Hoax Museum Blog: Miscellaneous

Spammed by the Disinformation Company — Authors love to read reviews of their books, especially positive ones. So, as an author, it's difficult to resist the temptation to periodically check out the Amazon page for your book, to see if readers have posted any new reviews of it. However, in Hippo Eats Dwarf I pointed out the danger of taking such reviews too seriously because so many of them are posted either by friends of the author -- or by rivals. In fact, I actually invited people to post fake reviews of Hippo Eats Dwarf. (You need to go to the early reviews to find the fake ones -- they're obvious when you see them.)

Inviting people to post fake reviews seemed appropriate for Hippo Eats Dwarf, since that book is all about fakery, but it didn't seem to fit for Elephants on Acid. So I never asked anyone to post a review. But when I last checked Elephants on Acid's Amazon product page, I discovered that a fake review had found its way on there anyway. Or rather, a spam review. But the identity of the person posting the spam surprised me. Here's the latest review of Elephants on Acid, posted by "DISINFO CEO":



The review follows the tried-and-true formula of comment spam. A meaningless platitude, followed by a plug for the product the spammer is trying to promote, which in this case is a book by Mark Pilkington. But if you check out the page for Pilkington's book, you'll discover that DISINFO CEO has posted a review there as well -- and in that review he pretty much reveals that he's the publisher of Pilkington's book!



In other words, someone who appears to be the CEO of the Disinformation Company is leaving comment spam on Amazon -- on the page for my book! I've never had any contact with the Disinformation Company, but I am aware of them and had always thought they published some interesting stuff, which is why it really surprised me that THEY, of all companies, would do something that tacky. The irony here is that DISINFO CEO, on his profile page, claims his nickname is "DeathToSpammers".

The possibility that DISINFO CEO is actually someone with no affiliation to the Disinformation Company crossed my mind, but what would be their motive to do this?

I clicked the link to flag DISINFO CEO's review of my book as inappropriate, since I think it's obviously spam. If Amazon agrees, the review may no longer be there by the time you read this.

Update: Amazon has deleted the spammy review. An irony is that I actually thought Pilkington's book sounded really interesting, so I ordered it -- but I ordered it from a used bookstore, so the Disinformation Company won't get any money from the sale. Ha!

Elephants on Acid Publicity — I received a couple of emails this morning along the lines of: Hey, the Guardian just published a list of the top ten weirdest experiments of all time. It sounds a lot like your list of the top 20 most bizarre experiments. They're not ripping you off, are they?

It's nice that people are concerned, but there's no need to worry. I haven't been ripped off. After I posted my top 20 list back in September, New Scientist contacted me asking if I would like to create a shortened version of it for their magazine. I was more than happy to oblige, and the resulting article will appear in the Nov. 3 issue of New Scientist.

Apparently New Scientist circulated a pre-release version of this article to the media, and it's been picked up by a lot of British papers: The Daily Telegraph, The London Times, and the Daily Mail.

I've also found it in the South African Independent Online, the Sydney Morning Herald, and PhysOrg.com.

Here in America, the Hartford Courant had an article about my book, focusing on the creepy experiments to coincide with Halloween.

So there's been some good publicity. Hopefully it'll help sell a few books.

And speaking of publicity, I'll be doing a book signing at Dark Delicacies bookstore at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 18th. It's a bookstore that specializes in horror, so the first chapter of my book (the one with all the Frankenstein-style experiments) should hopefully find a receptive audience there. If you live in the L.A. area, come on by and say hello.

Update: My publisher also tells me that Playgirl magazine plans to review Elephants on Acid (probably because it has a chapter on weird sex experiments). Thankfully, they're not planning a photoshoot of the author to accompany the review. But I will be able to tell people that I've been featured in Playgirl.

San Diego Fires — San Diego is on fire again. I've been watching the TV most of the day, tracking the progress of the fires. It's amazing how many people have been evacuated and homes have been destroyed. From what I hear, many more people have been affected by this fire than by the fire back in 2003.

I'm lucky that where I am in San Diego (relatively close to downtown), I'm not in any danger. All that I'm dealing with is the smoke. But that's pretty bad. The air smells strongly of it, and if you're outside for any length of time you start to feel it in your lungs.

