Hoax Museum Blog: Death

Quick Links: Megan Meier, fake lawyer, etc. — I'm on the road up to Lake Tahoe for Thanksgiving, but here's a few quick links I've been meaning to post.

Online hoax leads to girl's suicide
The case of Megan Meier is attracting lots of attention, both online and offline. Megan believed that a young guy on MySpace was interested in her, but when Josh started to send her nasty messages, she committed suicide. Later it was discovered that "Josh" was a fake alias created by adults in Megan's neighborhood. A bizarre case, and one that underlines how important it is for kids to learn to be skeptical about information (and people) they find online.

Man Accused of Posing as a Lawyer
Cranky Media Guy writes, "I love the lawyer's "explanations" of his client's behavior."

Belly Dancer Indicted Over Fake Degree
"A high-profile belly dancer has been indicted for allegedly fabricating her university diploma, a prosecution official said Tuesday in the latest fake-degree scandal to hit education-obsessed South Korea." Since when has it become important for belly dancers to have advanced degrees?

Let's Marry Before Hanging Up
The latest prank from Pakistan: "The latest spin for the emergency helpline (Rescue 15) operators is prank calls from girls, who first report a ‘crime’ and then ask operators to marry them over the telephone." What are kids going to dream up next?
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007.   Comments (25)

Hawk Kills Whitey — The students of Ohio State are in mourning after a hawk killed Whitey, an albino squirrel that was widely known around the campus. A facebook page has been created to honor Whitey's memory. It currently has over 2100 members. The Lantern, Ohio State's student newspaper, reports:
Whitey's life was cut short at around 2 p.m. Friday when a hawk spotted his white fur coat from above and flew in for the kill. Several students walking through the South Oval witnessed the aftermath of the attack, the proud hawk looming over its prey...
After about five minutes, the hawk flew away with its talons fastened to the squirrel's lifeless body. The hawk made it as far as the other side of the South Oval when Whitey's weight forced the predator to land. In some nearby shrubbery the hawk sampled his prey before flying away.

This reminded me of the Killer Hawk of Chicago, which got Chicagoans upset back in 1927 because it was killing pigeons outside the Art Institute. A lot of people had doubts about whether the Killer Hawk of Chicago was actually real, or whether it was the invention of a paper trying to drum up sales. But it sounds like Ohio State's Whitey-killing Hawk is real.
Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007.   Comments (7)

Did Morrissey predict the death of Princess Diana? — Here's an unusual theory. David Alice, webmaster of dianamystery.com, argues that the singer Morrissey (formerly of The Smiths) predicted the death of Princess Diana. I would dismiss it all as an elaborate joke, except that the guy seems really serious about it.

The crux of his argument (at least in the video posted below) is that one of the songs on The Smiths' album The Queen is Dead, speaks about two people getting killed together in a car crash. And this song was released as an exclusive single in France. He comes up with a variety of other clues and weird coincidences, all equally farfetched.

The guy's theory is like a strange inversion of the Paul is Dead rumor, in that the Paul is Dead rumor involved people combing through the Beatles's music to find clues referring to a car crash that had supposedly happened in the past, whereas this guy is desperately searching through Morrissey's music to find evidence that the singer was providing clues about a car crash that would happen in the future.


Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007.   Comments (13)

Detective Poses As Corpse — Here's a story about a detective who had to go deep undercover, posing as a corpse in order to catch a man who was vandalizing hearses belonging to a funeral home:
The funeral directors contacted the Portsmouth Business Crime Reduction Partnership which hired a team of private detectives. They spent five days posing as members of the public and using cameras to stake out the firm. But cars continued to be damaged under their noses so security firm Storewatch decided one of their team had to hide inside a body bag. There the detective could watch a computer displaying live images from cameras inside and outside the vehicle. Mark Ferns, Storewatch director said: "Our guy would do three or four hours in the bag and then would have to take what the Americans call a comfort break.

I don't really understand why they couldn't have achieved the same thing with remote control cameras.
Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007.   Comments (2)


Tombstone Humor — The temperature reached 110 degrees on my patio today. I sat inside the whole day with a fan blowing on me, wishing I had air conditioning, and wondering how anyone could think global warming is a hoax.

I also put together a list of tombstone humor, which I posted in the hoaxipedia.

My favorite humorous epitaph that I came across, which supposedly can be found on a tombstone in a Maine cemetery (though I have my doubts) is this one:

“Tears cannot restore her. Therefore do I weep.”

