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Top 100 Hoaxes of All Time
Kaz Riprock writes "Did you know that Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell? Or that Spaghetti grows on trees?? Here is a pretty interesting website that compiles 100 of the best hoaxes perpetrated through the ages."
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/. should be at the top of this list :)
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
Micro$oft OS's are secure!
i gaunrntee you that the evil-bit hoax is NOT up there
#17: The Left-Handed Whopper
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."
some new news?
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Surely the best hoax ever perpetrated is the ongoing lies that parents tell to most (western) children - Santa Claus (father christmas/St Nik etc).
This one is probably the longest running one that has sucked up the greatest number of gullible people falling for it.
And don't get me started about the tooth fairy.
Finally, an April Fool's Day post that isn't annoying as hell!
Who posts the worst April Fools jokes?
CmdrTaco
michael
timothy
Hemos
Definately not someone on Slashdot...
Never heard of "April Fools"
CowboyNeal - I spilled by coffee because of his...
thanks :^)
right here
Oh - and a new RFC adds an evil bit to TCP/IP packets to explicitly indicate their evil intent.
"News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
Duke Nukem Forever.
[este]
Good thing I just read this a couple of hours ago, it's probably slashdotted to bits by now. (I got the link from an earlier /. article.)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Oh c'mon - blue soda cans make the list but this doesn't?
I see the number of slashdot contributions to the list seems slim. Don't the public find the discovery of a "new colour" or an "evil bit" funny? Why, I sit in the dark for months on end, verging on suicide, waiting for this glorious day were I can laugh without breath from the humour of the slashdot editors. Today I laughed and laughed and laughed. When the stories were duped 7 or 8 times in the space of 2 minutes, it brought back the memories of the first time I read them. What a great day!
Andy Kaufman's last(?) days
I think Andy Kaufman is a genious. I do not believe he is dead. I think he is playing a hoax to be the greatest performance artist of all time.
Andy didn't call himself comedian. He was a character actor. Read all about him and his great Moon Hoax theory that will blow your sox off.
I suggest you read Slashdot
at least it wasn't:
...
1) Slashdot posts story regarding IPv4 evil bit.
2) Slashdot posts story regarding IPv4 evil bit.
3) Slashdot posts story regarding IPv4 evil bit.
etc
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
#71: Man Flies By Own Lung Power
I was thinking people would fly under their own power, but not necessarily by means of the lungs, but perhaps another source of hot air...
The Pigloo
For the museum of Worst hoaxes... ..look at /. on April 1st.
When I see a hoax, I run to my hoax bible:
Snopes
Failing that, I go to http://www.vmyths.com or put my common sense to work.
saskboy's forwarded hoax paradox:
>Every line that begins with '>' is a hoax.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I heard that Rob bought Emeril's old restaraunt and it will now be called CmdrTaco's Palace.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The best prank I'd say was the broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Even though it was unintentional, the widespread hysteria it made was just amazing.
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
Shouldn't number 1 be George W Bush hoaxing the American public into thinking Saddam and Bin Laden are linked.
the poor quality of the april fools jokes on /. today should count as a terror attack. Come on Taco, figure something better out.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
Why do all comments in April Fools' Day must be annoying as hell?
My neighbor's
Andy Kaufman's last(?) days
I think Andy Kaufman is a genious. I do not believe he is dead. I think he is playing a hoax to be the greatest performance artist of all time.
Andy didn't call himself comedian. He was a character actor. Read all about him and his great Moon Hoax theory that will blow your sox off.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Didn't we do this last year?
Contrary to popular opinion, it doesn't get any funnier.
about Wyndurs being an operating system???
Snopes wasn't linked properly in the parent post. Sorry, that'll learn me to not use preview.
What about the moon landing...or the hoax about the hoax of the moon landing, or the hox about the hoax about the hoax...Oh my, I've gone cross eyed.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
Notice that NOWHERE in the list is Slashdot's April 1st editions?
Take the hint guys. Please.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
My personal favorite has to be #6: Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers. I remember seeing that story in Discover and being completely amazed. It had me going for quite a while until I did some checking and found out that the scientist's last name was latin for fool. Since her first name was April I then figured out it was a joke.
Apparently naked mole rats are a big favorite for April Fools pranks. They show up again later on in this list.
I think it was 1996, a major newspaper (Either the Sun or the Journal) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada ran a full front page story with a headline to the tune of "Meteor found heading for earth, will strike northern Saskatchewan in mid-september". The story contained a whole lot of "explanations" from experts about how it would kill 98% of the population or whatnot.
The joke caused such a panic, that the next two days they had to run a full front page retraction. It made national news too.
I'm still waiting to hear that Operation Iraqi Freedom was all a hoax and that Bush and Saddam are actually old friends.
What about The Nuge (aka Ted Nugent) attempting to buy "Musak" to foil their plans for universal brain rot when standing in line at a department store????
This is the top 100 April Fool's hoaxes of all time, not the top 100 hoaxes of all time.
Huge difference.
