Desmond and Amy Duguay of Turner, Maine claim that they found a piece of Dot gummy candy that resembles the Virgin Mary. They've put it up for sale on eBay, and bidding is currently at $215. [Bangor Daily News]


But some are crying hoax. The website corporatemal.com notes that there are Virgin Mary molds, which might have been used to create the Virgin Mary Dot.


However, the Duguays are sticking to their guns and insist their "Gummy Virgin Mary" is no hoax. In response to the accusations, they've posted this message on their eBay auction page:

On Monday, The Pirate Bay issued a press release on its blog announcing that it was moving to North Korea:


As part of the move, the site added a North Korean flag onto the sails of its pirate ship logo. And those who investigated its IP address found that it did indeed seem to be originating out of North Korea.


But yesterday, The Pirate Bay revealed on its facebook page that the move was just a joke. It explained the hoax as their way of demonstrating the need for critical thinking skills:

In response to the widening horse-meat scandal in Europe, Icelandic food authorities decided to conduct tests on some of their country's own food products. They didn't find any horse meat, but to their surprise they discovered that one brand of beef pie, Nautabökunni, contained no meat at all. Or, at least, the pies had "no mammalian DNA." Instead, the pies contained some kind of vegetable matter masquerading as beef.

The company that makes the pies says it's dumbfounded by the results, and has asked for more tests, questioning the accuracy of the initial ones. The co-owner of the company is quoted as saying, "I'm not saying that this is chock-full with mincemeat, but we use soya meat to supplement the meat and also use beef stock as seasoning. I know how the recipe is and this finding is therefore improbable."

I'm inclined to believe the guy. It's hard to get a meat taste with no meat at all. [links: icelandreview, mbl.is]

Not exactly a criminal mastermind. Rahmell Pettway needed a good excuse to explain his two-week absence from his Bedford-Stuyvesant home to his girlfriend. So he faked his own abduction, tying himself up with duct tape on the side of a street. When found, he told police that two men in a light-blue minivan had first abducted him and then dumped him there. The problem? The roll of duct tape was still dangling from his wrists. This made the police suspicious, and soon Pettway confessed the whole scheme. They arrested him for filing a false report.

Belly Ballot is an internet site that helps parents name their baby by "crowdsourcing" the process. That is, it allows parents to create a shortlist of names that their friends and family can vote on.

Back in January, the site announced a "Belly Branding" contest: "One lucky pregnant couple may win $5000 in exchange for letting the entire world decide their baby's name."


And in mid-February it declared a winner, LA-based art teacher Natasha Hill. It posted some photos of Natasha as well as a screenshot of her facebook page. Belly Ballot told the Huffington Post that Hill was chosen from a pool of nearly 80 applicants because of "her honesty and enthusiasm."


The unusual contest received a fair amount of media attention, much of which focused on the controversial aspect of a mother allowing strangers on the internet to name her child. Hill reportedly said she wasn't worried about this because, "I think people will do the right thing and vote for something unique and nice."

However, the story took an entirely different turn on March 3 when LAist.com revealed that Natasha Hill bore a striking resemblance to LA-based actress Natasha Lloyd. In fact, Hill and Lloyd were quite obviously the same person.


The next day, Belly Button admitted that the results of their baby-naming contest were a hoax. No one had entered the contest, so they had hired Lloyd to pose as the winner. In reality, Lloyd wasn't even pregnant.

Belly Ballot founder Lacey Moler explained to today.com that she and her staff decided to perpetrate the hoax because, "we're a start-up and we wanted to control the situation."

The mystery in all this is how LAist managed to notice the resemblance between Hill and Lloyd. They don't explain. Did someone at LAist already know Lloyd and recognized her picture? Or were they tipped off?

The second option would be the more interesting one, because it raises the question of who gave them the tip. Perhaps Belly Ballot surreptitiously exposed its own hoax, knowing that the news of a hoax would generate even more publicity for its site than the original baby-naming contest had. Secretly exposing his own hoaxes was one of P.T. Barnum's favorite tricks.

Or perhaps Lloyd was the informant. After all, the hoax is good publicity for her as well.

Washington Post photographer Tracy Woodward won an Award of Excellence for his image "State Champion" that he entered in the 2013 White House News Photographers Association ‘Eyes of History’ stills photo contest in the Sports Feature/Reaction category. But Woodward's editors at the Post noticed that the image had been altered since the time when it had first appeared in the paper. Specifically, Woodward had deleted the referee standing in the background. (Although you can still faintly see the outline of his pants.) It is a better picture without the ref, but such a major alteration violated the rules of the contest. So Woodward's award was rescinded. [deadspin]

Check out the Hoax Photo Archive for other examples of photos with deleted details.