Here's a photo I took a few minutes ago from my roof (looking west). You can see the layer of smoke hanging over the city. But still, the smoke is not as bad where I am as it was during the 2003 fire. Compare the photo below to the photos I took during the 2003 fire.

Campus Book Drop Volunteers Wanted — My publisher is looking for approximately 20 volunteers willing to participate in a campus book drop guerilla marketing effort for my new book, Elephants on Acid. Their idea is to have people leave copies of the book in highly visible places, such as on college campuses, where someone else will pick it up. Hopefully this will help spread the word about the book.

I'm not sure how many sales these book drop efforts actually create, but it's worth a try (especially since my publisher is the one paying for it!). If you volunteer, my publisher will mail you a free copy of the book. Of course, it's not a copy you can keep forever. The idea is to leave it somewhere after you've finished reading it. And yeah, it's all on the honor system, so you could just keep the book. But that would be dishonest!

Contact me by email if you'd like to volunteer. The only conditions are that you have to live in the U.S. or Canada. (Sorry, it's not being published anywhere else yet.) And we're also looking for some geographic variety, so that we don't get twenty people all in the same city.

UPDATE: So I've now already got all the volunteers I need. Thanks to everyone who's agreed to help out. And sorry if you wanted to volunteer, but are only reading the post now. You can always buy the book and leave it somewhere. 😉 The geographic location of volunteers turned out to be well distributed, just by random chance. The largest concentration of volunteers was in Missouri, but there's not enough Missourians to warrant dropping anyone for that reason. After all, It doesn't hurt to have a couple of the books circulating in the same state.

UPDATE 2: One other thing. A couple of people mentioned that the books should be marked in some way to prevent people from simply selling them on eBay. I assume the publisher is going to do this, but I'll point it out to them, just in case this possibility never occurred to them.

Introducing Elliot Feldman — I was browsing the web a few days ago when I came across a guy who was posting lots of great hoax-related articles to the Associated Content site. He seemed to know all kinds of fascinating, obscure things.

That guy was Elliot Feldman. I emailed him and asked him if he'd consider posting some articles here to the Museum of Hoaxes. Luckily, he agreed. So I want to introduce everyone to Elliot. We should be getting to read his articles regularly from now on.

Elliot says that he was a game show writer for 25 years. Shows included the Match Game, Hollywood Squares, Nickelodeon's Double Dare, and (yes, it's true) That's My Dog. He published his first novel, Sitting Shiva, in 2003. You can buy it at Amazon.

Elliot is also a cartoonist. You can check out some of his comics at detroitcrazy.com and scene4.com.

He supplied four facts about his life, half of which are fake. You have to guess which are the true Feldman Facts and which are the fake ones:

• He once dressed in a molting chicken suit and was beaten to death by San Diego Padres fans.

• He was a cartoonist long before he was a writer.

• His first TV job was as a (blank) for The Match Game.

• He is currently searching for the Loch Ness Monster in Florida.

Elliot's first article, posted in the Hoaxipedia, is about John Howard Griffin, a white man who had his skin darkened so that he could pose as a black man.

He promises future articles about subjects such as thirties and forties con artist Titanic Thompson, golf hustlers, pool hustler Minnesota Fats, con artists who have sold landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge, and Bob, Ivan Stang, and the Church of the SubGenius.

Minor Change — I decided to add a few visuals to the top of the page. I thought it was looking a bit too plain before. I wonder if anyone can identify all the figures without looking through the museum to find out what they are. (There's no prize. I'm just curious if anyone can do it.)

At some point I'll make the figures clickable, so that they'll link to whatever they represent, but that's a bit of work. I'll save that project for later.

Also, from time to time I might change them around. Take some out, put in a few new ones. It's quite easy to do. I can even have special ones for holidays like Christmas, Halloween, and April Fool's Day, like Google does.

Everything is back to normal — After a couple days of fussing with the design of the site, I've decided to put everything back to almost the way I had it when I started -- except for a few minor tweaks. I decided I couldn't stand having the google ads smack in the middle of the weblog, even if they do generate more money there. (It's probably a trade off anyway between making more money and driving off readers, so it comes out even in the end.) You can all carry on as if nothing ever happened.

