling the same thing for $100 more. I understand these things are supposed to be space-savers, but why not save space by buying a smaller tree? I guess I just don't see the point, or appeal, of an upside-down tree. And why are they so ridiculously expensive?

Amazon Mechanical Turk — Amazon.com has unveiled a new web service called Amazon Mechanical Turk. I'm making note of it here because they've named it after a famous hoax: the Great Chess Automaton (aka the Mechanical Turk) of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Mechanical Turk, which wowed audiences during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was supposedly a mechanical device that could play chess against human players (and win!). In reality, there was a man hidden inside the device who was doing the chess playing. Amazon's service similarly uses real humans to do tasks for computers. They describe it as Artificial Artificial Intelligence. Their site states: Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. The kind of tasks they have in mind are things such as identifying objects in pictures (simple for a human; very hard for a computer). One problem I can see with their service is that people have the tendency to lie, cheat, and make mistakes. So will they need to have a human to check the work of the other humans? In the meantime, it seems like a dream job for someone like Caias, who will do anything for money.

Road Rage Video — Someone emailed me a videoclip titled "Road Rage". It shows an old woman slowly crossing a road, as a guy in a sports car lays on the horn, trying to get her to hurry up. I won't ruin the ending, but it's pretty amusing. However, the video (in the version I received) appears to be an unscripted scene accidentally caught on video by an amateur. There's no identifying information to suggest otherwise. But since I was curious about whether the scene really was unstaged, I managed to find it on Google Video. Their version was a few seconds longer, preserving the ending in which it's revealed to be an ad for IKEA. So apparently the scene was staged. It's still funny. But, I have no clue how the scene is supposed to inspire anyone to shop at IKEA.

Altmann Tube-O-Lator Lacquer — Altmann tube-o-lator lacquer is a coating-compound that you can rub on semiconductor chips found in devices such as CD-players, DVD-players, Preamplifiers, or Power-Amplifiers. And somehow this coating will change the way those chips process sound. Whereas before the sound was cold and harsh, after rubbing a bit of tube-o-lator lacquer on, the sound is warm and rich. The tube-o-lator website states:

The ALTMANN “TUBE-O-LATOR" lacquer is applied only on the top surface of plastic semiconductor packages of AD-converter-chips, DA-converter-chips, OP-amps and discrete transistors. After application, the overtone spectrum of these active devices changes immediately and permanently. The new sonic signature will be natural, full and tube-like. The ALTMANN “TUBE-O-LATOR" lacquer electromechanically balances the resonance-spectrum of the plastic chip package and semiconductor itself in such a way, that a natural sounding overtone- spectrum of the treated active device will be generated.

Why would rubbing a bit of lacquer on top of a semiconductor chip have any effect on the sound quality? The tube-o-lator people are disarmingly honest. They have no idea:

We are not able to provide an accurate description why the "Tube-o-lator" stuff actually works. Maybe some of you guys out there will solve this mystery and tell us.

Not being an audio engineer, I don't feel qualified to state definitively that this stuff couldn't work. But I can't imagine why it would work. Anyway, it's no longer for sale (demand must have been too high), so it's not possible to get any of this to test it out.

Who Buried Paul McCartney? — A Dutch TV station, omroep.nl (I think it's a TV station), has an interesting documentary online about the Paul Is Dead hoax. The documentary is in English, but with Dutch subtitles. I had to select the Real Player option to get the video to play.

The documentary contains interviews with many of the key players in the events of 1969, including Russ Gibb (the Detroit DJ whose broadcast about the Paul is dead rumor brought it to the attention of a national audience), Tom Zarski (the kid who called Russ Gibb and told him to play Revolution 9 backwards), and Fred LaBour (the student journalist whose article first presented many of the clues to readers... LaBour is dressed as a cowboy in his interview because he's now a member of a western music group called Riders in the Sky). At the end of the documentary Russ Gibb claims to know a piece of information about the origin of the rumor that he's not yet willing to share with the public. Very mysterious. One can only speculate about whether he really does know something, or if he's full of it.