Today, clicking "rob's page" on the left, there (scroll the page up and take a look) redirects you to goatse.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I told my g/f that swallowing is good for shiny hair :D DAMN! That shit works, baby!
just like the humble blood clot... turboporsche@telus.net
It can be pretty hard to tell the liar from the true believer!
I'll RTFA.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Sourceforge's alleged search engine in that list? The same search engine that ALWAYS kaks when I ask it a question?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Milli Vanill?
- number 1 hoax
Not only today but every day you are a fool buying bullsh*t HLS.the Holocaust.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The greatest internet hoax of all time was the false marriage of Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda to Kathleen Fent. Thank you.
Back in the 60's a Swedish TV show host, Lennart Hyland, managed to convince some huge portion of the Swedish people to drape a nylon sock over their black-and-white TV in an effort to test a new technique to transmit colour TV without requiring new receivers.
This particular April Fools joke is still talked about...
Copy a paragraph directly from the article and get moderated up? Give me a break. Clearly the moderators didn't bother to read the article...
plus innumerable hoaxes for petty gain but which cause confusion for years:
- various skeletons of early humans,
- fairies in the forest,
- ghosts in the parlor,
- seances
- John Edward,
- crop circles
and so forth.Few April first pranks take more than a moment to detect, and they're almost always revealed as harmless pranks within a day or two. In contrast, hoaxes often last for years and develop a life on their own. The "Protocols of Zion" - a document arguably responsible for millions of deaths, is a well-documented forgery/hoax. Yet there are still millions of people who are convinced it's real and are ready to kill over it.
(P.S., yes I'm being provocative in some of my claimed hoaxes. That's the point - every one of them is, or was, widely believed at some point.)
(P.P.S, one of the best PRANKS ever has to be the guy who lived in Sitka, Alaska waiting for a clear April First. When one finally arrived, he took a helicopter to a nearby extinct volcano and set a pile of old tires on fire. Smoke poured from the volcano, the more credulous residents were convinced that the volcano was erupting... and if I heard the story correctly the prank made the national news that night.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
...was the fraudulent election of a war obsessed religion crazed hallucinating dummy to the position of President of the US.
or was it not a hoax?? :)
I remember when the taco bell thing happened. I was thinking, "What the hell?!" It went on for a bit until I realized the joke.
(Yes, I'm slow. Bite me.)
I do security
#8: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.
Funny, but came very close to happening. In fact, in my great state of Indiana, the House actually passed legislation to set pi equal to 3 by a vote of 67-0. Fortunately, it was shot down in the Senate.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
That was a joke? Cmdr Taco! Give me back my money!!! :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The Alabama story (ranked #8) was an hoax originated by Mark Boslough, but there was legislation introduced regarding pi in 1897 in the state of Indiana. It never passed. Sources: urban legends and the straight dope.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I had a subscription to Discover when they ran the ice borers story. It was funny at the time, but a few weeks later it was in the local newspaper, being reported as fact. I'm not sure but I think it was an AP or UPI story. That was more scary than funny.
Where was Dihydrogen Monoxide?
But every year Slashdot does this, just like every year everyone bitches.
Frankly, my scales being tipped in the other direction. I'm tired of reading all the bitching about it.
I appreciate what the Slashdot editors are doing and if I don't get/like/understand what they do from time to time I'll still read, happily.
Quack, quack.
Zophar's Domain (an emulation site) has set up a nice hoax.
since this news is about the only "real" news we will get today....
:)
Or maybe Duke Nukem Forever could top that list
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
I immediately thought of this one. I was a senior in high school at the time and a member of the baseball team. We talked about this for about a week in practice. This guy was going to change baseball history. We got a kick when we found out it was an April Fool's Joke.
While not directly related to April Fool's Day, one cannot forget MIT Hacks. Some of the best pranks I've seen in awhile.
Notable is the Campus cop car on the Great Dome...though they're all great.
Mike
I put a fake 404 error page on the site last night for a few hours, and then copied the isonews.com nonsense. Been getting emails all day from people telling me how it's the first trick they fell for in years.
www.zophar.net
Next thing you'll be tellin' us we didn't land on the moon or the world is controlled by shape changing lizards who eat babies.
How about the Orange Terror Alert that has been up for the last year or so.
This has got to be a good hoax.
To quote the Simpsons news anchor: "...and the alert has been raised to orange....which means absolutely nothing."
Once again this is something that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!!! (or at least 12 hours ago).
Sorry, since when has cut'n'pasting segments of the article been "+4 Funny"?
In this particular case, the poster didn't even add any comments of their own. Redundancy anyone?
Although, given the chances of anyone actually reading the articles, it might deserve an 'Informative'...
I'm really surprised to not find Orson Well's War of the Worlds in the top 20 anyways. That has to be one of the best hoaxes ever! War of the Worlds
Though not intentional but shouldn't the 'war of the worlds' radio broad cast by orson wells be listed ?
