If you visit Loch Ness, you probably won't see Nessie, but you will see a lot of confused tourists, thanks to confusing road signs that local businesses have been putting up.

For instance, many tourists who are looking for Urquhart Castle wind up in the Loch Ness Monster Visitor Centre because of a large road sign for "Glen Urquhart Castle" that points toward the Visitor Centre. The word "Glen" is in tiny, small letters, and most people probably wouldn't realize that Glen Urquhart Castle is different than Urquhart Castle.

Urquhart Castle is a real castle (and definitely worth seeing). Glen Urquhart Castle is just a wooden building attached to the Loch Ness Monster Visitor Centre.

Link: Inverness Courier.

The Science Channel has a list of the Top 10 Science Hoaxes. I'm giving it a thumbs down, because it's a pretty feeble list. It's the kind of thing someone who didn't know much about science or hoaxes might put together by surfing the web for a few hours.

It starts off with Harold Miner's analysis of the Nacirema tribe at #10. This is a famous anthropological satire (Nacirema is American spelled backwards), but I wouldn't consider it a hoax, unless any comedy or fiction can count as a hoax.

El Chupacabra comes in at #3. (Should El Chupacabra even count as science?)

A better list was put together by Tim Radford and published in the Guardian back in 2003.

One of these days I need to write a Top 10 Science Hoaxes list of my own. I'll add it to my list of things to do.

Thanks to Bob for the link!

Philadelphia Mom Bonnie Sweeten had apparently been embezzling money from a charity where she worked for years. Fearing that she was about to be found out, she fled to Orlando with her daughter, but not before concocting a hoax about being abducted by two black men who rear-ended her SUV. (She placed a call to 911, pretending she was locked in the trunk of the black men's car.)

I guess the hoax was intended to cover her tracks, but I'm not sure if it didn't simply increase police scrutiny, making them search more closely for her than they otherwise would have. Obvious signs that her call was a hoax: a) the call was placed miles from the scene where she said the abduction occurred; b) police soon found her car, unharmed; c) police then identified Sweeten on airport video, boarding a flight to Orlando with her daughter. The police tracked Sweeten down in Orlando and arrested her.

If someone wanted to disappear effectively, I would think they should slip away quietly, to give themselves as much of a head start as possible. And also avoid airports and other places with lots of security cameras.

Links: Yahoo! News, Philly.com.

The BBC reports that Welsh-language road signs mysteriously appeared on the Longthorpe Parkway in Cambridgeshire. They suspect it was the work of a practical joker. Presumably a Welsh practical joker.

The Coude Catheter is a curved tip catheter. The bend in the tip apparently is useful for inserting the catheter through the urethra into the bladder. You can buy one on Amazon for $7.78.

Back in 1957, The Leech, the journal of the students' society of the Welsh National School of Medicine at Cardiff, published an article about how the Coude Catheter got its name. It claimed it was named after a nineteenth-century French doctor, Emile Coude. The Leech offered a short biography of Coude and even had a picture of him.

However, Emile Coude was a hoax. There never was such a man. Coude is actually a French word meaning elbow or bent. But the hoax almost fooled the editors of a medical textbook, A Short Practice of Surgery, before they realized their error at the last minute and removed all references to him from the galley proofs.

I've got the full details of this obscure medical hoax in the archive.

I periodically get bored with how the site looks and decide it needs to be overhauled. That's the kind of mood I was in today, so I redesigned the blog.

I'm not sure if the new look is better or worse than the old one, but it is different, which is the important thing. (I haven't yet changed the comments or permalink pages, so if you're nostalgic for the old look, you can see it there, for now.)

In another year or two I'll probably get bored of this look and change it again.

More importantly, I'm also adding a new section to the site: the Hoax Archive.

One of the problems with the site has been that, although it contains a lot of information, that information has been very disorganized. There are all kinds of stray articles in forgotten corners of the site. So I'm trying to import all that information into one central database. I'm also merging the hoaxipedia into the archive, so that everything will be in one place, and easily searchable.

There's still a lot of work to do on it. I've only imported about one-third of the site's articles into it. But since I'm unveiling a new front page, I figured I might as well unveil the Hoax Archive as well.

A few months ago it was revealed that Herman Rosenblat had invented his story about how he met his wife while he was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and she was a young girl from the nearby village who would give him apples through the fence. The revelation caused his book deal to be canceled.

But Gawker reports that York House Press is now turning his tale into a book anyway... they're just clearly labeling it as fiction. And they paid someone else to write it.

I think I understand York House Press' reasoning. They must have been impressed by how people like Oprah called Rosenblat's story the greatest love story ever told, and they figured that even though it's fake, it's still a great story. Thus the decision to put it out as a novel. The problem is, it was only a great story because people thought it was real. Once it's exposed as a fraud, it's no longer a great story. It then becomes a manipulative and exploitative story.

The latest viral hoax photos circulating online claim to show shots of the Panama Women's Cricket Team. It doesn't take a degree in Photoshop to realize these women's buttocks have been digitally altered.

Fool Blogger has tracked down what appears to be one of the unaltered originals.

The Fakes:

The Real One:

What I don't know is whether this actually is the Panama Women's Cricket Team. A google search for "Panama Women's Cricket Team" simply brings up these photos.

What Students Want — Scottish high school students were given a survey to find out what resources they would like to see in the area to help it develop. The answer: fast-food restaurants, cinemas, and a brothel. [BBC]

Severed Arm Prank — A strange April Fool's Day prank: A Ministry of Fisheries worker on a trawler in subantarctic waters radioed his superior to tell him that a human arm had been found in the water. Specifically, his message said:

A full-scale search and rescue operation was prepared, but then the observer admitted it was just an April Fool prank. Apparently he had played the same one five years ago. Sounds like someone is going a little stir crazy down there in the subantarctic! [Otago Daily Times]

MomSourcing — MomSourcing: "You know you should call your mom on Mother's Day. But in today's fast-paced world, between work, hobbies, and "me time," it can be hard to squeeze in. We can help. Outsource your Mother's Day responsibilities to MomSourcing and let us make the call for you." According to Boing Boing, it's a joke. But I wonder how long before it proves to be a case of satirical prophecy.

Snake Head with Broccoli — The latest case of the gross things found in food scam: A man dining at TGI Friday's claimed he found a rotting snake head in his side order of broccoli. But testing has now revealed that the snake's head was never cooked and must have been placed in the broccoli at some point after the cooking process. So foul play is now suspected. The guy who found the head claims he didn't put it there, and since he isn't suing the restaurant, he may be telling the truth.

Moms Behaving Badly — A dispute between two young girls escalated into an online fight between the mothers. The mother of one of the girls posted an ad on Craigslist offering sex with men, and listed the phone number of the other girl's mother as the contact. Twenty-two people called the number. The woman has now been charged with aggravated harrassment. [Newsday]

Wikipedia Hoax — Irish student Shane Fitzgerald conducted an experiment to test whether journalists blindly rely upon wikipedia as a source of information. Shortly after composer Maurice Jarre died, Fitzgerald placed a false quote on the wikipedia page about him, claiming Jarre had said: "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear."

Sure enough, the quotation soon appeared in newspapers throughout the world. Why is this no surprise? [Yahoo]

Is the bust of Nefertiti a fake? — Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin argues that the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti on display in Berlin's Pergamon museum is a fake. He says that it was created around 1912 as a way for an archaeologist to color test ancient pigments found at the digs, but when a German prince mistook it for an ancient work of art, the archaeologist didn't have the courage to correct his important guest. And so the statue came to be regarded as an ancient work of art. [Agence France Presse]