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)

Blacklight Power and Hydrinos — An article in the Guardian about Dr. Randall Mills, founder of Blacklight Power, has been generating a lot of debate in the blogosphere. For instance, there's discussion of the article over on Slashdot, and a link to it also got posted in the hoax forum. I wanted to add a few comments here because, although many people might be hearing about Mills for the first time (thanks to the Guardian article), the guy has actually been lurking around since the early 1990s, claiming to have discovered a limitless source of cheap energy. (I recognized Mills because he's discussed in Robert Park's book Voodoo Science, published in 2000.)

Mills's theories originally developed out of his interest in cold fusion, though he insists he's not proposing a rejiggered form of cold fusion. Instead, what Mills claims to have discovered is a way to get a hydrogen atom to move to an energy level below the ground state. The ground state is the lowest energy level a hydrogen atom can sink to (according to modern physics). But Mills is saying it can sink even lower (i.e. the electron can move even closer to the proton). When a hydrogen atom sinks to this sub-ground level, it supposedly emits an enormous amount of energy and transforms into what Mills calls a "hydrino". If Mills is right, pretty much all of modern physics is wrong. Which is why Mills probably isn't right.

Of course, Mills could be a genius whose theories are going to completely revolutionize modern science (and modern industry). That's what his supporters claim. But that's what the supporters of ALL free-energy schemers claim. The fact is that for almost fifteen years Mills has been promising that practical applications of his hydrino technology are just around the corner. But nothing ever materializes. And meanwhile he keeps luring in new investors with his wild promises of limitless energy. So it seems to me that Mills and his hydrinos match the familiar free-energy pattern of big promises, but no results.

Spooky Images — Edna Barrie sent me this series of images that's circulating around. It's accompanied by the caption:

If You Don't Send This to at Least ten People in the Next 2 Hours You will Forever have Bad Luck.....If You do...Something Good Will Happen to you in the Near Future!!!! Good Luck.

What I can't understand is why over-exposed and double-exposed images would cause anyone bad luck. But as it is, I'm slated for permanent bad luck because I waited over two hours to post these on the site.

Mosquito Anti-Teenager Device — The Sunday Mirror ran an article about a device, called the Mosquito, that promises to allow shopkeepers to get rid of the crowds of surly youths who like to congregate outside their shops. The article states:

The machine, which is hidden within the lights of corner shops, uses ear-splitting ultrasonic soundwaves. It is being hailed as the answer to clear away underage drinkers and vandals from the doorways of late-opening stores. The 9in-high device - called the Mosquito - has a range of 20 to 30 metres and emits a piercing sound only clearly audible to under-20s. The sound is said to be "extremely unpleasant", but not harmful.

The website of Compound Security Systems, maker of the Mosquito, further explains:

Mosquito is essentially a sounder unit that emits a very high (ultra-sonic) tone that is completely harmless even with long term use... Research has shown that the majority of people over the age of 25, have lost the ability to hear at this frequency range... The longer someone is exposed to the sound, the more annoying it becomes. Field trials have shown that teenagers are acutely aware of the Mosquito and usually move away from the area within just a couple of minutes. The field trails also suggest that after several uses, the groups of children / teenagers tend not to loiter in the areas covered by the Mosquito, even when it is not turned on.

I'm not sure about the science here, but it does seem plausible to me that younger people would be able to hear high-pitched sounds more easily than older people. If this does work, I would definitely consider installing it to annoy my college-age neighbors who enjoy playing basketball in their backyard at midnight. (Thanks to Eric for the link.)

Sea Serpents Are Really Whale Penises — It's long been argued that when people report seeing sea serpents, they might actually be seeing floating logs, strange waves, or shadows on the water, and mistaking these things for sea serpents. Now Dr. Charles Paxton has come up with an interesting extension of this theory. He argues that people might also be misidentifying whale penises as sea serpents. He presents this theory in the current issue of the Archives of Natural History. As an example he uses the case of an eighteenth-century missionary named Hans Egede who reported a sighting of a sea serpent, and drew a picture of the creature. Paxton demonstrates that Egede's picture closely resembles what a whale's aroused penis rising from the water might look like. The abstract of Paxton's paper is as follows:

A re-evaluation of the “most dreadful monster” originally described by the “Apostle of Greenland” Hans Egede in 1741 suggests that the missionary’s son Poul probably saw an unfamiliar cetacean. The species seen was likely to have been a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), a North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) or one of the last remaining Atlantic grey whales (Eschrichtius robustus) either without flukes or possibly a male in a state of arousal.

