On Monday (April 13) Buster Martin completed the London marathon in a time of approximately ten hours. What made this remarkable was his age. Martin claims to be 101-years-old. If true, this would make him the oldest person ever to complete a marthon. (The former record holder was 98-year-old Dimitrion Yordanidies who completed the Athens marathon in 1976 with a time of 7.5 hours.) But Martin's age has been called into question.

Martin says he was born on September 1, 1906. The British National Health Service, however, says he previously told them he was born in 1913, which would make him a mere 94.

The problem is that Martin has no birth certificate because he was born in France and later moved to a British orphanage. So there's no way to verify his exact age. Guinness World Records has refused to list him as the new record holder, insisting they need a birth certificate.

Perhaps Martin actually comes from Vilcabamba, the Ecuadorian town of very old people. As Vilcabamba demonstrated, the phenomenon of age exaggeration is well known to anthropologists. The problem is that it's very tempting for very old people to add a few more years onto their age, since it's an easy way to get more attention. So a lot of people who are getting close to 100 decide to bump up their age to make themselves older than 100.

Also running in the marathon were a man who dribbled a basketball the entire way, a girl on 4ft stilts, an 80-year-old woman, a blind man, and a team of six Masai warriors who sang traditional songs as they ran in shoes made from tires.

The latest viral video going around shows Kobe Bryant jumping over a moving Aston Martin. Is it real? I doubt it, though I can't definitively prove it's fake.

Think about it. Why would he risk his career by trying to jump over a car? That's what special effects are for.

A better quality version of the video can be seen at Bryant's website.

The protests and demonstrations occurring everywhere the Olympic Torch appears have reminded me of the prank from the 1956 Olympic torch relay in Australia, when a guy carrying a wooden chair leg topped by a pair of flaming underwear ran out in front of the crowd waiting to see the torch bearer pass by, and everyone in the crowd thought he was the real thing. He was even greeted by the mayor of Sydney. The full article about the Olympic Underwear Relay is in the hoaxipedia.

The 1956 prankster was mocking the idea of the torch relay itself. He felt the torch relay was treated with too much reverence, given that the tradition of the relay originated during the 1936 games in Nazi Germany. I keep waiting for someone to try to replicate his prank this year, but it hasn't happened yet. There's so much security surrounding the runners, it would be hard to pull it off.

Another memorable torch-relay moment occurred in 2002 when 18-year-old Joseph Frederick stood on the street across from his high school in Juneau, Alaska and held up a sign reading "Bong hits 4 Jesus" as the Olympic torch passed by. It earned him a 10 day suspension. Frederick appealed, and the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the principal did have the right to discipline him, even though Frederick wasn't on school property when he held up the sign.

A lot of people have posted this video to youtube in the past month, but no one identifies where the clip comes from. My question is: How was the shot created? The table looks like it's tilted to help the balls roll towards the pockets. Also, I'm assuming the egg is not real.

The following video shows kids (maybe in Brazil, I'm guessing) performing extreme freestyle soccer tricks. The tricks are pretty cool, but of course they're fake. The flips may be real, but the soccer ball must have been digitally inserted into the shots. The video is a viral ad for a new playstation game, FIFA Street 3. It reminds me of that Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho that was going around two years ago.

Here's another photo series I found in an old issue of Life Magazine (April 26, 1937). I had to kill some time in the UCSD library this morning, which is why I was looking through old magazines. The photos were titled "South Carolina Negroes Play 'Fireball Dodging'".


Here are the captions for the five photos (complete with the racist language characteristic of the 1930s):


These photos were presented as a factual news item, but I have a hard time believing that anyone ever really played "fireball dodging." After all, the potential for incinerating one of your friends seems a little high. I can't find any references to it, except for this one article. My guess is that either the cameraman dreamed up this game, and arranged for some guys to pretend to play it, or the field hands were pulling the wool over the cameraman's eyes.

Last week high-school football player Kevin Hart announced at an assembly at his school, Fernley High, that he had been recruited to play at UC Berkeley, a Pac-10 school. It was exciting news for his school and was publicized by the local media. But then Hart's story began to unravel.

It became apparent that Hart hadn't been recruited by anyone at UC Berkeley. Hart initially explained that the recruitment had been conducted by a middleman named Kevin Riley, implying that the middleman must have conned him.

