Hoax Museum Blog: Sex/Romance

Real Hamster — Real Hamster: Hot hamster sex. Maybe not safe for work.

Lapdance Island — Britain's Channel 4 was flooded with applicants hoping to get a spot on the new Reality Show called Lapdance Island. In this show ten men would be on an island with forty lapdancers. The winner would be the one who could keep his hands off the dancers for the longest. But the show was a hoax. Details here.

Fake Friendsters — There's been not one, but two articles in the past few days about the phenomenon of Fake Friendsters. Apparently many people using the new online service Friendster — a service that allows you to meet new people by making connections with the friends of your friends — have been creating fake identities, identities such as God, Giant Squid, or Jackalope. Friendster is fighting back by trying to delete all the fakes. Of course, this is like fighting the tide. Just ask any postmodernist and they'll tell you that the concept of identity is itself inherently illusory. So to insist that only 'real' identities are allowed on the service is absurd. Personally, if I were to create an account on Friendster, I'd want all of my friends to be fake.

Hunting for Bambi — It looks like it's now 100% official that Hunting for Bambi was a hoax.

Hunting for Bambi (hopefully final update) — So I think it's finally official that Hunting for Bambi is a hoax, a publicity stunt done to sell videos. Isn't it wonderful that public attention gets focused on things like this rather than, oh, poverty, hunger, education, etc.?

Not What You Expect — Super-Models-With-See-Through-Tops.com

Hunting for Bambi Update — It's looking more and more like Hunting for Bambi is a hoax. George Evanthes, the man who claimed to have paid to go on a Bambi hunt, is now being denounced as a shill by his friends. And the Hunting for Bambi company is claiming that it can no longer hold any Bambi Hunts because all the potential customers have been scared away by negative publicity. Seems like a convenient excuse.

More about Hunting for Bambi — Suspicions that Hunting for Bambi is a hoax seem to be growing. If the company is for real then it should be easy enough for them to prove it. Show that you're signing people up for new 'hunts.' Produce the accounting records to prove that you've taken people's money for hunts in the past. But of course they won't do that. These hoaxes always work the same way. Stall and delay for as long as possible while you milk the controversy for all the publicity you can get. KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas station that originally aired the story, discovered that the company behind Hunting for Bambi, only has a business license that allows it to sell videos, not to operate a sexually-oriented business nor to run paintball games. So if they are actually doing this, they're doing it without the proper licenses.

Hunting for Bambi — Is 'Hunting for Bambi' a hoax? In case you somehow missed it (hiding under a rock, or something), Hunting for Bambi is supposedly a company that for $10,000 will let guys hunt naked women with a paintball gun in the desert outside of Las Vegas. The company got some local TV coverage, and then the larger news outlets picked up on the story, initiating a media frenzy. But based on the emails I've been getting, a lot of people are suspicious about the company's claims. After all, exactly how does one sign up to go on one of these Bambi-hunting expeditions? That doesn't seem to be clear since the company isn't responding to most inquiries. What I would guess is that there are no Bambi-hunting trips. That would involve just too many legal problems. But the company is offering a video for sale, and members of the public can definitely buy that. I suspect that the company is just pretending to offer the 'hunts' as a way to generate a lot of publicity and sell the video (and the other merchandise they're offering). The whole scheme is reminiscent of something like Ron's Angels, which got a lot of publicity back in 1999 because it claimed to be selling the eggs of supermodels to infertile couples. That all turned out to be a hoax to promote a pornographic web site. I could be wrong about Hunting for Bambi, but I'll wait for them to provide more evidence of the truth of their claims before I change my mind.

A Vermont Wedding — The town of Manchester, Vermont is set abuzz when rumors spread that the marriage of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck will occur there. Unfortunately, the rumors turn out to be false.

Mail-Order Husbands — Guys have been able to shop for mail-order brides for quite some time now, so I guess this was inevitable: mail-order husbands. And what fine specimens of the male species they have available!

Rejection Hotline, II — An LA Times reader reacts to the Sept. 9 story about the hotline for 'losers' (from LA Times, requires registration):
The idea of a woman giving out a bogus "loser's" phone number instead of her own is an old one ("Hey, Loser, Got a Message for You," Sept. 9). Some years ago I met an attractive young woman and asked for her number. She gleefully gave it to me. I phoned the very next day, only to hear a taped recording: "Thank you for calling the Los Angeles Zoo.... " My only solace was a good laugh because, even though the joke was on me, it was truly funny. Unfortunately, Jeff Goldblatt's "loser's" phone number is lean on humor and mean to the extreme.

Rejection Hotline — If someone asks for your phone number and you don't want to give it to them, get rid of them discreetly by giving them the number for the rejection hotline. They'll think it's your number until they dial it up and hear this prerecorded message: "The person who gave you this number obviously did not want you to have their real number. Maybe you're just not this person's type.... This could mean short, fat, ugly, dumb, annoying, arrogant or just a general loser. Maybe you suffer from bad breath, body odor or even both. Maybe you just give off that creepy, overbearing, psycho-stalker vibe. Maybe the idea of going out with you just seems as appealing as playing leapfrog with unicorns." In LA the number is (310) 217-7638. (From LA Times article... Requires registration). Check out the website of the Rejection Hotline to find the number to call in your city. They also provide phony business cards.

Mock Weddings II — Yesterday's NY Times piece about mock weddings sparked my interest in the subject. A quick search on Google pulled up some more info about the phenomenon:Northern New York's Mock WeddingsThis website reports that mock weddings were a popular activity for church groups in the 1930sThis page references Frazer's The Golden Bough to note that at the dawn of civilization "Mock weddings were often carried out as part of harvest and fertility rituals, sometimes culminating in human sacrifice, or reminicances of such sacrifice."

Mock Weddings — The growing phenomenon of mock weddings: the NY Times reports that across the country young people are throwing elaborate wedding ceremonies at which no one actually gets married. Apparently they figure that since they're probably not going to get married until they're much older, they might as well have the party now. As the Times puts it: "Across the nation, whether for artistic expression or just to have a good time, perhaps dozens of men and women in their late teens and early 20's have been putting on costly pseudo-weddings, complete with a ceremony, reception and festivities."

Fake Euros fool shoppers — "A publicity stunt by a German firm which sent out fake 300 and 1,000-euro notes adorned with naked women has backfired after people began using them as legal tender. The firm Planet-Present said it had permission from the Bundesbank and European Central Bank. Only close scrutiny shows the notes are fakes. Michael Leidig, Vienna." Found on the Daily Telegraph site.
Here's a picture of Planet-Present's fake euro (page is in German).