So if Egede mistook a whale penis for a sea serpent, it's logical to assume others might also have done so. This theory has the ring of truth to it.

Patent The A and Patented Storylines — The Ecchi Patent Company claims to hold a patent on the letter A:

The rights lie with us for all forms of the letter A, including, but not limited to, uppercase, lowercase, accented, Cyrillic, put in a little circle (e-mail users please note), in code, and in any form we may not have thought of already.

Supposedly you need to obtain a license from them in order to use the letter A in any form: "we will soon begin prosecuting people who fail to purchase a license and continue to use the letter A." Of course, this is a joke. Unless you invented the letter A, you wouldn't be able to patent it. The creator of 'patent the A' admits it's a joke on another site he's created.

But in a similar case, Andrew Knight has filed an application to patent a fictional storyline (he says it's the first time anyone has ever sought to patent a storyline), and he doesn't seem to be joking about this. Here's the highly original story Knight seeks to patent:

The fictitious story, which Knight dubs “The Zombie Stare,” tells of an ambitious high school senior, consumed by anticipation of college admission, who prays one night to remain unconscious until receiving his MIT admissions letter. He consciously awakes 30 years later when he finally receives the letter, lost in the mail for so many years, and discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived an apparently normal life. He desperately seeks to regain 30 years’ worth of memories lost as an unconscious philosophical zombie.

Seems to have shades of Rip Van Winkle, to me. Anyway, I truly hope Knight doesn't succeed in his effort (if he is actually serious about it), since if authors are able to patent storylines, it would seem to me to spell the end of literature. Plus, it's often said that there are only three basic storylines: man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. self. So no story is truly original, and therefore shouldn't qualify for a patent.

Grand Canyon Skywalk — My wife emailed me this image, wondering if it was real. Yes, it's real. I think it's been circulating around for a while. It's one of those once-in-a-blue-moon kind of emails in which all the information is actually correct:

New Grand Canyon Sky walk
* Scheduled to open Jan. 1, 2006 Hualapai Indian Reservation
* Juts about 70 feet into the canyon, 4000 ft above the Colorado River
* Will accommodate 120 people comfortably
* Built with more than a million pounds of steel beams, and includes dampeners that minimize the structure's vibration.
* Designed to hold 72 million pounds, withstand an 8.0 magnitude earthquake 50 miles away, and withstand winds in excess of 100 mph
* The walkway has a glass bottom and sides...four inches thick

A hi-res version of the image (which is a drawing, not a photograph) can be found at destinationgrandcanyon.com. I'm not sure I could go on this skywalk. I don't consider myself afraid of heights, but the last time I was at the Grand Canyon I had a lot of trouble getting too close to the edge without feeling sick to my stomach.

Strunk & White: The Opera — Most people, I assume, are aware of Strunk & White's Elements of Style. It's hard to get through high school without being exposed to it. Now, at long last, that classic grammar and style guide has been put to music. Composer Nico Muhly created an operatic song cycle based on the book. He calls it "The Elements of Style: Nine Songs," and it was performed last month at the New York Public Library. When I first heard about this I thought it was some kind of early April Fool's Day joke. But no. It's quite real. The songs have titles such as "Be Obscure Clearly!", "Overly Over," and "Hyphens." A Newsweek reviewer who attended the event wrote that:

Unfortunately, the operatic style of the piece rendered the lyrics all but unintelligible to this listener—in ironic contrast to the simplifying ethos of "Elements"—though that may be more the fault of the acoustics of the library venue, which was, after all, designed for silence.

Maybe Muhly can make a name for himself by putting all kinds of different reference works to music. What about Oxford English Dictionary: The Musical, or Love Songs Inspired by Roget's Thesaurus?

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?