Another Site Redesign — Once again, I've redesigned the look of the front page. What prompted the redesign was that quite a few people had mentioned to me that they didn't realize the site was anything more than the blog. So I've put links to the entire contents of the site right up top where they're harder to miss. This also allows me to feature the hoax forum more prominently, and increase the width of the column for the blog. One of these days, after I win the lottery, I'll get a professional to design the site. But until then, we'll see how this format works out.

First review of Elephants on Acid — The first review of Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments is in. It's from Kirkus Reviews: The part of the review in bold is what appears on Amazon. The review botches the details of most of the experiments it mentions, but that's a minor matter. What I really like is that line, "One [of] the finest science/history bathroom books of all time." But, of course, while good reviews are nice, what really matters is that people buy the book. (Hint, hint.)

Alex’s African Adventure — I'm back! The return flight from Africa took almost 30 hours (and with layovers it basically was two entire days of travel), but I made it. I got back late Monday night and then spent Tuesday decompressing, trying to shake off the jet lag.

After a quick glance around, it looks like the site survived my absence. Thanks to Cranky Media Guy for filling in as the Guest Curator while I was gone. He did a great job. I guess this means I'm pretty much expendable around here!

Africa was incredible, but I had no internet access while I was there (and often no electricity either), so my apologies to anyone who tried to contact me while I was gone.

The trip consisted of a week in Malawi and two weeks in South Africa -- two very different countries. Malawi is a very rural society. In many places the lifestyle doesn't seem to have changed much there in hundreds of years. You still see numerous villages dotting the countryside, consisting of a handful of thatch huts. Women walk around with huge bundles of sticks on their heads. South Africa, by contrast, is much more modern. Many areas of it look almost exactly like America, with malls and office buildings... but down the road from the malls you find vast, sprawling shanty towns where people live in pretty wretched conditions.

One of my favorite sights in Malawi was the guys who stand by the side of the road selling mice-on-a-stick. Apparently many Malawians quite enjoy this dish. The vendors catch the mice by starting a fire in the brush to scare the rodents out. Then they spear about four or five of the critters on a stick and cook them -- fur, bones and all -- until they're charcoal black. Although I didn't sample this delicacy, I'm told that the proper way to eat a mouse on a stick is by beginning with the tail and working your way up to the head. You simply spit out the bones, much like you would do when eating chicken wings. I wanted to get a picture of a mouse-on-a-stick vendor, but I never had a chance. My sister, who lives in Malawi, promises me that she'll take a picture of one and send it to me. (In the meantime, I found some pictures of mice on a stick on a blog called Misadventures in Malawi and Beyond.)

I also spent a couple of days at Lake Malawi, where I kept an eye out for any sign of a Lake Malawi Monster. Lake Malawi is also known as Lake Nyassa, so it's monster, if it has one, would, I suppose, be called Nyassie. Unfortunately I didn't see a monster, though I did see a couple of otters, which I thought was pretty exciting at the time.

In South Africa, I got to visit Kruger Park where I saw elephants, rhinos, giraffe, and hippos. However, I saw no elephants on acid, nor any hippos eating dwarves.

While in South Africa, I also got to take a trip down a platinum mine, an experience which made me resolve never to quit blogging in order to become a miner.

Here's a few pictures of me from the trip. From left to right: taking a nap in a hammock at Lake Malawi, very cautiously petting a cheetah at the De Wildt Cheetah Park in South Africa, and 500 meters beneath the ground in a platinum mine (you can tell from the expression on my face that I'm feeling a little claustrophobic).

72 hours to get ready for a date—it’s ART! — Unlike a lot of people, I actually tend to like modern art. I can understand, however, why people think that some of it isn't really art, though. It seems that the way to become an art world sensation is to come up with what more accurately be called a publicity stunt, do it in a gallery, perhaps, call it A*R*T and find a super rich guy like Charles Saatchi (a patron of the modern art world in Great Britain) to pay you an enormous sum of money for whatever physical manifestation of it you can whip up.

Lian Sifuentes is an artist who is spending 72 hours getting ready for a date. She is doing this in a tent in Union Square Park on the northern edge of Greenwich Village in New York City. She's being filmed or videotaped as she does this and eventually her "date prep" will be turned into a movie. Every hour she takes will be condensed into a minute of screen time so that she will appear to be moving at normal speed while everything around her will look like it's moving at light speed. Oooookay. Hey, it beats working the fry station at Burger King.

