This image that recently appeared on the May 4 cover of the Living section in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is all over the blogosphere. Does the heading say "Suit Yourself" or "Shit Yourself"?

The real question is whether this was an innocent accident, or an artist's prank. Kind of like the penis on the Little Mermaid video cover. The artist swore he didn't put it there intentionally, but that was kind of hard to believe. After all, how could he miss it?

Scatology has always provided fertile ground for pranks and humor. In fact, I've read scientific speculation that farts and feces probably provided the inspiration for the very first jokes told (or staged) by our early hominid ancestors. Witness how modern-day chimpanzees find it endlessly amusing to fling their feces.

This might provide us with some context for the prank called Poop Dollaring. (Though it's probably more analysis than the prank deserves.) Its method is simple: smear feces on a dollar bill and then place it so as to "tantalize the gullible".

Back when people used pay-phones, a variant of the prank involved stuffing dog poop into the coin return box. Unfortunately I remember falling victim to this once as a teenager. It was disgusting.

Knowing about poop dollaring might, if nothing else, spare you from too readily picking up some money you see lying on the ground.

Of course, youtube provides us with quite a few examples of innocent victims getting poop dollared.

A new book to add to my reading list:

A software company has announced it's making a widget called LazyTruth that will scan all your incoming emails for misinformation:



Basically the widget will scan the text of your incoming emails and check them against "pre-existing nonpartisan information". It's an interesting idea. I'll be curious to see how well it works.

Of course, the main problem will be that the people who need the widget most, won't use it. And the widget won't work if some authoritative source hasn't already debunked the rumor. So it probably won't detect the latest twitter rumor you may be confronted with. (via Engadget)

A strange series of photos has recently been circulating online showing an entire classroom full of high school students in China hooked up to IV drips.


Apparently the students aren't sick. Instead, they're exhausted from cramming for the upcoming National College Entrance Exam (Gao Kao). So they're all being given supplemental amino acids via IV drip. And this is something the Chinese government is willing to pay for. Links: ministryoftofu.com, globaltimes.cn, businessinsider.com.

I haven't found anything to indicate that the scene shown in the pictures isn't exactly what it's being described as. And Chinese officials, in interviews, seem to have confirmed that this is what's going on.

The question is, does an animo-acid drip do anything for the students that drinking a gatorade (or other energy drink) wouldn't? Or, even better, getting a good night's sleep. Not as far as I know. Though it's not going to hurt them, except for a small risk of infection from the needle. And it definitely looks dramatic, so perhaps it triggers a confidence-boosting placebo effect.

It's not just the Chinese who are susceptible to strange, pseudo-scientific methods of boosting student performance. In Electrified Sheep I wrote about an idea that gained popularity in Europe and America circa 1912 of turning kids into super-students by electrifying them. The concept was to conceal wires in the walls and ceiling of a classroom, turning the entire room into a gigantic electromagnet. The students and teacher inside the room would supposedly benefit from the magnetic influence surrounding them. This idea was promoted by none other than Nikola Tesla, who wanted to turn all American classrooms into electromagnets. Nobel-Prize winner Svante Arrhenius even conducted experiments to test the idea... though the experiments didn't reveal any obvious benefit.

Perhaps the Chinese will latch onto the idea of electrifying their high-school students next.

The death last week of former Chargers linebacker Junior Seau was big news here in San Diego. But then, as deadspin.com reports, a rumor began circulating that his death had been predicted on Craigslist. Specifically, on May 1, a day before Seau died, this post apparently was posted on San Diego Craigslist:



The solution to this is simple. Someone must have edited the post after the fact to turn it into an accurate prediction. Either that, or Nostradamus has come back from the grave and is lurking around Craigslist. (But then, the prediction should have been in the form of a quatrain.)

Nettie has informed me that ThinkGeek is selling Bonsai Kittens. They're stuffed toys. Therefore, "No cats kittens or kittehs were harmed in the creation of this product." Still, it's seems to be like waving a red flag in PETA's face. They must figure that enough time has passed so that all the furor over bonsai kittens has calmed down.

In fact, ThinkGeek also seems to have acquired the bonsaikitten.com domain name. I guess no one else wanted it. The last time I checked it had become a spam portal, with a few ads for cat food and pet medications on it. However, ThinkGeek aren't hosting the original site there. Instead the URL forwards you directly to ThinkGeek's product page for their bonsai kitten dolls.

