Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Moon Base Clavius — Moon Base Clavius is "an organization of amateurs and professionals devoted to the Apollo program and its manned exploration of the moon. Our special mission is to debunk the so-called conspiracy theories that state such a landing may never have occurred." Their site is "named after the Clavius Moon Base in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and visualized by Stanley Kubrick in the film of the same name." I've only just begun browsing around their site, but already it looks like it has a lot of good info on it.

Fan Death and Tongue Cutting — Fan Death is "the belief that if someone is sleeping in a sealed room (windows and doors are closed) with an electric fan on, they could die." The theory is that either hypothermia will get you, or the fan breeze will somehow form a vacuum around your mouth and suffocate you. Apparently many people in Korea believe this is true. Or at least, this is what Robin, the creator of fandeath.net, has concluded after living in Korea for five years. He writes:

When I first heard about fan death, I discussed it with my Korean friends and students. I was the foreign skeptic and they were the loyal natives. I was shocked at how powerful their belief was and at the lack of critical thinking about the issue. All you have to do is bring up the issue of fan death with a Korean and it would be difficult to get them to accept the fact that fan death might not be true. Especially when talking to a foreigner, they are more likely to defend their cultural belief than question it. So, unable to have a semi-neutral discussion, I turned to the internet. After checking the internet for more information about fan death, I became greatly frustrated. I could not find any detailed information about fan death. So, I decided to make this site to encourage others to tell their stories and share their knowledge about the issue.

Robin's site includes info about some other unusual Korean beliefs, such as tongue- cutting, which is the theory that if you cut the frenulum (the tissue linking the tongue to the floor of the mouth) "your tongue will be more flexible and be able to pronounce those difficult English sounds." Robin says that for this reason tongue surgery is quite popular in Korea.

Roommates, Roaches, and Armadillos — Here's an unusual urban legend that I haven't heard before. It involves a group of students at Texas A&M University who are sharing a house together. It's in the genre of 'roommate horror stories'. According to the story, one of the students is an entomology major and keeps a collection of giant Africanized cockroaches in a terrarium. But during a party the terrarium breaks and the roaches escape, only to start breeding like crazy in the house. To solve this roach problem the students set loose some baby armadillos (since armadillos eat roaches). But soon the armadillos start breeding, without making much of a dent in the roach population, until eventually the house is full of a lot of roaches and a lot of armadillos. At this point the roommates decide to get some shotguns and shoot all the roaches and armadillos, but only succeed in busting up the house. And to make a long story short, the armadillos eventually start tunneling beneath the house, creating a sink hole that causes the entire building to collapse and fall into the ground. So in other words, the animals win in the end. The students are left with a bill for $25,000 in damages, courtesy of the landlord.

The Balance Bar — From the Balance Bar site: The "Balance Bar" is a simple browser extension programmed to allow any user to editorialize any web page anywhere on the Internet. The "Balance Bar" will literally insert your comments/article/rant directly onto whatever web page you would like to expound on. The "Balance Bar" was developed because of the increasing need to "balance" the one-sided and isolated worldview that much of our media sources produce.

I can't decide if this is real or fake. I could see that it would be possible to program a browser to float comments on top of a page. However, the comments would only be visible to you (the browser user). I can't imagine it would be possible for a browser extension to insert comments onto a page so that the comments would be visible to other people (i.e. to actually alter a page that's stored on someone else's server). In which case, I don't quite understand the purpose of the extension. Since I use a Mac, I can't download the program to test what it actually does.

Atlantis Off The Coast of Cuba — Back in December I posted a list of some of the places where Atlantis has been found: off the coasts of Spain, Cyprus, and Tampa, Florida. Add Cuba to this list. Sonar images taken off the coast of Cuba show "massive stones in oddly symmetrical square and pyramid shapes in the deep-sea darkness." And as we all know, anything mysterious on the ocean floor must be Atlantis.

Rosie’s New Blog — Whenever I come across a celebrity blog nowadays I figure it's probably fake. So looking at the new blog of Rosie O'Donnell, I thought it had to be a phony. Especially given how bizarre it is. It's almost entirely written in non-rhyming verse. A lot of it I can't even understand. But Defamer points out that it's linked to from the homepage of Rosie's official site, which is pretty good evidence that it's real.

Do Dogs Commit Suicide? — In the past six months five dogs have fallen to their death off a bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland. This fact does not seem to be disputed. What is controversial is whether or not the dogs fell because they committed suicide. Or did they think they saw something and accidentally leapt? In the most recent case a woman claims that she was out walking her dog when it suddenly ran away from her "vaulted over the parapet and plunged 40ft to its death."

Some animal behaviorists are dismissing the notion that suicide was the cause of the dogs' deaths, arguing that dogs never commit suicide. Personally, I'm not sure what to think. I did once hear about a dog who was so despondent after its master died that it walked out to some train tracks and lay there until a train ran it over. However, I'll concede that this story may be an urban legend because I can't remember where I heard it. And I doubt that five dogs in a row would commit suicide in the same place. However, this bridge in Dumbarton does have a spooky history. In 1994 a guy threw his two-week-old son off of it, believing that the child was the Antichrist. So believers in the supernatural are having a field day with this case.