I guess my point in putting this up on MoH is for you guys to collectively discuss whether "art" like this really IS art. Is it just a publicity stunt or a hoax or is it a legitimate form of artistic expression. Have at it.

It must be art 'cause I can't understand it

["It must be art 'cause I can't understand it" is something my old friend Guy Ennis once said when we went to see some pretentious movie I can no longer remember the name of.]

Net Authority — Net Authority is a site that claims to be...well, I'm not completely sure WHAT it's claiming to be. Something about being the controlling authority over the Internet. That sounds vague, but if you look at the site, you'll see what I mean. I'm very sure this is a hoax, based on how just-outside-of-credible the writing is, but it's very well done.

"Net authority" hoax?

OK, I just found this by the guy who claims to have come up with Net Authority:

"Net authority" revealed?

OK, I looked a little further into Net Authority. It's not really that they're claiming to be in charge of the Internet; it's more like they saying they SHOULD be.

OK, I have to stop saying "OK" so much.

UPDATE: This guy got a "cease and desist" letter from Net Authority. He knows it's a joke, but he doesn't think it's funny:

Not amused by Net Authority

Hot dog eating champ faking an injury? — Takeru Kobayashi, six-time world record hot dog eater, is claiming to have a jaw injury which may hamper his competition today at Nathan's Famous in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. Some think the champ is faking, playing head games with Joey Chestnut, who beat Kobayashi's record of 59 1/2 franks and buns two weeks ago. The two are the favorites in this year's event at Nathan's.

Would Kobayashi really pull such a stunt, potentially tarnishing the great sport of competitive eating?

As an aside, this article I'm linking to refers to the governing body as the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE). I thought I had read that they changed their name to Major League Eating recently. I'll have to check.

Scandal in professional gluttony?

Okay, I checked. From Wikipedia:

The IFOCE, which first established eating as a sport in the 1990s, has recently launched Major League Eating to serve as an umbrella for competitive eating worldwide while also providing a recognized brand for licensing of t-shirts and other products. The Major League Eating website, www.majorleagueeating.com, is considered the most dynamic website in this sport. It features videos of contests and eaters and offers a complete online community similar to MySpace, for eating fans.

UPDATE: Sore jaw or not, Kobayashi lost to Joey Chestnut, meaning the Mustard Yellow Belt has returned to American, where it belongs, damn it! NO ONE outeats us. USA! USA!

THE SUBSTITUTE IS HERE! — OK, with Alex on his way to Africa, the substitute teacher is officially in charge. That doesn't mean you can throw spitballs or run in the hallway, though.

I'll have some stuff up in a little bit. I'm still figuring out how all this works.

Behave.

Best of the Forum – 22nd June 07 —
Flowers growing from a steel pipe (NEO)
A Chinese man has found what he believes to be a patch of white flowers growing from a steel pipe in his vegetable garden.
Ding has consulted his neighbours, who believe the flowers are the legendary Youtan Poluo flower, which blossoms only once every 3,000 years.
“No soil, no water. These flowers can bring me good luck,” he added.
Forum members suspect, however, that the 'flowers' are lacewing eggs (see pictures to compare.)

Make your bad grades disappear! (Accipiter)
A student worried about re-taking a year at school because of his bad exam results talked two friends into entering a classroom wearing masks, threatening the teacher with an iron bar, and attempting to steal the report cards. Sadly for the sixteen-year old and his accomplices, the other students in the class defended the teacher, and they fled without the reports. The associates, aged 14 and 15 respectively, were arrested near to the school.

Herman Munster's Identity Stolen (Tah)
Internet thieves on an underground chatroom were offering the personal identification data of Herman Munster. Apparently unfamiliar with the television series The Munsters, the thieves were offering information such as his address - 1313 Mocking Bird Lane - and his Mastercard number. The theory is that a fan of the programme deliberately provided the bogus data.

A horror movie come to life (Iridium)
Three families in Fircrest claim to have been victims of harassment for four months now. The families say that the mysterious stalkers are tracking their moves, controlling their cell phones, and sending death threats.
Somehow, the callers have gained control of the family cell phones, Price and Kuykendall say. Messages received by the sisters include snatches of conversation overheard on cell-phone mikes, replayed and transmitted via voice mail. Phone records show many of the messages coming from Courtney’s phone, even when she’s not using it – even when it’s turned off.
Whilst the phone company claims this is impossible, the Department of Commerce says that there is such thing as a 'roving bug', which will work whether the phone is on or not, and can pinpoint its location to within a few feet.