But yesterday Hart admitted that he had, in fact, made the entire thing up. In a statement he said, "I wanted to play D-1 ball more than anything. When I realized that wasn't going to happen, I made up what I wanted to be reality. I am sorry for disappointing and embarrassing my family, coaches, Fernley High school, the involved universities and reporters covering the story."

Kind of sad in a way. Links here and here.

My 61 Memorable Games
A special updated edition of Bobby Fischer's book, "My 60 Memorable Games," is up for auction on eBay, and bidding has already reached $3,050. The New York Times Chess Blog wonders whether the book is real.

Giant Skeleton photo doing the rounds again
National Geographic has an article about the Giant Skeleton photo, which dates back to 2004. The article says it's now enjoying a revival. I'm even quoted, though I don't remember talking to National Geographic. However, it sounds like something I would say. It must have been a while ago that they talked to me. (Thanks, Joe)

BBC admits Lotto button is a fake
Viewers see a man press a red button to release the Lotto balls. But it turns out the button doesn't control anything at all. This was revealed when the guy hesitated before pressing the button, but the balls dropped into the spinning barrel anyway.

Private parking company issues fake tickets
"A private parking company will have to reimburse drivers who paid fake citations left on cars in free lots throughout the Bay Area... PCS employees left written notices that looked like government-issued tickets on cars that allegedly violated the posted parking rules or state laws." Wow. It's bad enough having real traffic cops issue tickets without a private company trying to get a piece of the action.

In the summer of 2004 pranksters used herbicide to trace the outline of a giant phallus in the football field located inside Harman-Geist Stadium in Northeastern Pennsylvania. When the grass died, the phallus became visible.

Maintenance crews did their best to hide the phallus by painting it green, but eventually the paint wore away. And now the prank has succeeded in reaching an even wider audience, thanks to satellite technology.

Overhead satellite imagery of the stadium -- and giant phallus -- has shown up on google maps. You can see it for yourself by searching for the address "300 N. Cedar St., Hazleton, Pa." and then zooming in to see the stadium.

An interesting thing I noticed. One of the streets leading to the stadium is called Shaft Rd., which seems very appropriate.

The organization that does the satellite imagery says that it plans to resurvey that region in early 2009. Until then, the football-field phallus will remain on google maps.

Bill Henry used to like to tell his wife and friends stories about when he was a relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox back in the 1950s and 60s. He had a lifetime ERA of 3.26. When the Lakeland, Fla. resident died, the Associated Press ran his obituary. But Red Sox fan David Lambert noticed something wrong with it. The obituary said that Henry had been born in 1924, but Lambert knew that Henry was actually born in 1927. He decided to phone Henry's family (whose address he found in Major League records) to check the facts.

Henry's wife picked up the phone and said, "Bill Henry isn't dead. He's sitting right here in the living room."

It turns out that the Bill Henry who died was an impostor, a man who had been falsely claiming to be the former Red-Sox player for decades. Even his wife of nineteen years didn't know the truth.

The real Bill Henry says, ""It's just amazing someone would want to live someone else's life. I say more power to him if it helped him in his career."

Links: chron.com; theledger.com; tbo.com (Thanks, Joe)

Elliot has posted an article about great golf hustlers. Read it and find out why, if someone wants to bet you that they can drive a golfball a mile, never bet that they can't.

Newsgroper is a parody site full of fake celebrity blogs. To make sure that no one confuses its content with real news, it posts the warning "Fake Parody Blogs, Political Humor, Celebrity Satire, Funny Commentary" in the title bar of every page.

Apparently, this warning wasn't enough for MSNBC's Alex Johnson. In a piece about Michael Vick, he quoted from Newsgroper's fake Al Sharpton blog, presenting the following quotation as if it were something Sharpton really had said:
Caught in the blunder, MSNBC quickly removed the quotation from the article and posted this correction:



To me, the self-serving correction is worse than the original mistake. The fake Al Sharpton blog isn't a hoax. A hoax is a deliberate deception. Since the Al Sharpton blog announces right in the title bar that it's a parody blog, it hardly counts as a hoax.

MSNBC should retract their correction, and admit they're victims of sloppy reporting, not of a hoax. (Thanks to Cranky Media Guy for the link.)