It took me a few seconds to get it.
Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007.   Comments (18)

Death-Predicting Dog — imageFirst there was Oscar, the death-predicting cat. Now there's Scamp, the death-predicting schnauzer. Metro.co.uk reports:
Scamp, a Schnauzer, lives at The Pines nursing home in Ohio – where his owner, a staff member, claims he has been present for the death of virtually every patient for the past three years. That's around forty deaths, twice as many as Oscar the cat's kill count of 20. Deirdre Huth, Scamps owner, says that the doomhound always turns up in the hours before one of the residents dies, waiting patiently in their room until they pass away. 'He has either barked or he'll pace around the room. The only time he barks is when he's trying to tell us something's wrong,' she said. 'It's not like he's a grim reaper,' she added, inaccurately.
It sounds like these death-predicting animals are a fairly common phenomenon, though I suspect it all must be some kind of Clever Hans Effect. Now we need some death-predicting rabbits, gerbils, and parakeets to round out the menagerie.
Posted: Mon Aug 20, 2007.   Comments (2)

Poe Toaster Revealed — image RainOubliette has beaten me to the punch and already posted about this in the forum, but I've been getting so many emails about it that it obviously belongs here on the front page as well.

For decades a mysterious figure has visited the grave of Edgar Allan Poe in Westminster Churchyard, Baltimore on the anniversary of Poe's birthday and placed three roses and a bottle of cognac on the writer's grave. The figure has become known as the "Poe Toaster."

Now a man, Sam Porpora, has stepped forward who claims to have been the original Poe Toaster, and to have started the tradition as a kind of promotional hoax. USA Today reports:
Porpora's story begins in the late 1960s. He'd just been made historian of the Westminster Presbyterian Church, built in 1852. There were fewer than 60 congregants and Porpora, in his 60s, was one of the youngest. The overgrown cemetery was a favorite of drunken derelicts. The site needed money and publicity, Porpora recalled. That, he said, is when the idea of the Poe toaster came to him. The story, as Porpora told it to a local reporter then, was that the tribute had been laid at the grave on Poe's Jan. 19 birthday every year since 1949. Three roses — one for Poe, one for his wife, and one for his mother-in-law — and a bottle of cognac, because Poe loved the stuff even though he couldn't afford to drink it unless someone else was buying. The romantic image of the mysterious man in black caught the fancy of Poe fans and a tradition grew. In about 1977, Jerome began inviting a handful of people each year to a vigil for the mysterious stranger. The media began chronicling the arrivals and departures of a "Poe-like figure." In 1990, Life magazine published a picture of the shrouded individual. In 1993, he left a note saying "the torch would be passed." Another note in 1998 announced that the originator of the tradition had died. Later vigil-keepers reported that at least two toasters appeared to have taken up the torch in different years.
Porpora is definitely a credible candidate for having been the originator of the tradition. However, there's some debate about whether the legend actually predates him. If it does, Porpora obviously couldn't have invented the tradition. I did a search through newspaperarchive.com, looking for any mention of the legend before the 1970s, but couldn't find anything, even though there were many stories about Poe's grave in 1949 on the 100th anniversary of his death.

Honestly, when I first saw this story it didn't seem like a hoax to me. After all, even if Porpora was the Poe Toaster, his appreciation for the writer was obviously genuine, and so the gesture was an honest one. The only hoaxy element was to add a flair of drama by hiding the identity of the Poe Toaster, and to (perhaps) fudge about how long the tradition had been going on for.

Ironically, there are doubts that Poe's body is even in the grave. In 1875 Poe's body was disinterred and moved, except that no one was quite sure which grave belonged to Poe since his gravestone had been removed. There's also a strong possibility his body had long ago been stolen by medical students for use in anatomy classes, since Westminster cemetery was a common source for cadavers.

Whether or not it's a hoax, the Poe Toaster legend recalls the "Lady in Black" legend, in which a lady dressed in black would visit the grave of Rudolph Valentino and lay a red rose on it. This tradition was said to have been started either by a Hollywood press agent or by the florist across the street from Valentino's grave.

Update: I received the following email from Jeffrey Savoye of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore:
Okay, this silly story is really getting out of hand. Sam Porpora has a long history of making things up for the sake of publicity, which in this case is rather ironic as it is itself a publicity stunt about claiming to have started something else as a publicity stunt. As noted in the AP article, there is a clipping from the Baltimore Sun from 1950 which mentions what is essentially the modus operandi of the Poe Toaster. I was only an English major, but this is clearly long before Sam is claiming to have "started" the tradition.

in the 1970s, Sam Porpora claimed that there was a mass burial grave of Revolutionary War soldiers in the catacombs of Westminster Church, where Poe is buried. It turned out that the pile of bones were from pigs, not humans and of apparently fairly recent vintage. (Hmmmmm, I wonder how those got there? In any case, I suspect that there were very few porcine participants in any of the major battles.) He also invented stories of the catacombs being used in the Underground Railroad, with a crypt on the outside being used to get into another crypt on the inside of the basement area. (Unfortunately, the basement was essentially open to the outside until the 1930s, when it was finally closed up to keep out vagrants -- thus no need for a secret tunnel in the 1850s.) The fact is that Sam makes up stories, and this is apparently just another one of them -- not the event itself but his claim that he originated it. At best, he might have termed the phrase "Poe Toaster," for which, I suppose, some credit is due. The rest of his claims should not be accepted without verifiable evidence, which he does not have.

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2007.   Comments (6)

Oscar, the death-predicting cat — image The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 357, Number 4) contains a short article about Oscar, a cat that seems to possess the ability to predict when people are about to die. Oscar's home is the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, so he has many chances to be around dying people. When patients are about to die, he curls up next to them and happily sleeps there, until they're dead. Then he quietly exits the room. Most of the time the dying patients are so sick they don't even know he's there. The article in the NEJM states:
Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.
Oscar is a cute cat, but my first thought was whether Oscar could somehow be causing or hastening the deaths of the patients, though I can't imagine how this could be. An Associated Press article raises some other possibilities:
No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him.
Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa's article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.
If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it's also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.
Normally I'm happy if a cat curls up with me, but in Oscar's case, I would be a little concerned. (Thanks, Big Gary)
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007.   Comments (81)

Paris Hilton Lives! — In the past few days, several hoaxes have been circulating on the internet about Paris Hilton. The first claims that she was stabbed in jail. The second suggests that she committed suicide. The appearance of these hoaxes was rather predictable, given the media circus surrounding her time in jail. The method of operation of both hoaxes was to disguise themselves as credible news sites. The "Paris Hilton was stabbed" story disguised itself as a CNN webpage. The "Paris Hilton committed suicide" one disguised itself as Australia's ABC. I'll have to add these to my page about celebrity death hoaxes.
Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007.   Comments (10)

Mayor Appears on Tree — image Donald Stephens, Mayor of Rosemont in Illinois for fifty-one years, died on April 18. But now he's come back. On a tree. The Chicago Tribune reports that:
Eerily, a likeness of the late mayor's face has appeared on a tree outside the village-owned health club, according to some people who have seen it. In a town still grieving for the larger-than-life mayor, who died April 18, the mysterious image is sure to add to the Stephens mystique.
I find it amazing that people think it's the late mayor and not Jesus. Though, according to the article, some observers did initially think it resembled Jesus. Apparently, to really see the resemblance, you need to stand inside the health club and look out at the tree through the glass doors. And probably having a couple shots of whisky doesn't hurt either. (Thanks, Joe)
Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007.   Comments (13)

Psychic Photographer Takes Pictures of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson — imageJon-Erik Beckjord has taken photographs that show images of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, as well as OJ Simpson, he claims. The photos were taken at the scene of the murders, and Beckjord believes that the images are an accusation from beyond the grave. He says that the photographs show OJ's face alongside those he was acquitted of murdering, and his theory is that the spirits of Goldman and Simpson are making a statement.

Beckjord is a keen observer of the strange. "He acts as perhaps a psychic “lightening rod” for anomalies, since he has filmed Nessie, filmed UFOs at Area 51, photographed strange beings in crop circles and also has recently photographed a ten foot tall Bigfoot in the Sierras."

UPDATE: Chuck has noted that Beckjord is selling these images on ebay for a minimum bid of $100, 000. I can't see anyone paying that much for fuzzy images that can be barely be interpreted as faces at all, let alone any specific faces.
Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2006.   Comments (26)

Quick Links: Fake Steve Irwin Death Videos, etc. — Fake Steve Irwin Death Videos
Unsurprisingly, several videos have popped up on YouTube portraying Steve Irwin's death. They're pretty unconvincing.
(Thanks, Nai Art.)

IT Skills in Return For Gropes
The mirror of a now deleted post from Craigslist, the title really says it all. I particularly liked: "I have a lot of tech knowledge in my life and regrettably no boobs."
(Via BoingBoing, thanks Cranky Media Guy.)