Introducing Cranky Media Guy — On Sunday I leave for Africa. I'll be there for three weeks. I'm spending a week in Malawi, where my sister lives, and two weeks in South Africa, where members of my wife's family live. I probably won't have many chances to connect to the internet while I'm there.

As it turns out, Flora is also leaving for a vacation in Wales at the same time. Which could mean a sudden absence of Curators at the MoH, and not much blog content being produced.

To prevent that I've arranged for a guest blogger while Flora and I are gone. It's someone quite familiar to many people here -- none other than Cranky Media Guy (aka Bob Pagani). He has perfect credentials for the position. He's a media hoaxer, radio personality, warden of the Abu Ghraib Fantasy Prison Camp, and winner of the $365M Powerball Lottery. He'll be blogging from up north in Oregon.

So please give him a warm welcome. And if you want to help him out by giving him tips about links or news stories, just use the site's contact form. I've configured it so that he'll receive messages sent through it.

Historical Hoaxes Quiz — Test your knowledge of hoaxes. David Emery, About.com's Urban Legends and Folklore guide, has posted a pop quiz about Historical Hoaxes and Fallacies. I got 15 out of 15, a perfect score. Woo Hoo! (It would have been kind of embarrassing if I had gotten any wrong, though there was one question about what Neil Armstrong said when he first stepped onto the surface of the moon that I had to think about for a while.)

The Hoaxipedia — The software that I use to run this site comes with a "wiki module," which allows the capability to add a wikipedia-style encyclopedia to the site. For the past few weeks I've been working on getting this feature working. It's still very much a work-in-progress, but I think it's at a point where I can let everyone see it. I'm calling it the Hoaxipedia.

I'm slowly transferring all of the content contained in the various "galleries" of the museum into the Hoaxipedia. It's going to be a slow process. So far I've only transferred a handful of articles. But the nice thing about transferring the content into the Hoaxipedia is that it allows me to categorize the articles much more easily. It also makes it easier to edit existing content and add new material.

Another interesting feature of the Hoaxipedia is that any registered member of the Museum of Hoaxes can add or edit content. I suspect that I'll be the one adding most of the content for the foreseeable future, but in the past people have asked me if there was any way they could contribute articles to the Museum, and now there is an easy way for them to do that. If you're interested, please try it out -- even if it's just to write some hoax haiku to accompany some articles.

Museum of Hoaxes Curator in a Box —
I've been out of town recently. My wife and I drove up to Santa Barbara last weekend, where she had a work-related event to go to. While she was busy at that, I decided to check out Santa Barbara's used bookstores. I was browsing at The Book Den, when a student photographer approached me and asked if I would be willing to participate in a project she was working on. She was taking pictures of people in the bookstore, posed in various ways, and then digitally inserting them into a box. She had me climb a ladder. She just sent me the resulting image, and I think it looks pretty cool. It seems like something that's crying out for a good caption, but I can't think of one. Any ideas?

After Santa Barbara we spent a couple of days in Merced, in central California. We're thinking of moving there -- because the University of California, where my wife works, just opened a new campus there, and because the cost of living is so much cheaper there. (Though there's not a whole lot there.) Any move would be at least a year away.

Elephants On Acid Put To Bed — Wow! It's been almost a month since I posted. Last time I posted, I thought that work on my next book was winding down. That turned out to be overly optimistic. I still had a lot of work to do, but now it truly is all done. The manuscript has been sent to my publisher.

Meanwhile, thanks to Flora for keeping this place running while I took a leave of absence!

As proof that I really have been working on a book, the book itself -- Elephants On Acid: and Other Bizarre Experiments -- is now listed on Amazon, although it will only be in stores in October or November. Also, from what I understand, the cover that you see on the Amazon page is not the actual cover. It's just a placeholder. The design department hasn't finished work on the real cover yet.

The book is not about hoaxes at all. It's about, as the subtitle suggests, bizarre scientific experiments. Here's the advertising blurb that the publisher wrote about it: