Does she really crave eating toilet paper, or is she full of it? more…
Millions of poinsettias are sold every year at Christmastime. But are these plants highly poisonous? For decades, many believed so. "One poinsettia leaf can kill a child," was a warning repeated often over the years. more…
Examples of flimflam mail order products confiscated by U.S. Postal Inspectors during the 1980s.
From the history of misleading advertising: In 1941, the Doughnut Corporation of America came out with "Vitamin Donuts," hoping the product would earn a seal of approval from the Nutrition Division of the War Food Administration. No dice, said the War Food Administration, because it was only the flour that was enriched with vitamins, not the entire donut. They suggested the name "Enriched Flour Donuts" as an alternative, but the Doughnut Corporation didn't think this sounded appetizing, so they dropped the product entirely. Incidentally, the flour in modern donuts has far more vitamins in it than the flour in Vitamin Donuts did. more…
A viral video shows what appears to be a horse flying in the sky over Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Some say it's the Buraq, the legendary flying horse that transported the prophet Muhammad. Others say it's the black horse prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Still others say it's a helium-filled balloon.
Russian state TV, Rossiya-1, has been warning viewers of the moral decadence of the West by airing news footage that shows an American father indoctrinating his child into homosexuality by covering the kid's bedroom wall with gay pornography. However, the footage is obviously fake. It originally came from a sports paraphernalia company, Fathead, and showed a father surprising his son by decorating his wall with a massive photo of a monster truck. The footage was then altered by 4chan users to replace the monster truck with gay pornography. It seems clear that this is not a case of satire mistaken as news. It's a case of willful misrepresentation of satire for the sake of propaganda. [vox.com]
Determined to maintain a relationship with Liam Griffiths, with whom she had a one-night stand, Charmaine Wilson presented him with a child, telling him it was his. A birth certificate and DNA test seemed to back up her claim. So Griffiths did what he thought was the right thing and took responsibility for the child, only to find out six months later that it was all an elaborate deception. Wilson had "borrowed" the child from a friend and used her position at a hospital to forge the birth certificate and DNA test results. Wilson, who said it was "a lie that snowballed out of control," was sentenced to serve 16 weeks in jail, but was released after 23 days on condition that she take a "thinking skills" class to help her realize the effect her actions had on Griffiths and his family. [Daily Mail]
In his 1930s newspaper column, John Harvey Furbay (aka The Debunker) wrote that it was a myth that all dogs can bark. But was he correct?
A video has gone viral that shows a bear chasing a cyclist through a forest. The video seems realistic when you first view it. But if you slow it down and watch it frame by frame, it starts to look a lot less convincing. more…
"Historians point out that there is a great deal of difference between pilgrim and puritan, which many people use interchangeably, supposing them to be the same thing. The Puritans were a religious order that arose in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. They were the strictest among the Church of England. The Pilgrims split off from this sect and refused to follow the Church of England -- thus they were no longer puritans. In fact, they were not as strict as the old puritans, but were quite liberal in comparison with them."
It says here that in a recently aired BBC documentary, The Real Tom Thumb, historian John Gannon argues that Tom Thumb's baby may not have been a hoax, even though Tom Thumb's wife Lavinia confessed it was a hoax in her autobiography.
The tale of the chloroformed turkey usually involves two women living in the city who decide to get a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving or Christmas. But after the turkey has been delivered to their door, they realize they need to kill it. Unwilling to tell the local butcher that they're too squeamish to cut off its head themselves, they search for a "humane" way of ending the bird's life, and come up with the idea of using chloroform. more…
It took me a while to see it, but once you see it, you can't unsee it. The question is: is this a purposeful illusion, or an accidental one? more…
In the summer of 1925, the carcass of a large ocean creature washed up onto Moore's Beach in the California town of Santa Cruz. The creature had a strange duck-like head and what looked like a long neck. Interest in the carcass grew when it was examined on the beach by one E.L. Wallace, who described himself as the president of the Natural History Society of British Columbia, and he declared that it was the remains of a plesiosaur — a species long extinct. more…
A pair of videos that seemed to show a giant "human sized eel" in New Zealand's Manawatu River went viral in the past week. It caught the attention of a viral video show, Right This Minute, who contacted the two young men (brothers Tim and Ray Hamilton) who filmed the footage and asked them for the right to air it on TV. At which point, Tim and Ray confessed that the footage was fake. They had filmed the eel in a bathtub and then composited that footage with shots of the river and Ray throwing bread at the imaginary eel.
