On Monday (April 13) Buster Martin completed the London marathon in a time of approximately ten hours. What made this remarkable was his age. Martin claims to be 101-years-old. If true, this would make him the oldest person ever to complete a marthon. (The former record holder was 98-year-old Dimitrion Yordanidies who completed the Athens marathon in 1976 with a time of 7.5 hours.) But Martin's age has been called into question.

Martin says he was born on September 1, 1906. The British National Health Service, however, says he previously told them he was born in 1913, which would make him a mere 94.

The problem is that Martin has no birth certificate because he was born in France and later moved to a British orphanage. So there's no way to verify his exact age. Guinness World Records has refused to list him as the new record holder, insisting they need a birth certificate.

Perhaps Martin actually comes from Vilcabamba, the Ecuadorian town of very old people. As Vilcabamba demonstrated, the phenomenon of age exaggeration is well known to anthropologists. The problem is that it's very tempting for very old people to add a few more years onto their age, since it's an easy way to get more attention. So a lot of people who are getting close to 100 decide to bump up their age to make themselves older than 100.

Also running in the marathon were a man who dribbled a basketball the entire way, a girl on 4ft stilts, an 80-year-old woman, a blind man, and a team of six Masai warriors who sang traditional songs as they ran in shoes made from tires.

Many British papers have reported the humorous story of a young woman who called the operator trying to order a cab, but instead had a cabinet delivered to her home. Her problem was too much Cockney, and too little Queen's English. From Ananova:


Two things make me suspicious of the story. 1) It sounds a lot like the classic "lost in translation" urban legend. 2) It originated from a Displaysense press release, which means that it's probably the invention of a press agent.

The latest viral video going around shows Kobe Bryant jumping over a moving Aston Martin. Is it real? I doubt it, though I can't definitively prove it's fake.

Think about it. Why would he risk his career by trying to jump over a car? That's what special effects are for.

A better quality version of the video can be seen at Bryant's website.

The protests and demonstrations occurring everywhere the Olympic Torch appears have reminded me of the prank from the 1956 Olympic torch relay in Australia, when a guy carrying a wooden chair leg topped by a pair of flaming underwear ran out in front of the crowd waiting to see the torch bearer pass by, and everyone in the crowd thought he was the real thing. He was even greeted by the mayor of Sydney. The full article about the Olympic Underwear Relay is in the hoaxipedia.

The 1956 prankster was mocking the idea of the torch relay itself. He felt the torch relay was treated with too much reverence, given that the tradition of the relay originated during the 1936 games in Nazi Germany. I keep waiting for someone to try to replicate his prank this year, but it hasn't happened yet. There's so much security surrounding the runners, it would be hard to pull it off.

Another memorable torch-relay moment occurred in 2002 when 18-year-old Joseph Frederick stood on the street across from his high school in Juneau, Alaska and held up a sign reading "Bong hits 4 Jesus" as the Olympic torch passed by. It earned him a 10 day suspension. Frederick appealed, and the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the principal did have the right to discipline him, even though Frederick wasn't on school property when he held up the sign.

Hudson Pace writes: "I was scraping out a baking tin when I discovered this Face of Jesus on the bottom! I thought of putting it on Ebay, but then I thought, I don't need the money, so why not cut out the middleman and send the picture straight to the Museum of Hoaxes? Hope you like it."

Very nice. Thanks, Hudson. And it's made me think that I really should create a Pareidolia Gallery to better categorize all these image-bearing baking tins, trees, pieces of toast, etc.

Paul Collins has an interesting article in New Scientist about the Mundaneum, a mid-twentieth century effort to create a vast, interlinked archive, like a "proto-internet," using index cards. But what caught my eye was the first paragraph:


It's like the old urban legend about a library sinking because the engineers forgot to include the weight of the books in their calculations. Though I'm not sure that the weight of the index cards was the cause of the collapse of Ford's Theater. The wikipedia article about the Ford's Theater disaster (I was surprised to discover there is a wikipedia article about such a now obscure event), notes that workmen had removed part of the theater's foundation and had failed to shore up the building above it. Thus, it came crashing down.

So the Ford's Theater disaster may not be a real-life example of the sinking-library urban legend. But I'm sure there's an example somewhere of a library that collapsed because of the weight of its books.

Backyard Phenomena has posted an interesting speculation about why some witnesses report receiving telepathic messages from Bigfoot:


Some military experiments have shown that microwaves can be used to make a person hear sounds inside their head. So Backyard Phenomena suggests that, "If Bigfoot and UFOs go together, as I believe they do, then their alien handlers could use microwave technology to confound or control witnesses via seeming telepathy."

Me? I'm sticking with the "they're crazy" explanation.

The image shows the silhouette of a woman turning round and round. (She seems to be naked, but I'd say it's safe for work.) The text says:

I stared at the spinning woman for a while, but I could only see her turning clockwise. I kept asking her in my mind to change direction, but she wouldn't. Can other people actually see her turn anti-clockwise? Apparently so. One guy analyzed the image frame by frame to find out how the illusion works. But I'm not seeing it.

