The above picture has been doing the rounds in recent months, often with the caption "Very Tall Bride."

The bride in the photo is Allyssa DeHaan, a collegiate basketball player at Michigan State University from 2006 to 2010. In real life DeHaan is very tall — 6 ft 9in. So could this photo be real?

Well, no. When I first saw it, I thought perhaps she was standing on a box, perhaps for a gag photo. But some more investigation revealed her height in the photo is a result of good, old-fashioned photoshopping. The manipulation was done by a DeviantArt member going by the username lowerrider, who enjoys creating fantasy photos of giant women.

I found the original, unaltered photo of DeHaan at her wedding (below) over at Flickr.

This is all over the news. [oregonlive, csmonitor] Some girl scouts in Portland, Oregon thought they had landed a massive sale of cookies when they received an order via email for 6000 boxes — a $24,000 order.

Whoever was handling the order (a scout's mother, I assume) exchanged some emails with the buyer, and everything seemed legitimate. The buyer was even an acquaintance of the troop. So the girl scouts went ahead and processed the order, committing themselves to receiving 6000 boxes.

And then they discovered the mega-order was a fake. The buyer was actually a young girl using her mother's email address. The girl was apparently young enough that she didn't fully understand the signficance of what she was doing. She just thought it was a funny joke. The Portland troop can't return the cookies, so it's now holding a special sale to try to unload all 6000 boxes. So far, half have been sold. (Which, already, is way more than the troop usually sells.)

My first thought, when I heard this story, was, "Wouldn't it be clever if the hoax order was itself a hoax... a ploy to drum up sales." But my next thought was, "No, I seriously doubt a bunch of girl scouts would be cynical enough, or brazen enough, to pull off a stunt like that." So I'm going to accept that everything here happened exactly the way it's being reported.

Word got out this week that the Ukrainian military had lost three dolphins in the Black Sea after the dolphins swam away from their trainers, apparently to search for mates. The problem: these were trained attack dolphins "equipped with firearms."


The source of the story was a document that appeared online that seemed to be a scan of a letter from the head of a Ukrainian military research institute to naval command warning of the dolphin escape. The story took off when it got picked up by RIA Novosti (the Russian International News Agency) and from there spread to the western media.


However, Ukraine's Defense Ministry has denied the story is true, pointing out that the scanned document wasn't on letterhead and lacked an official stamp. And, more importantly, it points out that Ukraine doesn't have a military dolphin program. The Soviets used to have one, but that ended long ago. [links: en.ria.ru, alaskadispatch.com

I found the following story posted in the March 3, 1944 issue of the Carteret Press (scanned and hosted by the Woodbridge, NJ Public Library):



But I'm having trouble understanding exactly how the scam would have been profitable. First, if the car was a rental, wouldn't it have been easy to find out the identity of the scammer? Unless, of course, he used a fake ID to rent the car. Second, some kind of deposit must have been required by the rental agency. By abandoning the car, the scammer would have lost this deposit. But if he took in more from the victims than he lost on the deposit, I suppose this wouldn't matter.

Perhaps I just answered my own questions!

File this under Low Threshold of Belief. Several Southeast Asian news sites have recently published photos that supposedly document the presence of "extra terrestrial beings" here on Earth. For instance, the Visayan Daily Star ran a picture (below) of "Emily Santodelsis" posing with a small alien. Strangely, she insisted that she hadn't noticed the alien while the picture was being taken. She only spotted it later, when she looked at the photo.


And back in January, the Bangkok Post ran a picture of an alien supposedly spotted on a beach in Thailand.


The Open Minds UFO investigation site explains that the appearance of these alien photos coincides with the addition of new special effects to the Camera360 app for Android phones. These special effects allow the easy addition of UFOs, extraterrestrials, or lightning to photos taken with the Android phone.

The latest issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an article that reviews the history of how the crystal "Aztec" skulls that began showing up in the mid-19th century were eventually found to be fake. The take home is that the following pieces of evidence led researchers to conclude the skulls were modern forgeries:

• The skulls didn't come from documented archaeological sites.
• The skulls' teeth were suspiciously linear and perfect, whereas the teeth in other Aztec art reflected the lack of Aztec dentistry.
• Microscopic analysis revealed that the crystal skulls had regular etch marks, such as would be made by modern rotary wheels and hard abrasives, not ancient hand-held tools.
• Spectroscopic analysis showed that the rock crystal had "green, wormlike inclusions" characteristic of rock crystal from Brazil or Madagascar, not Mexico.
• And finally, X-ray diffraction revealed that some of the skulls were coated in deposits of silicon carbide, "a synthetic abrasive used in stone-carving workshops only starting in the mid-20th century."

On Monday, a man calling himself "Basilius," wearing a cassock, black fedora and purple sash, tried to gain access to the pre-conclave meeting of cardinals at the Vatican. He made it through one level of security before being stopped by the Swiss Guard. Spiegel Online has a profile of the guy, whose real name is Ralph Napierski. Apparently Napierski has a history of posing as a Catholic bishop, though Spiegel isn't quite sure what to make of him, debating whether he's "a joker, a church critic or simply an eccentric with strong leanings toward esotericism."

Napierski's history includes: Claiming to be the leader of the "Catholic Order Corpus Dei" (a non-existent order, but perhaps a play on the real "Opus Dei"); conducting a fake auction on eBay that "drove the price of a small digital photo to €10 million" (he said he did it to highlight a security loophole); and attending Berlin's "Venus" erotic trade fair, dressed as a priest, in order, so he said, to promote the use of sex toys by Catholics.

In the thumbnail below, Napierski is the guy on the left. You can also check out Napierski's website.

This levitating computer mouse (aka "The Bat") is listed as a product in the "testing period and research" phase on the site of Kibardin Design. But it's raising a few skeptical eyebrows. Not that it wouldn't be possible to build a levitating mouse, but io9 notes, "to us it looks a little like someone took a Microsoft Arc Mouse, fixed it to a plastic ring, and added a few aesthetic details with the help of some carefully applied modeling clay and a couple coats of Krylon."


Even if it is real, what would be the point of a levitating mouse? The Kibardin Design site says the mouse is designed "to prevent and treat the contemporary disease Carpal tunnel syndrome," but as someone who suffers from Carpal tunnel syndrome, I don't see why this would help. It looks like you'd need to keep your wrist bent at a strange angle to use it, which would make the condition worse, not better. Also, would the mouse be able to support the weight of a hand?

Remember Bonsai Kittens — the hoax about growing kittens in a jar? It seems that they've finally made their way from the internet into print, serving as the title for Lakshmi Narayan's new novel.


I would have expected that a novel titled "Bonsai Kitten" would be a work of gross-out fiction aimed at young men. But not so! Narayan was inspired by the idea of a Bonsai Kitten to write a work of serious literary fiction about the struggles of young brides in Indian society. Here's the book description on Amazon:


The Hindu has an article about the book, revealing that it took Lakshmi 17 years to complete the book, and discussing why she chose Bonsai Kittens as a metaphor:

Artist Tracey Snelling has created an installation which she calls Last House on the Left. It consists of 4 miniature houses from horror films (The Birds, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and the Amityville Horror. It's the Amityville Horror Dutch Colonial that caught my eye. If I ever did have a brick-and-mortar hoax museum, it would make a great addition!


Snelling's miniature houses feature sound effects as well as tiny LCDs that play clips from the films when you look through the windows. The installation is currently on exhibit at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.

The Stark Insider blog has posted a video of the Amityville house on display:



Update: According to Tim Farley, today (March 6th) is the 37th anniversary of Ed & Lorraine Warren investigating the Amityville Horror house with a TV news crew.