Building Using Recycled Paper
"Papercrete [is] a mixture of Portland cement, sand, and recycled newspapers/magazines, which can be used as a building material."
Looks reasonable to me.
(Thanks, Sharruma.)

Australopithecus Afarensis Discovered in Ethiopia
The bones of the 3.3 million-year-old girl have finally been recovered from a block of sandstone originally discovered in 2000. She has now eclipsed 'Lucy', found in 1974, as the girl lived more than 100,000 years earlier.
(Thanks, Tah)

Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2006.   Comments (8)

Quick Links: Gnomes and Gropers —
Yet Another Traveling Gnome
Back in the Spring Allen Snyder's gnome disappeared from his garden. Now he's learned that it's been attending Pittsburgh Steelers' games. Next stop an airplane to somewhere far away. Submitted by Big Gary who notes: "Predicatable, but I thought you'd want to keep your gnome section up-to-date."

Pretends to be mentally ill to get a grope
This is pathetic. William Mucklow has been accused of pretending to be mentally ill so that he can hire nurses to take care of him. He then grabs their breasts as they try to do their job. A pretty elaborate strategy to get a grope.

Jigsaw Prodigy
3-year-old "Mikey" Lorhan can put together "300- to 500-piece puzzles in less than 30 minutes or less -- and sometimes with the pieces flipped over, working blind." If this is real, he evidently has some kind of savant abilities.

image Man Shows Back of Head For Obituary
Jim Schinneller's death notice in the Sunday paper included a photo of the back of his head. Why? Because "He liked to buck the system. He enjoyed showing people how absurd life was." This would be an even better idea for a high-school yearbook photo, if you could get away with it.

Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2006.   Comments (5)

Quick Links: Pregnant Man, etc. —
Beijing Fake Smile Campaign
Beijing residents are being urged to practice their best fake smiles, in preparation for the 2008 Olympics: "We hope Beijing residents will join in the smile campaign to turn the city into a city of smile," Liu Jian, one of the committee members, was quoted as saying on Monday. What happens to those who refuse to smile?

Clown Crushed To Death, Audience Applauds
No reason to doubt this story isn't true, but it does seem like a real-life version of the Hippo Eats Dwarf tale (minus the dwarf and hippo), particularly the way the audience thinks the accident is all part of the act: A hot-air balloon caught fire during a circus stunt, killing a clown acrobat as dozens of children watched, police said Tuesday... Witnesses said the man, dressed in a clown outfit, was hanging from a cage suspended by ropes and a hot-air balloon inside the canvas tent. When the balloon exploded in flames, the cage fell on top of the man... many people in the audience initially thought the falling cage was part of the act.

'The Hoax' Trailer
The movie version of Clifford Irving's Autobiography of Howard Hughes hoax will be in theaters in November, and a trailer is online now. Looks like it may be pretty good. Richard Gere actually looks kind of like Clifford Irving. I think I've said before that stories about hoaxes often make very good movies.

A Pregnant Man
image 36-year-old Sanju Bhagat of India certainly looked pregnant, but while he did have a fetus growing inside him, he wasn't pregnant in the conventional sense: Bhagat, they discovered, had one of the world's most bizarre medical conditions — fetus in fetu. It is an extremely rare abnormality that occurs when a fetus gets trapped inside its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cordlike structure that leaches its twin's blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene. So the world still waits for a true male pregnancy. (Thanks, Kathy)
Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006.   Comments (17)

Quick Links: Taco Sauce Pranksters, etc. —
Taco Sauce Pranksters Strike
Fifteen masked men entered an Indiana Taco Bell and returned 25,000 packets of taco sauce that, so they said, had been accumulating in the trunk of their car for the past three years. It required 40 trash bags to carry all the packets of sauce into the store. Maybe they thought that if they saved up enough packets of sauce they could win a free Liberty Bell.

Unwise Grenade Opening Technique
Reuters reports that "A Brazilian man died Tuesday when he tried to open what police believe was a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer in a mechanical workshop on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro." Big Gary notes: "The Darwin Awards have a new emblem."

Lonely Heart Calls Operator 37,760 Times
A Japanese man has been arrested for repeatedly calling information hundreds of times a day just to listen to the voices of the telephone operators. He called so often, 37,760 times to be exact, that it began to creep the operators out. In his defense the man said, "When I made a complaint call once, the operator dealt with it very kindly, so I wanted to hear these women's voices." This guy really needed an Imaginary Girlfriend. (Submitted by Alex from Colombia)

Fake Hearse Scam
The latest scam in New Zealand is to reduce your car registration by up to two-thirds by claiming your car is a hearse. "The scam ... came to light last in July when a woman told a radio station she justified her action by saying she carried dead chickens home from the supermarket." I assume she drove her car home slowly in honor of the frozen chickens in the back.

