Hoax Museum Blog: Miscellaneous

NPR Radio Show — Tomorrow (May 26) I'm going to be a guest on an NPR show, Odyssey, which is broadcast out of Chicago. Not that I'm going all the way to Chicago for the show. I'll be in the NPR studios in San Diego. The topic of the show will be "Falling for Hoaxes": From Piltdown Man to crop circles, history is littered with hoaxes that have grabbed headlines and fooled the public. So why do we keep falling for them? (my answer: because we're idiots!)

The other guest will be a historian from UC Davis, Michael Saler. The two of us will be having a discussion with the host, Gretchen Helfrich, and we'll take questions from callers at the end of the show (from what I understand). I've been getting quite a lot of media attention lately, what with being on the Paula Zahn show a week or two ago. I have the Runaway Bride to thank for it all. Anyway, the show will be on at noon Chicago time, if you want to listen. But not all NPR affiliates carry the show.

Light Posting Ahead — I haven't been posting as much to the site lately. That's because the deadline for turning in the manuscript for my next book is fast approaching. It's due in about two weeks, so posting in the near future will probably be even lighter. I'm finding it hard to focus on the book and the site at the same time, so the site temporarily has to go on auto-pilot. But I'm not going to disappear entirely. There will be scattered posts. I just can't promise that they'll appear regularly.

Photos of the Museum of Hoaxes — Some of you have asked about the images of the Museum that appeared in the piece on CNN. They were created by Eric Schucard of Carlsbad, CA about a month ago (he was hoping I could get USA Today to run them, but no such luck). I've uploaded them so everyone can check them out. At some point (when I'm done with the book) I'll redesign my 'About the Museum' page to incorporate them.

Paula Zahn Tonight — If you watch the Paula Zahn Show on CNN tonight (monday, May 2) you'll see an interesting guest: Me! They wanted someone who could blab on about hoaxes for a couple of minutes, so I fit the part. I didn't get to speak to Paula herself. In fact, I was actually looking at the wall during the entire interview while speaking to a reporter on speakerphone. It airs 8-9pm Eastern time, and 5-6pm Pacific. I think they're going to have a segment about 2 minutes long in which they're interviewing me.

April Fool’s Day Effect — The site seems to be loading very slowly today, and a few people have reported not being able to access it at all. This is the beginning of the April Fool's Day effect. Traffic to the site increases and causes the performance of the site to nosedive. I'm guessing this will last until April 2nd. There's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Getting Ready for April Fools Day — April Fool's Day is usually the day when this site gets the most visitors. In the past this has caused the site to crash... so if nothing on the site seems to be working on April 1st, it's not me playing a prank. It's just the server melting down. Though hopefully that won't happen this year since I upgraded to a better server.

April Fool's Day is also a time when this site gets some media attention (because I don't think any other site on the web has as much info about April Fools). Big Gary told me he saw something about the site a few days ago in the Dallas Morning News (aka the Boring Snooze). I also did an interview with Andrew Jacobs of the NY Times this morning. His article should appear in the Times on Thursday or Friday. The Times of India is publishing a summary of the top 5 of my Top 100 April Fools. The Toledo Blade will have an article about the site (that includes a picture of me) on Friday. Family Circle Magazine was supposed to have something about the site in their April issue, but I haven't heard from them in a few months so I don't know what became of that (and I don't read Family Circle so maybe it is there and I don't know about it). Finally, I did a one-hour radio interview last night with Morgan White, Jr. on WBZ radio (out of Boston), and I'll be on BBC Radio on April 1st (4 pm London Time) being interviewed by Vanessa Feltz.

Oh, and then there's the off chance something might appear in USA Today, though I have no idea what (I'm very curious to see if they do print anything). That's all the stuff I know about, but sometimes papers print things about the site without telling me (like the Dallas Morning News did), so there may be more.

USA Today Photo Request — I just received this request from USA Today. I'm not sure how to respond to it. Any suggestions?

Hello,
We are doing a story on 10 great places that have fools in their name. Do
you have any handout photographs of the exterior or interior of the museum?
Thanks so much,
Life Picture Desk
USA TODAY

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.