Another Belle de Jour Theory — The Book Club blog has collected together more information than you'd ever want to know about the Belle de Jour blog, the supposed online diary of a London call girl that recently was published as a book. About a year ago there was a lot of speculation that Belle de Jour was really Sarah Champion, a 33-year-old music journalist. Now the Book Club blog is speculating that Belle is really a writer named Lisa Hilton.

Swiss Hygiene Inspector — Before you move out of a home in Switzerland do you have to have it examined by a hygiene inspector who makes sure everything has been dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed, and polished? According to this BBC article, that's true, though it sounds a bit bizarre. Here in America people can, and do, leave their houses in any condition they want. So maybe we should have hygiene inspectors. But making sure that people dust inside the fuse box before they move out sounds a little extreme. (thanks to Susanne for the link)

Build a Better Caias — Caias Ward is a guy who used to weigh 315 pounds and then lost 100 pounds in a few months. As a result his skin got all loose and saggy. He's hoping to get plastic surgery to help tighten his skin, but the bill for the operation is $14,098, which he can't afford. So this is his solution:

I need 7500 people to donate $2.32 so I can get my surgery. If people want to give me more, that's great, but $2.32 is the number I'm looking for from people. If you don't feel comfortable just donating money, I'm willing to do a number of outrageous (or not so outrageous) things in order to earn your money. The amount you send will determine what I am willing to do.

The obvious question this raises is whether it's for real, or is it all an elaborate sob story to scam money? Caias says: "some people have requested proof that I am a real person. It's completely understandable, and I appreciate the concern in this day and age. I'm working on a way to prove my circumstance, from the exam photos for the surgery consultation all the way to 'meet and greets' in the New York and New Jersey area." Caias sounds like a real person, but even so, what if he decides in the end not to get the operation because he only gets halfway to his financial goal? Will he return whatever money he received? Donate it to charity? Or what? That was the main problem with Invest In My Breast (if anyone remembers that scam).

Wedding Photos — A couple of weeks ago Stephen sent me a set of pictures showing an 'Arkansas Wedding' (the two pictures on the left). At the time I thought the pictures were funny, but obviously just a joke, so I forwarded them to a couple of friends and forgot about them. But now I see that Snopes has created an entry about them, which made me feel like I should have posted them when I first got them. So anyway, here they are. Better late than never. Snopes identifies the photo of the hillbilly couple as an entry in a Worth1000 contest ('If rednecks ruled the world') and the picture of the 'wedding cake' comes from the Twinkies website.

However, I believe I have Snopes scooped with this fake photo (on the far right) of the newly engaged Charles and Camilla. I know it's fake because that's obviously Charles's head photoshopped onto someone else's body.

Is Surf Junky a Scam? — Surf Junky (www.surfjunky.com) is a service that supposedly lets you earn money simply by browsing the web. The description on its site of how it works isn't very clear, to say the least, but from what I can gather they make you have a browser window constantly open that flashes ads at you... a new one approximately every thirty seconds. They claim that they'll pay you about $0.45 for every hour that they sense you're actively browsing the web with this ad window flashing at you. Of course, it hasn't taken people long to figure out that theoretically you could leave the surf junky window open all day and be earning money while you do other stuff (like sleep). The trick would be to have a program running such as a chat room that would fool the surf-junky browser into thinking you were using the computer. So does this trick work? Can you earn money just by having a browser running? And the larger question: will surf junky actually pay you, or is it all a scam?

The answer is that you're probably not going to make any money this way because it doesn't appear that Surf Junky is very good about paying anyone. At least, there are all kinds of complaints on the web about its non-payment. Apparently they have a habit of cancelling accounts that approach the $25 minimum payment threshold. If you sign up with them you also have to provide your email address and agree to have spam sent to you, so they're making money off you that way as well. All in all I'd say that Surf Junky isn't worth messing around with. There are plenty of easier ways to make a few bucks.

The Carlisle Cursing Stone — In 2001 artist Gordon Young placed a block of sculpted granite in Carlisle's Tullie House Museum. The granite is inscribed with an ancient curse against local highwaymen and robbers. But some people in the city feel that ever since the 'cursing stone' was placed there, bad luck has plagued the city. "Livestock herds around the city on the border with Scotland were wiped out by foot-and-mouth disease, there has been a devastating flood, factories have closed, a boy was murdered in a local bakery and Carlisle United soccer team dropped a league." So now a local politician has introduced a bill to remove the Cursing Stone and have it destroyed, in the belief that this will bring good luck back to Carlisle. The suggestion has sparked quite a bit of controversy, as well as an angry response from the artist. Personally I think that if Carlisle wants to get rid of its bad luck it should stop fooling around with removing stones and go ahead and burn a witch. After all, that seemed to work for Salem. Didn't it?