In fact, I'm thinking it might be a joke designed to get people to stare at the image for hours, desperately trying to will the woman to change direction. But she never will. (Thanks, Nirmala)

More tree pareidolia. But this time, it's not the Virgin Mary. It's a naked lady. In theory, it could be a naked Virgin Mary, but no one has made that claim.

The tree, which is over 100 years old, stood on a corner in West Chester, Pennsylvania. It was going to be cut down. After its branches were removed, local residents noticed the woman. It wasn't enough to save the tree. They chopped it down anyway, but the owners are planning on making a statue out of the wood.

I'm guessing there's at least one guy like this in every company. The Mainichi Daily News reports:

This has nothing to do with Paris Hilton's friend Nicole Richie. Though it would be a benefit to mankind if the two of them would vanish into thin air. The title refers to the French actress Nicole Riche who in 1950 was starring in the stage production of No Orchids for Miss Blandish at the Grand Guignol theater in Paris. The play is about a woman who gets kidnapped by a gangster. Nicole Riche played the title character. She probably wasn't chosen for the part because of her great acting ability. More important was looking good in the flimsy white negligee she wore most of the time onstage.

On the evening of March 29, 1950, in between the second and third acts of the show, Riche suddenly disappeared. Kidnapping was suspected. Three days later she showed up -- strolling into a Paris police station at 3 a.m. (still in her white negligee), claiming she had been abducted by "Puritans" who kept her imprisoned in a room while lecturing her about her immoral lifestyle. According to her, the Puritans had finally dumped her in a forest, but luckily some kindly gypsies happened by who helped her get back to the city.

None of this was true. It turned out to have been a publicity stunt cooked up by the Grand Guignol's manager. The police had suspected as much from the start. Still, the stunt worked. The "kidnapping" made headlines throughout the world. More details, and a few grainy photos of Riche, in the hoax archive.

I have no idea what became of Riche. If you do a google search for her name you get a message saying "Did you mean: "nicole richie" and lots of links to people who have misspelled Richie's last name.

Father Francesco Saverio Bazzoffi, a priest in Florence, is being investigated for fraud for performing "fake exorcisms." From the Catholic News Agency:


So as long as he can prove that his associates really were possessed by demons, he should be able to beat the charges.

The novel Charm has already sold more than 100,000 copies. It debuted at No. 13 on the New York Times best-seller list. However, its author, Kendall Hart, isn't real. Hart is a character on the ABC soap opera "All My Children." As this NY Times article puts it: "It has Kendall’s name on the cover but the name of the actual writer is being kept secret."

This is why writers get depressed. They work hard to produce good books, which end up in remainder bins. Meanwhile, people flock in droves to buy a book just because it has the name of a soap opera character slapped on the front cover.

These kind of books spun-off from TV shows seem to be increasingly common. I think Lost has produced a few of them, which have also sold well.

Pictures have been circulating showing an expanded observation deck that is supposedly going to be added to the Eiffel Tower, transforming it into something resembling a giant mushroom. An article in the Guardian stated:


But it turns out that the Eiffel Tower is not going to have an expanded observation deck, nor did Serero Archictects win a competition to redesign it. The Eiffel Tower management company has completely disavowed such a project, saying, "This is a hoax. We have no idea where this came from. The whole thing is preposterous." Meanwhile, Serero has posted an explanatory note on its website:

Some more reports from April 1st: the good (or at least midly amusing), bad, and plain ugly.

The Good
List Universe posted the Top 10 Bizarre Genetically Modified Organisms. I saw this today, without realizing it was an April Fool's Day joke, and it had me going for a while. My favorite on the list was the paper tree which "grows square leaves that, when dried, are already usable as writing paper." • ThinkGeek wrote about a strange new Nintendo Wii game: Super Pii Pii Brothers. The point of the game: "A series of toilets are presented on screen and the challenge is to tilt your body to control a never-ending stream of pee." • The Norwegian energy company Statkraft released a video announcing they had developed a way to generate power from starlight. • WestJet announced that it would be converting overhead compartments on its planes into sleeper cabins. (Not that bad an idea.)

The Bad
A New Zealand radio station claimed that the Foo Fighters would be playing at an Auckland venue. Hundreds of people took the day off work. Some even booked plane tickets to make it to the concert. Sorry, no concert! • Two Los Angeles DJs pretended that a two-year-old was being tattooed in their studio. When the (fake) child began to scream, some listeners called the police. It was not only a stupid joke, it wasn't even original.

The Ugly
An Australian woman called emergency services to tell them her baby had fallen off the bed and stopped breathing. When the ambulances arrived, there was no sick baby. It was her idea of a hilarious April Fool. • But the absolute worst story from April 1st: