The following has nothing to do with hoaxes. It's a public service announcement:

UC San Diego grad student Jeff Butterworth and his girlfriend A.K. Basenberg are going to be bicycling across America this summer to help spread awareness of retinal diseases such as Retinitis Pigmentosa, Macular Degeneration, and Usher Syndrome. They'll be starting off in Yorktown, Virginia and ending up in Oregon, and they're hoping to use their journey to help raise $15,000 for the Foundation Fighting Blindness. So donate some money to help them reach their goal. All donations go directly to the FFB. Read more about the trip and what inspired it on Jeff's website (this is also where you'll find the link to donate). It's a good cause so I promised I would do whatever I could to help by plugging it here on my site (and I'll be putting a link to his site in a sidebar). Even if you don't feel like pledging any money, check out his site to learn a little bit about what the FFB does. The FFB also has a brief blurb about Jeff and A.K.'s upcoming trip on its site.

Looks like the site is back... at last. I'm definitely not going to change servers again in a hurry. Uploading files, checking folder permissions, and trying to understand how to get a mysql database to do what I want it to do is not my idea of fun. Anyway, everything on the site seems to be functioning, except for the forum. Go figure. Something had to break during the move. The pages for each individual topic in the forum are working, but the main page for the forum itself won't load. I have no idea why not, and I'm too tired to worry about it right now.

The Museum of Hoaxes will soon be moving to a new home at a different web hosting company (pMachine hosting). This may cause a slight disruption in service (fewer posts) over the following week as I make the switch. At the very least it might mean that the site will temporarily be at a new url (one of those urls that are just a string of numbers) until the internet domain name servers reassign museumofhoaxes.com to the new web host.

The reason for the move is that over the past few days all of the server-intensive functions of the site (such as being able to post and edit entries) froze up, apparently because of increased traffic. I'm not sure what the cause of the traffic spike was. Looking at my referrer logs it seems that the vast majority of the traffic is coming from the google and yahoo search engines.

Anyway, the server couldn't handle the load... or rather my web host restricted the amount of server queries my site could make, so that my site wouldn't hog the server's cpu... which meant I suddenly was having trouble posting entries. It all gets a bit technical. The long and short of it is that the site has evidently outgrown the server it was on, so it's time to move to something a bit more robust.

I'll keep everyone posted about how the move is going.

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it. I'm not at home this Christmas. Instead I'm in Phoenix, Arizona. So having now received (I think) almost all of my gifts, I'd have to say that the strangest one I got this year was Elephant Dung Paper from Malawi. It says on the info that comes with the paper that "The elephant dung is first collected from Liwonde National Park and then beaten and mixed with recycled waste paper to produce the pulp from which it is made." It actually looks like very high quality paper (in case you're wondering). Of course, I still have to go over to my Great Aunt's house (she's the one who's into all the alternative medicine stuff), so I may yet get a stranger gift. She has, in fact, already promised to channel my Reiki energy while I'm there.

I've created a year-end list of the top hoaxes of 2004. Actually, I've chosen ten hoaxes that I think might be worthy of making the list (my basic criteria was the hoaxes that received the most media and public attention), but I haven't ranked them yet. Instead, I'm opening it up to voting. I think that's a more democratic way of doing it. Check out the list and vote here.

There was a very nice blurb in today's issue of The Guardian about the Museum of Hoaxes. Does this mean I can now tell my mother that I'm famous?

The UK publisher of the Museum of Hoaxes just sent me a picture of what the paperback edition of the book will look like when it comes out over there (click image for a larger version). It looks quite colorful and fun. But I'm especially proud of the fact that it has a picture of Hamster Viagra right at the top of it. Nothing says quality non-fiction quite like Hamster Viagra. As for why the UK edition says 'edited by Alex Boese' instead of just 'by Alex Boese,' I have no idea. I'm trying to find out why.

It was pointed out to me that once people register as a member the 'notify of new comments' button suddenly becomes selected by default whenever they post a comment. That's a little annoying. I've managed to change this for people who register in the future, so that it won't be selected by default. But for existing members, if you don't want that option selected by default, you're going to need to change it yourself in your individual member preferences (you may not have realized there even were individual member preferences). Here's what you do:

• Click login on the menu above.


• Then click on the 'My Account' link at the top-right of the login screen


• Next click 'email settings'


• Finally, unclick the 'enable email notification by default' button

And that'll do it.

Here's a cute little quiz to waste five minutes of your life on: Which urban legend are you? I'm the classic tale of the gator in the sewer (because everyone knows I'm full of crap, but they keep talking about me anyway).

I've finally made a decision in the urban legend haiku contest. It was tough, because there were so many good entries, but I've decided to give the book to Big Gary C, based on the consistently high quality of his entries. He clearly has a knack for urban legend haiku. Here are a few of his entries:
(Ten English Names for Snow)
Flakes, drifts, flurries, slush,
Blizzard, powder, crust, white stuff,
whiteout, ice crystals.
We brought our cute pet
Back from our Mexican tour.
He loves cheese; fears cats.

Ev'ry stick of gum
I've ever chewed and swallowed
Is still inside me.

In elevator,
big black man with dog says, "Sit!"
So everyone does.

I had the biggest
beehive hairdo in town, 'til
spiders ate my brain.

Oh, waiter, waiter!
Won't you please feed my dog now?
No, no! Not to me!

Cheney's pocket's full
of something; so they don't call
him "Dick" for nothing.

Once you start writing
verses in Haiku format,
it's hard to stop it.
To be honest, I liked reading everyone's haiku so much that I didn't want the contest to stop. So I'm going to try to give the haiku a more permanent (better organized) place on my site and allow people to keep adding more of it. Maybe I'll also make this an ongoing contest, awarding a prize every month. Or something like that. Stay tuned.

A couple of days ago someone mentioned that the comments would be easier to read if they were in chronological order, so that you wouldn't need to go to the bottom of the page to view the start of a discussion. I hadn't thought much about it before, but this seemed logical to me, so I reconfigured the comments to appear in chronological order.

But now Razela has noted that the old way, when they were in reverse chronological order, it was easier to see the newest comments. Which is also true.

Each way of doing it has pluses and minuses. Unfortunately it has to be either/or. The software doesn't allow individual users to set their own preferences. So, because I can't see which way is obviously better, I've decided to let everyone vote, and then whichever way the vote turns out (after a few days), that's the way the comments are going to be configured. Permanently.

I've received a free copy of David Wilton's new book, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends, courtesy of Oxford University Press. So I'm having a contest to give it away. The book has just been published. I'm not sure it's even out in stores yet, but you can get a copy here... if you win the contest.

First, what's the book about? Wilton debunks all those stories about where words come from, such as 'is GOLF really an acronym for Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden?' or 'does SOS stand for Save Our Souls?' or 'was F**K originally an acronym meaning For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge?' You'll have to get the book to find out the answers. It's a lot of fun, and quite enlightening.

Here's what I've decided for the contest: urban legend haiku. I figure this is appropriate since it's a book about urban legends and language. Whoever comes up with the best haiku describing an urban legend (or a hoax, since this is the Museum of Hoaxes) wins the contest. What's 'best' will, of course, be subjectively decided by me.

If you need inspiration, examples of urban legend haiku can be found here or here. I'm not going to be a stickler about whether or not entries maintain proper haiku form (three lines: first line five syllables, second line seven syllables, third line five syllables), since apparently the idea that haiku must adhere strictly to this form is itself a bit of an urban legend. Keep it to three lines, but if the number of syllables isn't perfect, I don't care.

Here's my own rather weak attempt at a hoax haiku. It took me all of a minute to write:

Enclosed in glass,
Soon she'll be rectangular,
My Bonsai Kitten.

You'll have to do better than this to win the book.

The contest will end on Nov. 20, about a week from today (oh, and you can submit as many haiku as you like).
Update: And one more thing, submit your entries as comments. Don't email them to me directly.
Update: Okay, the contest is now closed. I need a day or two to review all the entries.