Hoax Museum Blog: Sex/Romance

Twins get married… or maybe not — Last week this story was EVERYWHERE. A pair of twins in Britain, who had been adopted into different families, met and fell in love... without realizing they were twins. They then got married, only to discover the terrible secret they shared. Their marriage was promptly annulled.

When I first read about this, it sounded pretty fishy to me -- very much like an urban legend being reported as news -- but on a cursory reading of the story I also got the impression that there were officials involved who knew about the case but couldn't disclose the identity of the twins. So I accepted the news as true. I think the paragraph in the BBC report linked to above that got me was this one:



To me, this sounded as if Mo O'Reilly actually knew about the case first-hand. Unfortunately, I didn't read the article closely enough. Apparently the only person who knew about the case was Lord Alton who used it as an example during a House of Lords debate on the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill. Lord Alton had heard about the case "from a judge who was involved." In other words, the source is a FOAF (friend of a friend), one of the classic signs of an urban legend.

Jon Henley of the Guardian summarizes the situation:



So it looks like this piece of news needs to be categorized as an urban-legend-reported-as-news until proven otherwise. (Thanks, Joe)

Husband meets wife in brothel — This story sounds suspiciously like an urban legend being reported as news. It could, of course, be true, though the source (a Polish tabloid called Super Express) makes it difficult to fact check:

Bigfoot Bait — I wonder how many women are going to respond to this craigslist ad? The scary thing is that the guy's probably completely serious.

Jontex Condom Ad - Possible Hoax — The image to the right shows what is supposedly a guerrilla marketing campaign by Jontex, a Brazilian brand of condoms owned by Johnson & Johnson. The campaign involves a cardboard cutout that can be positioned beneath the door of a bathroom stall. The Brazilian phrase translates to, "You do not know when it can be necessary."

But strangely, Johnson and Johnson is denying responsibility for the ad. Or, at least, the folks who run the Johnson and Johnson blog claim it's not their company's campaign:



It seems like a lot of work for someone to create as a hoax. It could either be a subviral campaign (an ad campaign that a company creates but then denies responsibility for), or a "spec ad" (a speculative ad created by an agency to show a potential client what they're capable of).

Still No Sex In Space — Ever since humans first made it into space, there have been rumors of sex-in-space experiments. Such rumors are doing the rounds again, and this time it's the Russians who are the focus of them. Russian officials decided they should go on record to deny them:


I like that last line. Apparently the Russians have no problem with experiments involving two-headed dogs or human-ape hybrids, but they draw the line at sex-in-space research.

Bat Bugs Have Fake Genitals — National Geographic has an article about a "hotbed of deception" in the natural world. It involves the genitals of a small, reddish-brown parasite called the bat bug. In order to protect themselves from the unwanted advances of male members of the species, female bat bugs have evolved a region on their body similar to a fake genital:
It turns out that male bat bugs sport a similar fake genital area, because males often perform "the same injurious sexual acts on other males." All in all, the sex life of the bat bug sounds like a rather unpleasant affair.

Is my baby gay? — A website called Is My Baby Gay offers to inform you of your child's sexual preferences for a fee of only $19.99. They direct customers to print out a circle on a piece of paper. You're then supposed to apply the tongue of your baby to the center of the circle for 15 seconds. You mail this piece of paper to the "Is My Baby Gay" testing center, and they promise to get back to you with an answer within two weeks. If they turn out to be wrong, they promise that they'll refund 150% of your purchase price.

At first I thought this had to be a joke, but apparently they really will take your money. They've set up a paypal payment system to do so. Which transforms this from a joke into something more like a scam. [Note: I didn't actually try to pay them anything, so perhaps at the last minute they decline to take your money... but somehow I doubt it.]

On their front page they've included a phrase which is apparently their legal escape clause: "Results are intended for entertainment purposes only."

I'd like to think that no one would actually take this site seriously and mail in their baby's saliva sample. But there's probably someone out there dumb enough to think this might be for real.

Even dumber would be someone knowing there is no such thing as a saliva test for sexual preference, but paying $19.99 anyway just for the fun of getting some bogus results.

Who’s That Girl? — Recently someone posted on facebook pictures supposedly recovered from a camera they found while on holiday. The photos showed an attractive young woman posing in various stages of undress. The guy who found the camera wrote:

The only thing surprising would have been if this didn't turn out to be a viral marketing campaign for a porn site. But no surprise here. It all turned out to be a viral marketing campaign for a porn site. (Thanks, Cranky Media Guy)

Fake Money For Strippers — Damon Armagost probably thought he had a pretty good scam going. He had printed up some fake $100 bills from an image he downloaded off the internet. He was then using this counterfeit money to pay for lap dances at a strip club. He must have thought the strippers would never notice the money was fake. Unfortunately for him, they did and alerted the police, who arrested Armagost and charged him with manufacturing and passing counterfeit currency.