North Korean Defector Sells Fake Aphrodisiacs
A North Korean defector now living in South Korea has been charged with selling unlicensed aphrodisiacs. He claimed that Kim Jong Il had been a user of them. This is where the story gets a little weird: "The stimulants were sold to blind people, most of them owner of massage centers." Huh? How many blind massage center owners can there be? But this is the part I like: The police said, "Some who took the stimulants suffered from swelling." So I assume the stimulants actually worked.
Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006.   Comments (11)

Thief Plays Dead To Avoid Arrest —
Status: Dumb criminal
German police report an encounter with a master criminal who, when caught in the act of stealing a computer, tried the old "pretend you're dead" act to elude capture:
The 51-year-old sneaked into a company in the town of Hildesheim late Monday and tried to make off with a computer when the owner discovered him and called the police. The man had fled into the boiler room, where they found him lying on the floor, police said in a statement. He had a pulse, but was not responding to their commands, so they called an ambulance. Only after a doctor tried to insert a tube into the burglar's trachea to reanimate him, did he suddenly open his eyes and begin speaking.
Maybe he thought that if it works for opossums, it might work for him.
Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006.   Comments (3)

How To Fake Your Death On The Internet —
Status: Public Service Video
A highly informative Beginner's Guide To Faking Your Death On The Internet can be viewed on YouTube. It was created by satirist and internet scholar Luke Lewis. Some of the points it covers:

→ Interest in your death (or the death of your alter-ego) can be measured by Heinstein's 2nd Law of the Internet, which states: I = H x W x C. Or rather, INTEREST in your character equals their HOTNESS times their camWHORE factor times the CRAZINESS of the community in which you're posting (measured in LJs or LiveJournals). "The higher the I value, the more ego strokage you'll get from faking your death."

→ Also, terminal illness is generally a better way to depart this world than a car crash. Car crashes are too abrupt and not unusual enough.

→ Finally, "a post without an OMG is a post incomplete."

Lewis notes that "He is currently working on the sequel: 'A Beginner's Guide To The British', due for release in late July." Personally, I think the sequel should be a beginner's guide to faking someone else's death on the internet.
Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006.   Comments (2)

Did Ken Lay Fake His Death? —
Status: Undetermined (I refuse to give him the benefit of the doubt)
image Ken Lay was reported dead on Wednesday. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death to be severe coronary disease. But almost as soon as word of his death hit the internet, the conspiracy theories started. Scott Adams summed up what many were thinking in his Dilbert Blog:
Does it seem suspicious to you that ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay died right before they could put his guilty ass behind bars? I wonder how many doctors you need to bribe to fake your own death. Is one enough? Or is there some special double-checking that the police do if the guy is heading for prison? I’m sure there’s a body, but I wonder if it’s his. I have a bad feeling that some pizza delivery guy’s last words to his coworkers were “Hey, I have a delivery to that Enron guy’s house! Wish me luck!”
Reality Rule 16.1 from Hippo Eats Dwarf seems appropriate here: For some, death is merely a career move.

The timing of Lay's death is what makes it so suspicious. It's not just that he died before serving any time. He died before the appeals process was completed and before being sentenced. Therefore, his convictions could be erased, severely complicating efforts to seize his assets. As the New York Times reports:
Mr. Lay's death effectively voids the guilty verdict against him, temporarily thwarting the federal government's efforts to seize his remaining real estate and financial assets, legal experts say. "The death of Mr. Lay in all likelihood will render the government's hard-fought victory null," said Christopher Bebel, a former federal prosecutor based here who specializes in securities fraud...
Any life insurance policies bought by Mr. Lay may also be shielded from federal seizure efforts since state laws normally cover such payments. While jurors found Mr. Lay guilty, his death may also complicate any efforts to go after life insurance proceeds, even if the original policies were acquired with ill-gotten gains.
In other words, Lay picked the perfect time to die. Of course, this doesn't mean he faked his death. It just makes his death seem awfully convenient for him (if he's still alive) and his family. (There's also a theory that he was murdered... or perhaps he could have committed suicide by using drugs to induce heart failure. I believe there are drugs capable of doing this.)