I remember when the Bonsai Kitten site debuted back in 2000, and people were absolutely apoplectic about it. I posted a description of it here on the site, pointing out that it was a hoax, and that was enough for me to start receiving quite a few email threats, from people describing how they were going to stuff me in a little glass jar to see how I would like it. They must have thought that I was somehow supporting the site rather than debunking it.

I may have to get a few of these dolls for old times sake.



Update: Something weird is going on with the bonsaikitten.com URL. The link I posted here redirects people to ThinkGeek. But I posted the same link on twitter, and that directs people to a spam site. I don't know why.

This image (which appears on a lot of humor and weird picture sites around the web) is often captioned, "Why boys need parents." And try as I might, that's the only information I can find out about it. Where it came from and who created it, I have no idea.

I'm not even sure whether this is a photograph or a painting, though I suspect it's a painting. The low resolution makes it difficult to tell, and I can't find any higher-res copies. It's the boy's legs, in particular, that make me suspect it's a painting. They look slightly unrealistic.

So I'm posting this here in the hope that someone, at some point, might come along who knows something about the source of this image.

Update: Thanks to pazuzu for quickly identifying the source of this painting. (Yes, I was right. It's a painting!) It's an oil on canvas by Ron Francis titled "Skateboarding". Francis writes: "This image was inspired by a childhood memory. The suburb was somewhere around the north side of Sydney harbour and I was the boy on the skateboard."

Several pictures of a cat with a cat-shaped mark on its back have circulated online for a couple of years.


There's also a version of the image with arabic writing on it, that's currently doing the rounds on facebook.


I don't know the cat's name, but the cat has a Japanese owner who keeps a blog, ameblo.jp/usousopp, devoted to posting pictures of it. There are hundreds of pictures of the cat up there. And here's the strange thing. In the two pictures of the cat that are circulating, the marking clearly resembles a cat. But in the pictures of the cat on the ameblo.jp blog, the marking looks slightly different. The pointy ears on the marking are gone, so the marking no longer looks as much like a cat. Though when viewed upside down, it resembles a question mark.


Perhaps the pointy-ear effect in the two photos was caused by the way the cat's skin folded. Or perhaps someone photoshopped the ears in. I'm not sure, though I'm leaning towards photoshop. I searched the site to see if I could find the pointy-ear-marking photos. (The site has an image browser feature which made searching pretty easy.) I wanted to see if the originals differed from the versions in circulation. But I couldn't find them on the site.

Fairies have a pretty good public image. They're widely regarded as good creatures, since they're small, delicate, and magical. But in European folklore, they were often considered quite malevolent. The wikipedia article on fairies notes the belief in fairy kidnapping:




And apparently, the belief in fairy kidnapping created an opportunity for con artists. Dr. Beachcombing, who runs Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, notes the existence of what he calls "fairy shysters":


Unfortunately, Dr. Beachcombing is holding off on describing these cases until a later date, but I thought the idea of a fairy shyster was intriguing.

Imagine you're going about your day, minding your own business, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's a goat! That's the premise of the goat prank that's become a tradition in Spokane, Washington. The link includes a video of a Spokane anchorwoman who keeps repeating excitedly, "I've been goated! I've been goated!":

I'm not sure how old this image is, but it must be 15 or 20 years old at least. It's been circulating online for as long as I can remember.

It's one of those images that's become a staple on humor sites, but people don't often pause to ask about the details of it: is the picture real? Where was it taken? And if it is real, what were all those cops doing there? Were they really all on a donut break?

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out very much about the picture. Although I was able to locate where it was taken, because a few people recognized it. Both Jenni at ivman's blague and April at strangetalk.net independently identified it as a Donutland that used to be in Cedar Falls, Iowa. But the Donutland closed sometime during the 90s and was replaced by an Italian restaurant that also seems to have closed.

Some googling revealed that there was once a Donutland at 5312 University Ave in Cedar Falls. And here's that address now on Google Maps. The shot is from a different angle, and the Donutland sign is gone, but I think it definitely is the same building.


Jenni thought the police cars in the picture looked like they were from the nearby town of Waterloo, not Cedar Falls. She joked, "obviously Waterloo was suffering from a lack of security that day!"

April (writing in 2001) also recalled some trivia about the Donutland:


Because I can't see any obvious signs of photo manipulation in the picture, I'm going to assume the picture is real. Though why all the cops were there, I have no idea. Maybe it was staged as a joke. Or maybe all the cops really were on a donut break!