Carl Sifakis, in his book Hoaxes and Scams, reports on a similar scam called "tishing a lady." It involves paying a prostitute with tissue paper instead of real money. The con artist flashes a large bill at the prostitute and makes a show of stuffing it into her stocking. But in reality he palms the bill and stuffs in tissue paper instead.

Sifakis writes that the con-artist Count Victor Lustig frequently used this scam. He would "warn the female that he had given her trick money, and if she removed it before the following day it would turn to tissue paper. The lady would promise to comply with the rules, but as soon as Lustig left, she would remove her reward; alas, it had indeed turned to tissue paper."

Best of the Forum - 24th August 07 — Due to personal circumstances, this week's Best of the Forum post is brought to you by guest writer and board moderator Madmouse.

Unauthorised Reincarnation Banned in Tibet (MadCarlotta)
China has banned Buddhists from reincarnating without permission, in an apparent attempt to have the next Dalai Lama chosen by the Chinese government.
From the news article:
"According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

This could lead to a situation where there are two Dalai Lamas, one recognised by millions of Buddhists around the world, and one by the Chinese government.
I don’t know how much of an effect this would have, but it would be a situation best avoided, if possible.

Skype Outage Caused By U.S. Government Spy Plan? (LaMa)
There’s been a lot of discussion in the forum about this conspiracy theory.
www.skype-news.com says:
“Skype says the problem was triggered by a Microsoft patch, delivered by Windows Update, which caused an automatic reboot of many PCs. "The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction," says Skype's Villu Arak. According to Arak, the system would normally have recovered quickly, but on this occasion "a previously unseen bug" caused the network to fail.”
However, this news item suggests that the outage was in fact caused by the introduction of eavesdropping technology, made permissible by a newly-introduced law.

Online Game Used As Epidemic Scenario (Hulitoons)
Scientists have been studying players’ reactions to a disease in online game ‘World of Warcraft’. The researchers say that the information gathered about people’s varying reactions to a crisis like this could prove useful in the event of a genuine epidemic.
From the BBC article:
Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”
Even if people might act somewhat differently in a game, I think that this is a reasonable (and safe) way of gathering data.

Rampant Rabbit In Stick-Up (Dave and Madmouse)
A man was jailed for five years for a robbery at a bookmakers in which he used the sex toy instead of a gun. The vibrator was hidden in a carrier bag, and seemed realistic enough that the shop staff handed over £600.
I do wonder what on earth made him think of using that rather than, say, a toy gun…

Penis Peanut — Brenda has been so good as to send me these pictures of a peanut she found that she believes looks like a penis. She writes: I've already told her the name of the casino: goldenpalace.com. As for how to sell this thing, I'm not sure. But I know that, somewhere out there, there's got to be a home for the Penis Peanut.

Biologically Inappropriate Mating Objects — One of the topics I cover in Elephants on Acid is experiments with animals who exhibit mating behavior toward "biologically inappropriate objects." For instance, during the 1950s, Martin Schein and Edgar Hale of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a series of experiments to determine what objects would elicit a sexual response from male turkeys. They discovered that all you have to do is show a male turkey a severed turkey head on a stick, and the dim-witted birds would invariably try to mate with it. And researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center created a "hypersexual cat" who attempted to mate with "a small and rather friendly dog," an old hen, and a rhesus monkey. (I have photographic documentation of these experiments in the book.)

These following stories don't have anything to do with hoaxes, but they did remind me of the experiments in my book:

Lusty Camel Kills Woman
An Australian woman was killed by a pet camel she had received for her 60th birthday when the camel knocked her to the ground, lay on top of her, and began trying to mate with her. Earlier the same camel had almost killed the family's pet goat by trying to have sex with it. I'd say they've got a problem with that camel.

Man Arrested For Sex Acts With Traffic Signs
Proving that no matter how odd the mating behavior of animals is, the behavior of humans is always stranger, police arrested a Sioux Falls man who had amassed a large collection of videos of himself "engaged in masturbation and sex acts with traffic signs near his home."

Man Meets Wife Via Message-in-a-Bottle — An email correspondent asked me if the following story could be true: Initially, I was skeptical, because of the large number of hoaxes involving messages-in-bottles (See here and here). But it turns out that the story of Ake and Paolina is true.

The tale was widely reported in the news back in the late 1950s. A 1959 article in The American Weekly titled "Love in a Bottle" told the story in more detail and actually included a few pictures of the happy couple, in one of which (shown above) they were posing at the spot where she found the bottle. Here's the text of the American Weekly article:

Mother poses as son’s wife — Christopher Crowe had pleaded guilty to domestic battery. When the judge asked his wife to stand up and state if she accepted the plea deal, 47-year-old Rebecca Crowe stood up and said she did. But Rebecca was actually his mother. (Let's hope she was just pretending to be his wife, and it wasn't anything weirder.) The court realized the deception when a prosecutor later saw a picture of Crowe's actual wife.

The article also notes: "Courtroom personnel later admitted they thought the woman looked too old." But that wouldn't have been a good basis for suspecting fraud because older woman/younger man matches are becoming much more common. The most frequently cited example are Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, who are 15 years apart in age, but I'm in this demographic too because my wife, Beverley, is ten years older than I am. Though she definitely would never be able to pass for my mother. I think I seem older than she does.

Vegansexuality — The New Zealand Press reports on a new sexual phenomenon: Vegansexuality. Here are some extracts from the article: Wow. I never thought of myself as a graveyard for animals, but when you put it that way, I guess it is technically true.

I think what's going on here is what anthropologists call the law of sympathetic magic: Once in contact, always in contact. That is, if an offensive object touches a neutral object, the neutral object becomes permanently tainted (in the eyes of the observer) by the contact. It's a totally irrational impulse, but powerful nonetheless.

I write about an experiment in Elephants on Acid in which an experimenter briefly dipped a dried, sterilized cockroach into a glass of apple juice and then asked people if they would be willing to drink the juice. Most people didn't want to, even though the juice was in no way contaminated. It's the same principle as vegansexuality. If something really grosses us out, that sense of disgust will spread to anything touched by the offensive object.

Zombies Crash San Diego Wedding — Imagine this scenario. It's your wedding day. You've been planning for it for months. It's cost you thousands of dollars, but finally the big day has arrived and the entire wedding party is gathered in San Diego's beautiful Balboa Park -- the guests, the caterers, the photographer... and the zombies?

Balboa Park is an extremely popular spot for weddings. In fact, it's where Beverley and I got married five years ago, but it's also completely open to the public. Usually this is no problem. But it became an issue last month when Balboa Park served as the location for San Diego's first-ever zombie walk.

Hundreds of people dressed up as blood-spattered zombies lurched and staggered through the park. It was supposed to be a wacky, flash-mob type event. But the people having weddings there didn't think it was funny. Witness this angry letter-to-the-editor that Glenda Wiederkehr wrote in to the San Diego Union-Tribune: However, Jennifer Griffith, the organizer of the zombie walk, has denied that any zombies dragged themselves through the wedding. She writes: Personally, I would have loved it if zombies had shown up at my wedding, but then, not everyone shares my appreciation for the odd. I can understand that many people would not include zombies in their idea of a dream wedding.

Fake Wedding Cakes — I've heard of renting wedding dresses, but I'd never heard of renting the wedding cake. But apparently renting fake wedding cakes is becoming increasingly popular. Here's how it works: It seems like a sensible idea to me. Though, of course, another option would be simply not to have such an expensive wedding if you can't afford it. I'm constantly amazed at the obscene amounts of money some people spend on their weddings. My wife and I had a very simple, low-key wedding, though we did splurge on an Elvis-shaped groom's cake (real, not fake).

Prom Babies — The latest trend among teenage girls is, apparently, to have a "prom baby." The idea is that girls try to get pregnant on prom night. This sneaky tactic allows them to avoid the pressure of going to college. Instead they substitute the pressure of raising a child.

This trend was reported by a "Worried Dad" who recently wrote in to Dear Abby. He writes:
I'm thinking that either the letter writer was deliberately trying to start a new urban legend, or his daughter's friends were pulling his leg. I have a hard time believing anyone would be stupid enough to think that raising a kid is easier than going to college.

And as one blogger points out, "If they really wanted to sabotage their own chances of going to college, wouldn't they just submit a poor application?"

I think "prom babies" should be classified as an urban legend of the "shocking sexual behavior of teenage girls" variety, along with other legends such as Jelly Bracelet Sex Codes and Rainbow Parties.

Public Break-up — A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill couple, Ryan Burke and Mindy Moorman, have admitted that their Valentine’s Day break-up was nothing more than a prank.

The story went that the couple had been dating for four months when Burke discovered Moorman had been cheating on him.
He invited people via facebook.com to watch the confrontation, which featured a group of singers performing the Dixie Chicks song “I’m Not Ready to Make Nice” before he broke up with Moorman, to which she responded with expletives. Hundreds of people turned up to the event, and it was quickly posted on youtube.com, where the video has been seen by thousands of people worldwide.

However, twelve days after the break-up, Burke admitted that the entire story was a prank. He and Moorman had never even dated, and they had set up the spectacle to show ”the power of Internet communities and the amount of money that companies make from them.”

Quick Links: Fake Cyber Romance Leads to Death, etc. —
Fake Cyber Romance Leads to Death
22-year-old Brian Barrett was shot to death by his 47-year-old co-worker, Thomas Montgomery, who was jealous of his internet relationship with the young woman that Montgomery had been having a cyber fling with. What neither of them knew was that the woman involved was not 18, as she said, but a 40-something mother who was using her daughter’s identity.

CNN Debunks Obama Report
CNN have refuted Insight magazine’s claims that Democratic Sen. Barack Obama was raised in a radical Muslim school.

Protesters for Hire
For around €150 per person, a group of young Germans are offering themselves as demonstrators for whatever protest you happen to be running.

(Thanks, Firefly and Charybdis.)