Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Tsunami Fish — An email has been going around showing photos of bizarre, supposedly never-before-seen deep-sea creatures that have been washing up on beaches because of the tsunami. Photos of the creatures can be seen on this Russian website. It's obviously a hoax since these photos have been floating around the internet for ages. One of them has even appeared on my site before. But the Practical Fishkeeping site has done everyone a service by identifying what all these sea creatures actually are.

Secret Ingredient Scam — I spent my Sunday night watching FoodTV's new show, Iron Chef America. I've long been a fan of the original Japanese Iron Chef, but I quite liked Food TV's adaptation of it. However, I was upset to read in this NY Times article that the 'secret ingredient' presented to the chefs at the beginning of the competition isn't that secret after all:

Both teams are readier for the challenge than most viewers realize. They have come to Kitchen Stadium knowing that they will be cooking with one of two ingredients, striped bass or buffalo, a choice negotiated in advance with the network.

Hmm. Instead of calling it the 'Secret Ingredient' perhaps they should call it the 'Previously Negotiated and Agreed Upon Ingredient'.

Bill Gates Teen Idol — The Monkey Methods blog has posted pictures of a young Bill Gates supposedly posing for a Teen Beat photospread back in 1983. I'm willing to believe that the photos are real pictures of a young Bill. But I'm not willing to believe that they're from Teen Beat, not unless more evidence is provided, such as a scan of the article itself. Some of the people who have posted comments on the Monkey Methods blog have pointed out problems with the claim that these photos are from 1983. For instance, there's clearly an Apple Computer a Macintosh visible in the first picture. But the Apple Macintosh only began to be sold in 1984. Plus, why in the world would Teen Beat have wanted to do a photospread of Bill Gates?

Update: These pictures were taken in 1985 by celebrity photographer Deborah Feingold shortly after the release of Windows 1.0. This information comes from Corbis.com, which has these photos in their database. There's no evidence that they ever appeared in Teen Beat.

What is Neurocam? — Neurocam is very specific about what it is not. Its website asserts that:
neurocam is not a cult religion
neurocam is not a scientific discovery
neurocam is not anything to do with politics
neurocam is not anything to do with religion
neurocam is not a prank or a hoax
However, it's not clear at all exactly what Neurocam is. Compounding the mystery is that billboards have been appearing around Australia bearing the message "Get out of your mind" and directing people towards the neurocam website. There's not much to see on the site itself, but if you register and successfully pass the 'background checks' they put you through, you're eventually given strange tasks to perform, such as giving a stranger a locked briefcase. The leading theory is that neurocam is some kind of Alternative Reality Game. Or it could be a bizarre viral advertising campaign. Or it could be an art project. The people on Metafilter theorize it has something to do with this 'company' marketing Human Possibility.

Face of Christ in Painting — I received this email yesterday from an artist requesting my opinion. Feel free to leave your own opinion in the comments:

Being an artist, in August of 1996 I painted a picture.
It was supposed to be a simple picture of a large cross on a white background.
The picture is 24 x 30. The two axis of the cross are 11.5 inches wide.
Roughly 28 x 22.5. The cross was made by taking a pallet of mixed colors of paint and with one vertical and one horizontal swipe nothing more.

When the paint dried you could "I would say" clearly see the face of Christ on the cross. I was so afraid I put the picture away and in the last 8 years have only showed it to several of my friends. Please give me your honest input on what you see in and think about my picture.
You can either call or email me back.

This is no joke.

Warmest Regards,
DiMarcia (Dee) Ancrum

(Click on the image to enlarge it. I had to trim it down significantly because the image file was huge... 3.3MB)

Cooking Your Placenta — I've heard a rumor that some women do this, though I didn't think it was true. But what was I thinking? There's always somebody who's going to try something out, no matter how gross it is. So anyway, if you have a hankering for cooked placenta, here are some recipes, including Roast Placenta (with red peppers and a bit of garlic) and Dehydrated Placenta (that would be like Placenta Jerky, I assume).

Countdown to Oblivion — This attracted quite a bit of attention (relatively speaking), but I only found out about it today, once it was revealed to be a hoax. It was a Countdown-to-Suicide Journal on LiveJournal:

My name is Jerry Romero, and I am 23 years old. If you have found this journal, it is through your own actions. I will not comment on other entries in an attempt to make friends. I am leaving this in the hands of Fate and no-one else. This journal was created solely for the purpose of providing one last lifeline in a vast sea of hopelessness.
On January 13th, I am going to kill myself.

Forehead Ad Blocker — Hot on the heels of the latest guy who was auctioning off advertising space on his forehead, comes this eBay entrepreneur who has invented Forehead Ad Blockers.

there is a new type of advertising that is rapidly gaining ground: forehead advertising. These ads will be inescapable, especially if you have to visually interact with that soulless human posing as a walking billboard. That is, unless you have: The Forehead Ad Blocker™
Portable! No heavier than a standard pair of safety glasses!
Adjustable! Blocks forehead ads regardless of their height! Just raise or lift your head!
Patent-pending technology!

(via Adrants)

Toilet Paper Rejected By Beatles — Up for sale on eBay is a roll of toilet paper rejected by the Beatles. It supposedly once occupied the toilet in the E.M.I. Abbey Road Studios in 1962 when the Beatles were recording there, but it was removed because the Beatles found it to be too hard and shiny. Plus, it had E.M.I. printed on it, which the Fab Four thought to be a bit strange. Bidding has already reached over £5,000. If you're a Beatles fan it would be a pretty cool souvenir, but my question is how anyone can be sure that this is the actual roll removed from the bathroom? What if it's just an old roll of E.M.I. toilet paper?

Waiting for Mr. Tsunami — I found this posted in the alt.folklore.urban usenet group:

A while before the catastrophe, a local clerk in one of the countries hit by the tsunamis receives a warning note stating "Tsunami will reach you shortly!" - and, in response, sends a welcome crew to the local airport, to welcome and pick up the mysterious "Mr Tsunami", whom he expects to be an unannounced ministerial visitor or inspector.

I don't understand why a clerk would have received a message warning him about the tsunami. But I don't think it's worth trying to understand this, since it's obviously just a dumb joke.

Rats a la Carte — The latest gross-out food email going around involves a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta supposedly caught accepting shipments of rats and mice. These rats would, I guess, be served to people who enjoy rodents as a delicacy. Some photos accompany the email (rats1, rats2, rats3). The email says that:

After a full search of the kitchen, authorities found, packaged rats, mice, kittens, puppies and a large frozen hawk... The restaurant has locations off Peachtree Road and Alpharetta near North Pointe Mall.

I tried googling for chinese restaurants located on Peachtree Road in Atlanta and came up with a few of them. But needlessly, since David Emery has already debunked this email by doing a news search and confirming that there have been no recent reports of rat-accepting restaurants in Atlanta. Plus, the photos come from a store that sells packaged rats for feeding snakes.

Butt Art — Stan Murmur has a good thing going. He smears paint on his buttocks, smacks his fanny on a piece of paper, and sells the resulting product for hundreds of dollars. Is it really art? Well, no. It's Butt Art. I think this probably qualifies as something that started out as a bit of a joke, but then somehow turned into a real thing for him.

Stoned Student Tackles Oedipus — This link (warning: Not Safe for Work because of language) ranks high on the stupid meter, but I'm posting it anyway because it reminds me of the days that I worked as a TA in a freshman writing program at UC San Diego. It's supposedly a student essay that some guy wrote while high and then handed in... and despite this sorry excuse for an essay he passed the class, because attendance counted. Is the paper real? That's hardly worth speculating about since there's no evidence either way. It would be easy enough for someone to fake this (get out a red pen and mark up a paper), but I also remember seeing many papers that were worse than this when I was a TA, so I'm inclined to believe it's real. One of my students handed in half a page of incoherent sentence fragments as his attempt at an assigned three-to-five page essay. From a TA's point of view, the awful papers are actually the easiest ones to grade. It's the students who seem to be making a real attempt but still end up with bad essays that really make you work for your money.

Still on Vacation! — I don't know if these pictures are real, in the sense of whether they really show tourists sunning themselves while people try to clean up tsunami damage around them. Maybe the pictures were taken at some other time, in a totally different context. But they certainly look like tourists trying to act as if nothing happened while all around them is a wasteland. Unbelievable.

Online Gamers Anonymous (Status: Not A Hoax) — I came across the On-line Gamers Anonymous (OLGA) site recently and can't make up my mind whether or not it's a hoax. It's a site "of, by, and for on-line gaming addicts." Some of the stories shared on its message board seem a bit farfetched. Take, for example, the tale of Tommy, a former EverQuest addict. Tommy complains that:

Before EverQuest I used to have nearly a perfect life, I was living the american dream if you will. I hade a wonderfull job, a great house, a beautiful and lovely wife and most importanly my 2 beautiful little girls wich I love dearly....now I've lost everything because of this game.

As he relates his tale of woe, Tommy shares one unforgettable detail with us. He says that in the depths of his addiction it became so hard for him to tear himself away from the computer that:

I decided to set up a little pot in my computer room so I wouldn't have to get up when I needed to go pee, as much as this may sound ubelivable I can assure you it's the truth.

One thing that made me suspect this was a hoax was that there have been other gaming addiction hoaxes, such as Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence. However, after reading this article in Wired about gaming addiction (by Daniel Terdiman), I'm inclined to think that OLGA may be real. Terdiman relates how hard-core gamers can begin to have problems separating the game from reality. One lady describes swerving her car around the road because she thinks she's still playing a game. Another lady, a Sims player, sits at her computer thinking 'What percent of my bladder is full?' instead of going to the bathroom.

So what is it about gamers and their reluctance to urinate? I'm now imagining thousands of solitary gamers sitting there with pots in their rooms.

Update (09/19/2005): The owner of OLGA has stated that it is "a REAL service provided for people who are addicted to computer/video games and have no where else to go."

Update (13/2/2007): OLGA has now moved to a different website.

LA Times on Ghosts and eBay — The LA Times has just discovered something that I've been saying for ages: haunted stuff sells well on eBay. As they put it: "Having exhausted bad taste and banality, it appears EBay sellers have moved on to a new marketing strategy — the paranormal. Everything "haunted" is so hot, EBay could launch a new category." But still, the LA Times is only seeing half the story here. What's interesting is not just that people are selling lots of haunted things on eBay. After all, there's always been a market for the paranormal. What's interesting is the new market for haunted junk that eBay has created. Take any old crap that's been collecting dust around your house: an old jar, a Coke can, a broken toaster. Slap a haunted label on it, make up a story about it, and hey presto, sell it on eBay for hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars.

CIA Muezzin School — The Guardian reports that a story has been spreading around Islamic websites about a CIA muezzin school in which the CIA trains agents to pose as muezzins (the men who call Muslims to prayer five days a week times a day from the minaret towers of mosques). Supposedly the CIA feels that muezzins are in a uniquely advantageous position to view everything that's going on in Muslim communities. But in reality, this is another of those satire-mistaken-as-news stories. The story of the CIA Muezzin school originated on the satire-laced website of the The Rockall Times (Rockall is a tiny uninhabited island in the middle of the Atlantic). So this will join the growing list of spoofs taken seriously by Muslim news sources, a list that already includes the Giant Skeleton Unearthed in Saudi Arabia, and the Secret History of the Flying Carpet.

Aural Policing — According to an article in the Economist, quoted here by the Washington Monthly blog, a British grocery store chain has been successfully deterring rowdy youths from hanging around their stores by playing classical music. Mozart and Pavarotti appear to be especially potent at warding off juvenile delinquents. The same technique has been working in underground stations. Something about this strikes me as a bit odd. Why would it work? Just because the kids don't like having to listen to classical music? Could it really be that easy? Perhaps it is.

Remote Autographing Device — The novelist Margaret Atwood, having grown tired of attending book signings in cities throughout the world, has invented a strange new device that may eliminate author appearances altogether in the future. It's a remote autographing device. The author sits in the comfort of their home and talks to a tv screen. In a bookstore thousands of miles away a fan talks back. If the fan wants an autographed book, the author simply scribbles something on a tablet. The tablet then transmits this scribbling to an in-store machine that produces an identical copy of the message in a book that the fan can take home. It reminds me of a high-tech version of Jefferson's polygraph machine. I predict this idea will take off just like that idea someone had back in the '50s about how we could all eat nutrition pills instead of real food (via Neil Gaiman).

Abstract Expressionism as CIA Plot — I realize some people feel that Abstract Expressionism needs some kind of an excuse for its existence, but the following purported connection between Abstract Expressionism and the CIA seems just bizarre. It comes from a review of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders

One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.

Art museum directors on the front lines of the Cold War? That sounds like the plot of a Thomas Pynchon novel to me. It also sounds just crazy enough to be true. (via Early Days of a Better Nation)