Thanks to LaMa for bringing this recent Jesus sighting to our attention. A bird pooped on the windshield of Jim Lawry's car, while the car was parked in his parents' driveway outside their Brooklyn, Ohio home. When he got into his car, Lawry could clearly see the face of Jesus looking at him from within the poop. Lawry says it's "some sort of sign." [newsnet5.com]

Over in Perth (home to a couple of MOHers!) there's a rumor going around about an organized dog fighting ring that's stealing pets and using them in fights. The larger dogs are supposedly starved and turned into fighters, while smaller animals are used as "bait." A flier (below), posted on Facebook, is helping to spread the warning.


People are also being warned that the pet thieves are tagging the homes of potential victims with red dots, as shown in this picture:


However, the police and animal welfare authorities insist there's simply no evidence that any of this is happening. Social media expert Tama Leaver is quoted as saying, "To go from dog missing to dog fight is a long bow."

Back in September 2012, a video was uploaded to youtube showing a pig rescuing a baby goat that was supposedly stuck in a pond at a petting zoo.


The video got millions of views on youtube and was widely aired in the media (including being shown on Good Morning America, the NBC Nightly News, and Fox News). Yesterday, it was revealed to be entirely staged.

It was created for a Comedy Central series, "Nathan For You," which is debuting this week (thus the timing of the reveal). The pig was directed toward the goat by means of an underwater plexiglass ramp.

The New York Times has a fairly long article about the video hoax, including comments from some media critics who take the news organizations to task for not questioning the video. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute says, "It really is embarrassing for the journalists who stumbled upon this and decided to promote it or share it with their audience. It's almost a form of malpractice."

Comedy Central has posted a follow-up video showing exactly how the original video was made.

Legend has it that the 19th-century French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) had a pet lobster named Thibault that he took on walks in the Palais Royal gardens of Paris, using a blue silk ribbon as a leash. When asked why he did this, he replied



It's an amusing story, but is it true? Did Nerval really take his lobster on walks? Over at Boing Boing, Mark Dery delves into this mystery at length.

First, Dery consulted literary scholars. He discovered that they disagree about the story's veracity. It turns out that the original source of the story was Nerval's friend Théophile Gautier, and one critic, Richard Sieburth, thinks Gautier invented the story as a hoax to "impress the bourgeois." But another scholar, Richard Holmes, thinks the story could be true, noting Nerval had a "well-documented fascination with odd or exotic animals."

So next Dery turned to marine biologists to find out if it would even be physically possible to walk a lobster. The answer, summarized, is that it might be possible, but it wouldn't be easy since a) under ideal conditions a lobster will survive for only 30 or 40 minutes out of water, and b) lobsters aren't designed to walk on land. They can scuttle around, if they're stressed enough, but they don't like doing it. Diane Cowan of the Lobster Conservancy says bluntly, "Taking a lobster for a walk in the park is a cruel and sadistic idea. Please do not even think about it."

And could Nerval even have kept a lobster as a pet at home? To do so would have required "a large tank with relatively cool seawater and it would have needed some kind of aeration." It's unlikely Nerval had any of this.

So the answer to the question of whether Nerval really walked his lobster is that, no, he almost certainly didn't. But Dery offers two other possible explanations for the story (besides the suggestion that Gautier invented it).

Nerval's correspondence reveals that once, during a visit to the coastal town of La Rochelle, he intervened to save a lobster from a fisherman's nets and then took the lobster home with him. Perhaps this was the source of the tale.

Or, perhaps (possibility #2) Nerval came up with the lobster-walking story, but he intended it to be read allegorically. In other words, the lobster that Nerval walked was a symbolic lobster, not a real one.


Nerval, Dery notes, was "a fervent scholar of the occult," and lobsters have special significance in some occult sources, such as Tarot cards. For instance, the Moon card shows a lobster crawling out of a pool onto dry land, up a path guarded by two dogs (or a dog and a wolf) toward the full moon. The lobster, in this setting, could be interpreted as a symbol of the animal self struggling toward enlightenment. So Dery asks:


An interesting idea. It certainly makes me view the B-52's song "Rock Lobster" in an entirely different light.