Lay isn't the first multi-millionaire to be suspected of faking his death. In 1932 billionaire Swedish businessman (and mega-swindler) Ivar Kreuger apparently committed suicide by shooting himself. But a rumor soon spread that he had actually faked his death and fled to Indonesia. Supposedly Kreuger's tobacconist later received from Sumatra a large order for custom-made Havana cigars. The tobacconist said that Kreuger was the only person who would have known how to place that order.

There's also the case of Michael de Guzman, geologist for Bre-X, and perpetrator of one of the greatest mining frauds in history. In March 1997 de Guzman supposedly committed suicide by jumping from a helicopter into the Indonesian jungle. But his corpse could never be positively identified, and last year one of his widows claimed that he had recently sent her money. So he might very well still be alive. Perhaps he's hiding out somewhere in an Indonesian resort with Ken Lay.

Oh, and this photo of Ken Lay's tombstone that's doing the rounds is obviously fake (1964-2006??? That would have made him 42). Last year the same picture was used to represent Johnnie Cochran's tombstone.
image
Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006.   Comments (17)

Huggable Urns —
Status: Weird, but real
image Christophe Thill sent me a link to Huggable Urns (they're teddy bears that hold cremains) along with the message: "This has to be a hoax? Right? Right?" Sorry, Christophe. I don't think so. The Huggable Urns look real enough, and if you click on the 'Buy Now' button on the products page, it takes you to a PayPal payment page, which is usually a good sign that a product is real.

Actually, although the huggable urns seem a bit ghoulish and tacky, they're not that bad an idea. They're better than many alternatives. For instance, my mother-in-law's ashes have been sitting in a plastic urn above the washing machine in our garage for the past two years. We just can't figure out what to do with her. So there she sits. And the award for the worst thing to do with someone's ashes has to go to Sandi Canesco of Australia. I write about her in Hippo Eats Dwarf. She had her husband's ashes injected into her breast implants. She said that "that way I'd never really have to part with him at all." I guess you could say that Sandi has her own unique version of Huggable Urns.
Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006.   Comments (20)

The Frosties Kid Is Dead —
Status: Urban Legend
image A recent ad for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes shows a blond-haired kid dancing around singing "They're going to taste great!" I think this is a British ad. At least, I've never seen it here in America. And all the references to it I've found occur in the British press. For instance, David Whitehouse writes in the Guardian:
Pity the poor Kellogg's marketing department... all they wanted to do was make an advert in which a chirpy young scamp would skip his way through the streets of a suburban town attracting other children like a Pied Piper with a silly ditty about his breakfast. So, they set out to hire an angelic young choirboy with a voice so beautiful it could shatter the beaks of songbirds. Then disaster struck. It appears that, on the way to the shoot, this choirboy's balls dropped with quite monstrous results. They wanted Aled Jones, but they got Mick Jones. And what we're left with is a jingle being sung by a boy at the exact moment his voice breaks, in a tone so monotonous it appears to be operating at a frequency which toys with people's bowels. It is, quite simply, the worst soundtrack to an advertisement ever. His voice is so oppressively dull that prolonged listening is like having every orifice systematically packed full of wet bread by a politician with no facial features.
Evidently this is the kind of ad that people love to hate. And this dislike has inspired a rumor that the kid in the ad is dead. (Google 'Frosties Kid' and you pull up page after page of rumors of his death.) There are two versions of the rumor:

1) That the kid committed suicide on account of the bullying he received since the ad aired.
2) That the kid was a cancer patient whose dying wish was to star in a Frosties ad.

I don't know who the Frosties Kid is in real life. So I can't prove that he's alive. But there's absolutely no evidence to support the claim that he's dead. Plus, the 'Frosties Kid Is Dead' rumor seems to be a new variation of the 'Death of Little Mikey' rumor (which alleged that Mikey, of the Life Cereal commercials, died after eating Pop Rocks). So I think it's safe to assume that the Frosties Kid is still alive. (Thanks to Dave Tolomy for telling me about the rumor.)

Update: As Dead-Eric noted in the comments, Scott Mills of BBC Radio 1 recently discussed the 'Frosties Kid Is Dead' rumor on his show. Mills received the following official statement from Kelloggs about the rumor:
"The current advertisement has been well received by the vast majority of our customers. We would also like to take this opportunity to confirm that the lead boy within the advertisement is well and continues to live in his native South Africa."
You can listen to an mp3 clip of this portion of the Scott Mills show here.
Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006.   Comments (102)

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