You wouldn't want to run into this thing while out for a stroll in the woods. It's a 1000lb wild hog with 9-inch tusks, nicknamed Hogzilla, that hunting Guide Chris Griffin claims to have shot in Georgia last month. To put this in perspective, 500lb wild hogs are considered enormous. No one has ever heard of a 1000lb wild hog before, so it's raising a few eyebrows. Plus, the only evidence for the creature's existence is a picture Griffin snapped of himself posing beside it. He says that he buried the hog soon after killing it. In the picture of Griffin with Hogzilla, the hog sure looks big. Hogzilla could be real. Or the picture could be photoshopped, though I haven't seen a good enough copy of the image to make a judgement on that. Or Griffin could have obtained a large hog from a farm. In the hoax forum, posters have pointed out that tricks of perspective might make the hog look bigger than it really is... though even taking distorted perspective into account, that still seems like a big hog. If I were Griffin, I'd dig the skeleton up to prove that Hogzilla is real, because a picture alone is not indisputable evidence.
Update: A better quality picture of Hogzilla can be seen at Kens-fishfarm.com, and David Emery notes that there have been previous stories about giant hogs caught in the wild.

Stephen Wagner, over at About.com's Paranormal Phenomena Blog, reports that this picture of a very weird looking creature has been circulating via email. So is the creature real, or is it photoshopped? After some research, Stephen discovered that the creature is real. It's a deep-sea creature known as the Longnosed Chimera.

This story about a catfish with a big, red inflatable ball stuck in its mouth found bobbing around in Sandalwood Lake has been getting quite a bit of attention. Apparently the guy who found the fish, Bill Driver, first saw a red ball in the water, then he noticed that there was a catfish attached to it. The story was reported in the Wichita Eagle by Michael Pearce, so there's no reason to think it isn't true. But what I wonder about is how the ball got into the fish's mouth in the first place. Aren't catfish bottom feeders? So how would it have come across a ball floating on the surface? Is it possible that someone stuck the ball in its mouth and then released it in the lake? Who knows. Though it's just as possible that the fish was swimming near the surface for some reason, saw the ball, and opened its mouth real, real wide. I guess I'll just have to file this case under 'unsolvable mysteries.'

Ripley the Cat has a weblog, and he writes all the entries himself. But I don't think it's a hoax, because my cat writes the exact same kind of stuff on the computer. Maybe it's some kind of secret language that we humans have yet to decode. (via The Presurfer)

A photo of a curious fish with one head but two bodies has been doing the email rounds. Is it real, or is it Photoshop? It's real, if the Texas Reptiles website can be trusted (and they sound like they know what they're talking about to me). The picture shows a siamese Northern Pike caught by Donald Tayer on the Ottertail River in North Dakota. The Texas Reptiles site also has an interesting gallery of other 'freaks of nature,' including a photo of an 18-foot alligator supposedly found on a construction site in Florida (the picture is real, but the gator was only 13.5 feet long).

Digging through my harddrive, I came across this news item I saved at some time in the past and then forgot about. So here it is:

A classified ad was placed in a New Zealand newspaper in July 2001. It read,

"Where is Killer? We are missing our fat, furry, friendly cat. Killer is a marmalade-coloured tabby cat with a heart of gold and a hearty appetite. He's probably gone to your house to eat your food! If you've seen Killer please let us know. He has a missing right eye, a ripped ear, a limp, a scar down his spine. Please call Jim or June, or John or Joe."

Something about the description of Killer caught people's fancy, and soon hundreds of people were calling the number listed at the bottom of the ad. Some of them claimed they had seen Killer. Others just wanted to learn more about the battle-scarred feline and maybe help find him. Unfortunately Killer wasn't real. He had been invented by a group of co-workers playing a joke on a new employee. His phone reportedly rang all day.

Proving, yet again, that truth is stranger than fiction, I present you with VIP Fibers (I'm assuming this is real... I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be). Send VIP Fibers a bundle of your pet's fur, and they'll turn it into any knit good of your choice, except socks. As the site explains: "Many dogs and cats have a fine and lustrous undercoat so suitable for spinning. It does not, however, have the crimp or elasticity such as found in wool from a sheep, and therefore is not suitable for all projects such as socks." My cat sheds constantly, but it never occurred to me that all that fur on the floor could be put to good use. Now I have the perfect christmas presents for my entire family. (via Red Ferret Journal)

Can't think what to get your significant other for their next birthday? What about a penguin? As Penguin Warehouse, the internet's #1 domesticated penguin dealer, notes: "Penguins make wonderful birthday and holiday gifts all year long." Penguin Warehouse offers a variety of penguins including Emperor, King, Rockhopper, and Macaroni.

Cicadaville reveals the dangerous truth about cicadas. For instance, did you know that cicadas are vicious killers that prey on children and pets? You do now. I was also surprised to learn that there are many cases of cicadas being successfully altered, with minor surgery, to look like Ryan Seacrest.

According to Horse & Hound magazine, British health authorities have decided to make it the law that all children must wear face masks and rubber gloves while doing yard work or grooming horses. Health and Safety spokeswoman Lirap Ducek is quoted as saying, "Childhood asthma has increased three-fold in the last 10 years, and we want to ensure that children are protected against picking up bugs which can have long-term health implications." But before you send your kid out in a rubber mask, you might want to check the release date on that story: April 1. That's right, it was an April Fool's Day joke. But apparently hundreds of people in England fell for it.

Roman Kingsley is an Australian man who has trained geese to do skywriting, or 'birdtyping' as he calls it. Impossible, you say? Not at all, according to Kingsley. As he says in this interview, "It normally takes about three months to train the birds to spell out a word. Once each bird knows the letter, they have to know where in the word that letter occurs. But I’m hoping to speed it up more in the future. The curved letters, you know, like o, c, and b take the birds a bit longer. But it’s early days." His plan is to have his birds spell out various corporate logos. Volvo is his first client (Volkswagen passed on the offer). He's going for clients with straight letters in their name. In the future he even hopes to have the geese squawk on cue, to add a sound element to the skywriting. Okay, I wouldn't bet a lot of money on the reality of Kingsley and his skywriting geese, but maybe he is real. I'll let you decide for yourself. He's described in a new book by Australian writer Stephen Banham called Fancy that mixes together factual and fictional stories about typography

The cicadas have returned, and with them the rumor that researchers at Johns Hopkins University will pay up to $1000 for specimens of rare blue-eyed cicadas. Unfortunately, the rumor simply isn't true. In fact, no researcher at Johns Hopkins even studies cicadas, let alone insects, though back in 1947 the university did employ a Biologist, William D. McElroy (who later moved out to UC San Diego), who announced that he would pay kids twenty-five cents for every 100 fireflies they could catch. McElroy was always criticized for this by people who said that he was somehow contributing to the depletion of the firefly population, though I doubt the kids ever made a dent in their numbers. (via David Emery).