Raising Money for the Foundation Fighting Blindness — The following has nothing to do with hoaxes. It's a public service announcement:

UC San Diego grad student Jeff Butterworth and his girlfriend A.K. Basenberg are going to be bicycling across America this summer to help spread awareness of retinal diseases such as Retinitis Pigmentosa, Macular Degeneration, and Usher Syndrome. They'll be starting off in Yorktown, Virginia and ending up in Oregon, and they're hoping to use their journey to help raise $15,000 for the Foundation Fighting Blindness. So donate some money to help them reach their goal. All donations go directly to the FFB. Read more about the trip and what inspired it on Jeff's website (this is also where you'll find the link to donate). It's a good cause so I promised I would do whatever I could to help by plugging it here on my site (and I'll be putting a link to his site in a sidebar). Even if you don't feel like pledging any money, check out his site to learn a little bit about what the FFB does. The FFB also has a brief blurb about Jeff and A.K.'s upcoming trip on its site.

Back Again… — Looks like the site is back... at last. I'm definitely not going to change servers again in a hurry. Uploading files, checking folder permissions, and trying to understand how to get a mysql database to do what I want it to do is not my idea of fun. Anyway, everything on the site seems to be functioning, except for the forum. Go figure. Something had to break during the move. The pages for each individual topic in the forum are working, but the main page for the forum itself won't load. I have no idea why not, and I'm too tired to worry about it right now.

Museum of Hoaxes is Moving — The Museum of Hoaxes will soon be moving to a new home at a different web hosting company (pMachine hosting). This may cause a slight disruption in service (fewer posts) over the following week as I make the switch. At the very least it might mean that the site will temporarily be at a new url (one of those urls that are just a string of numbers) until the internet domain name servers reassign museumofhoaxes.com to the new web host.

The reason for the move is that over the past few days all of the server-intensive functions of the site (such as being able to post and edit entries) froze up, apparently because of increased traffic. I'm not sure what the cause of the traffic spike was. Looking at my referrer logs it seems that the vast majority of the traffic is coming from the google and yahoo search engines.

Anyway, the server couldn't handle the load... or rather my web host restricted the amount of server queries my site could make, so that my site wouldn't hog the server's cpu... which meant I suddenly was having trouble posting entries. It all gets a bit technical. The long and short of it is that the site has evidently outgrown the server it was on, so it's time to move to something a bit more robust.

I'll keep everyone posted about how the move is going.

My Strangest Gift — Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it. I'm not at home this Christmas. Instead I'm in Phoenix, Arizona. So having now received (I think) almost all of my gifts, I'd have to say that the strangest one I got this year was Elephant Dung Paper from Malawi. It says on the info that comes with the paper that "The elephant dung is first collected from Liwonde National Park and then beaten and mixed with recycled waste paper to produce the pulp from which it is made." It actually looks like very high quality paper (in case you're wondering). Of course, I still have to go over to my Great Aunt's house (she's the one who's into all the alternative medicine stuff), so I may yet get a stranger gift. She has, in fact, already promised to channel my Reiki energy while I'm there.

The Top Hoaxes of 2004 — I've created a year-end list of the top hoaxes of 2004. Actually, I've chosen ten hoaxes that I think might be worthy of making the list (my basic criteria was the hoaxes that received the most media and public attention), but I haven't ranked them yet. Instead, I'm opening it up to voting. I think that's a more democratic way of doing it. Check out the list and vote here.

Praise from the Guardian — There was a very nice blurb in today's issue of The Guardian about the Museum of Hoaxes. Does this mean I can now tell my mother that I'm famous?

UK Paperback Edition — The UK publisher of the Museum of Hoaxes just sent me a picture of what the paperback edition of the book will look like when it comes out over there (click image for a larger version). It looks quite colorful and fun. But I'm especially proud of the fact that it has a picture of Hamster Viagra right at the top of it. Nothing says quality non-fiction quite like Hamster Viagra. As for why the UK edition says 'edited by Alex Boese' instead of just 'by Alex Boese,' I have no idea. I'm trying to find out why.

Notify of New Comments — It was pointed out to me that once people register as a member the 'notify of new comments' button suddenly becomes selected by default whenever they post a comment. That's a little annoying. I've managed to change this for people who register in the future, so that it won't be selected by default. But for existing members, if you don't want that option selected by default, you're going to need to change it yourself in your individual member preferences (you may not have realized there even were individual member preferences). Here's what you do:

• Click login on the menu above.


• Then click on the 'My Account' link at the top-right of the login screen


• Next click 'email settings'


• Finally, unclick the 'enable email notification by default' button

And that'll do it.

Which Urban Legend Are You? — Here's a cute little quiz to waste five minutes of your life on: Which urban legend are you? I'm the classic tale of the gator in the sewer (because everyone knows I'm full of crap, but they keep talking about me anyway).

The Haiku of Big Gary C — I've finally made a decision in the urban legend haiku contest. It was tough, because there were so many good entries, but I've decided to give the book to Big Gary C, based on the consistently high quality of his entries. He clearly has a knack for urban legend haiku. Here are a few of his entries:
(Ten English Names for Snow)
Flakes, drifts, flurries, slush,
Blizzard, powder, crust, white stuff,
whiteout, ice crystals.
We brought our cute pet
Back from our Mexican tour.
He loves cheese; fears cats.

Ev'ry stick of gum
I've ever chewed and swallowed
Is still inside me.

In elevator,
big black man with dog says, "Sit!"
So everyone does.

I had the biggest
beehive hairdo in town, 'til
spiders ate my brain.

Oh, waiter, waiter!
Won't you please feed my dog now?
No, no! Not to me!

Cheney's pocket's full
of something; so they don't call
him "Dick" for nothing.

Once you start writing
verses in Haiku format,
it's hard to stop it.
To be honest, I liked reading everyone's haiku so much that I didn't want the contest to stop. So I'm going to try to give the haiku a more permanent (better organized) place on my site and allow people to keep adding more of it. Maybe I'll also make this an ongoing contest, awarding a prize every month. Or something like that. Stay tuned.

How to Order Comments — A couple of days ago someone mentioned that the comments would be easier to read if they were in chronological order, so that you wouldn't need to go to the bottom of the page to view the start of a discussion. I hadn't thought much about it before, but this seemed logical to me, so I reconfigured the comments to appear in chronological order.

But now Razela has noted that the old way, when they were in reverse chronological order, it was easier to see the newest comments. Which is also true.

Each way of doing it has pluses and minuses. Unfortunately it has to be either/or. The software doesn't allow individual users to set their own preferences. So, because I can't see which way is obviously better, I've decided to let everyone vote, and then whichever way the vote turns out (after a few days), that's the way the comments are going to be configured. Permanently.

Win A Book, Contest #2 — I've received a free copy of David Wilton's new book, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends, courtesy of Oxford University Press. So I'm having a contest to give it away. The book has just been published. I'm not sure it's even out in stores yet, but you can get a copy here... if you win the contest.

First, what's the book about? Wilton debunks all those stories about where words come from, such as 'is GOLF really an acronym for Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden?' or 'does SOS stand for Save Our Souls?' or 'was F**K originally an acronym meaning For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge?' You'll have to get the book to find out the answers. It's a lot of fun, and quite enlightening.

Here's what I've decided for the contest: urban legend haiku. I figure this is appropriate since it's a book about urban legends and language. Whoever comes up with the best haiku describing an urban legend (or a hoax, since this is the Museum of Hoaxes) wins the contest. What's 'best' will, of course, be subjectively decided by me.

If you need inspiration, examples of urban legend haiku can be found here or here. I'm not going to be a stickler about whether or not entries maintain proper haiku form (three lines: first line five syllables, second line seven syllables, third line five syllables), since apparently the idea that haiku must adhere strictly to this form is itself a bit of an urban legend. Keep it to three lines, but if the number of syllables isn't perfect, I don't care.

Here's my own rather weak attempt at a hoax haiku. It took me all of a minute to write:

Enclosed in glass,
Soon she'll be rectangular,
My Bonsai Kitten.

You'll have to do better than this to win the book.

The contest will end on Nov. 20, about a week from today (oh, and you can submit as many haiku as you like).
Update: And one more thing, submit your entries as comments. Don't email them to me directly.
Update: Okay, the contest is now closed. I need a day or two to review all the entries.