Virgin Mary Pretzel — The latest 'spawn-of-Virgin-Mary-Grilled-Cheese-Sandwich' on eBay is the Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus Pretzel. This is a pretzel that may, if you're of the right frame of mind, look kind of like a Picasso-style rendition of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus. According to the description: "This totally unique and spiritual item was found by a 12 year old girl.  She was eating "Rold Gold" Honey Mustard flavored tiny twist pretzels, when she noticed the Virgin Mother holding Baby Jesus.  We all had a feeling of warmth and spirituality when holding the pretzel." The salty pretzel has been receiving news coverage, and bidding on it has already passed $1,000 with three days to go.

Batman’s Greatest Boner — A series of scans has appeared on the scans_daily LiveJournal blog, apparently from an early Batman comic (Batman #66). It details a 'boner' made by the Joker, and his subsequent efforts to force Batman 'into a boner'. The word boner is repeated so often that it seems like it has to be a joke, especially when you read lines such as "Gotham City will rue the day it mentioned the word Boner!" Perhaps someone photoshopped the word 'boner' into an issue of Batman. But I don't think so. I think it's real, although I can't be sure since I don't have a copy of that particular Batman comic (in fact, I don't have any Batman comics). The cover of that issue can be seen here. It's titled 'The Joker's Comedy of Errors!' So the issue itself is real, and 'boner' can mean an error. I think that it's only in recent decades that boner has come to predominantly refer to something else.

Another thing... in one of the panels a newspaper headline reads "Wrong-Way Batman! Lawman Aims For California, Winds Up In England!" This is a reference to Wrong-Way Corrigan, an aviator who wanted to fly solo from New York to Dublin but wasn't given permission to do so. So on July 17, 1938 he took off for California and 'accidentally' went the wrong-way and ended up in Ireland.

The Money Blog Experiment — The Blog Experimenter, as he calls himself, is a "30-something guy living in the midwest United States." His experiment is to create a blog, put Google Ads on it, and see how much money he can make off the venture. Except he's really created two blogs. The first one is 'the money blog', which is the blog that is the subject of the experiment. The second is the 'blog money experiment', on which he chronicles his efforts to make money with the google-ad-driven 'money blog'. He doesn't tell you what the url of the money blog is, or what subject it covers. And from what he says, it doesn't appear to be attracting much of a following. His 'blog money experiment' blog, on the other hand, is attracting a big readership. So the question is: is there really a 'money blog', or is the 'blog money experiment' blog really the 'money blog'? (and how often can I fit the word 'blog' in a sentence?) I suspect that even if he does have a google-ad site somewhere, he knew from the start that the blog about creating a money-making blog would be the real attention-getter. So his plan is to slowly monetize the 'blog money experiment' blog. And sure enough, he has recently introduced Amazon affiliate links to it.

The Great Internet UFO Hoax — Ssshhh! What I am about to tell you is a secret. Do not tell anyone. On Saturday, March 19, many people on the internet will hoax the world with the biggest mass UFO sighting in years. The craft will zoom around the United States and the world. What will they see? A craft with 4 lights, 2 of which blinked several colors. They will then report their sighting as happening at APPROXIMATELY (not exactly) the appropriate time, and that's it.... Report the sighting to the National UFO Reporting center by calling 206-722-3000. Do not post this information online. Only share it with 'real life' friends.

Silence Killer Mystery Image — I received this mystery image via email, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. It may have nothing at all to do with hoaxes or pranks, but I'm wondering if it's some kind of Japanese prank gadget that makes farting noises. Or is it a really badly named perfume spray? I have no idea. Click the image to enlarge.

Martha Stewart’s New Body — It's being reported that the current issue of Newsweek has a faux picture of Martha Stewart on its cover. Its her head pasted on to someone else's body. "Janice E. Castro, a director at Northwestern's school of journalism, said the fact that the image did not look completely artificial and could be mistaken for the real thing was a problem." Newsweek actually admits that the picture is fake inside the magazine, so I don't think this is really that big a deal. Plus, nowadays I think it would be more surprising if a star on the cover of a magazine weren't photoshopped in some way. Anyway, the most outrageous instance of a celebrity's face combined with someone else's body on a magazine cover remains the August 26, 1989 cover of TV Guide sporting the Oprah/Ann-Margret Frankenstein creation.

Lie Detector — You may have read his posts here as Cranky Media Guy, but in real life he's also known as Bob Pagani, and he's going to be on TV in a few days. Here's the info, straight from the horse's mouth:

I just got information about when the TV show I taped back in November in L.A. will air. The show is Lie Detector and it will air on March 8th at 9 PM on the Pax network.

They put me through a lie detector test (as the show's name implies) and you'll see my reaction as I'm told the results of the test on the air. I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement so I can't tell you how the test comes out; you'll just have to watch to see, I guess.

It wasn't the first episode they taped but it's going to be the first one aired for this series. That's usually a sign that the producers think that it's a good show; they want to air one they think is strong first so that viewers will come back next week.

Congratulations, Bob. Unfortunately I don't seem to get Pax TV on my cable network here in San Diego. So you'll have to let me know what happened with the lie detector test after the show airs.