Slightly off-topic, but interesting none-the-less. Would some industrious young slashdotter mind compiling a "Top 100 slashdot trolls of all time" list for the bemusement of the common reader?
It's highly likely that such a list would be modded into oblivion, so perhaps your could link the list in your sig? Title it something conspicuous like "The top 100 slashdot trolls of all time".
Would someone please do this? Is the troll community still alive and well on SD? In the 3 years I've been reading SD, I've seen some gems. Make this list, and let everyone share in your trolling glory! Make a new account, and link the top 100 trolls of all time to it. Pretty please, with sugar on top.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I read the item about the one-way highway that changes directions with great interest. Like many Northern Virginians, I have many times driven the section of Interstate 95 inside the beltway that is inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening.
Miko O'Sullivan
Take notice everybody!
Ninnle Linux is NOT on this list, so it can't possibly be a hoax!
So stop treating it as such, and download your copy today at www.linuxiso.com
Hoax #16: Kremvax
"I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away." --Jack Handy
I can't believe they left this out. Another great hoax perpetuated by the great Horace Cole, who also did #78.
http://www.locusmag.com/2003/News/News0401a.html#s wanwick.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I pulled a similiar joke, but my friend is still sitting in prison. I can't wait for his release so I can see the look on his face when I come clean..
aahhh, good times.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not that anyone believed them anyway.
The human capacity to believe ludicrous shit is truly amazing :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
A friend once told me that the word "gullible" had been removed from all major dictionaries by some language committee. It wasn't until 30 minutes later that I caught on to the joke. How embarrassing.
There's always the "Bill Gates is tracking this email" nonsense, but I think the best long-term one is the hunt for the fortune or Sir Francis Drake.
Here's more info:
article at Salon
TiVo Upgrades
We are all pikers in his wake. The Abyssinian gag. The Dreadnought Hoax. The Venice Horse Mystery. And, possibly, The Piltdown Man.
My life's goal is to write a book about WHdVC. I know. I'm a loser.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
what about the birth of christ?
See the challenge by Rusty from Kuro5hin
Here's his audio clip
I like the presidential IQ stuff that keeps getting spread around, particularly when Clinton is listed at something in the 180s and Bush is exactly half. The man may be dumb as carpet but the fact that CNN will actually air the listing says something disturbing too, I think.
How long did that marriage last?
And does Slashdot's hilarous gag of making it look like they can't manage to keep their stories straight? Whoo hoo, that was a riot. Keep it up!!!!!! (ZZZZZ)
So where are the Bitboys product anouncements on the list?
Though this morning I really did own a Glaze 3d. Then I ate it.
Mmmmmmm sugary goodness
Amazing! No one mentioned this money making hoax..
OOP was created by consultants to sound like they were going to revolutionize your software, but really just create more billable work for themselves. I also remember the Expert Systems consultant hoaxes of the late 80's. "We are going to save your retiring lead engineer's expertise in this $200,000 AI database....". Whatta load.
Don't even get me started about the stupid dot-com ponzi schemes. IT is a hoax swamp. It is the greatest heaven for bullshit artists because it is mostly art and not science.
I love watching vendors swindle PHB's. It is poetry in motion. Watching good marketers is like a good hockey game: lots of swift, crafty action and blood all over the place in the end.
Peter Jackson's mocumentory about Colin McKenzie who supposedly made advances in film such as sound and color in 1908, years before it actually happened? Not to mention this guy supposedly filmed Richard Pearse who was the first person to fly. The film was called Forgotten Silver and caused many people to fall for it when it was shown in New Zealand on TV.
If anyone bothered to read through all 100 hoaxes you may have noticed and recalled that Hoax 43 (quoted below) was either repeated or actually tried in the year 2000.
o th_9461.asp
http://www.enn.com/features/2000/02/02102000/mamm
#45: Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth In 1984 Technology Review published an article titled "Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth" that described an effort by Soviet scientists to bring the woolly mammoth species back from extinction. The technique being used was the insertion of DNA from woolly mammoths found frozen in Siberian ice into elephant cells. The cells were then brought to term inside surrogate elephant mothers. The head of the project was said to be Dr. Sverbighooze Yasmilov. The story was widely reported as a factual event.
I kid, I kid. I wonder, though, if MIT vs. Caltech could set off the same sort of flamewar here on Slashdot that Emacs vs. Vi, Gnome vs. KDE, or Mac vs. PC can.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
April 1st, the day where trolls are treated like gods. Nothing is offtopic, either. I can say whatever I want!
So remember, moderators, mod me up as Funny all you want, but if you use Offtopic, the world will surely explode due to a vast rise in intelligence on a day like today.
Getting on topic now, I read the article, but I can't for the life of me find where the "Evil Bit in IPv4" is in the Top 100. It really fooled me! Even after appearing for the third time, I still couldn't find any trace of a prank in it...
Surely it is worth mentioning in a list of the top 100 hoaxes?
In 1999 the Savings Bank of Rockville placed an ad in the Connecticut Journal-Inquirer announcing that it would soon begin charging a $5 fee to customers who visited a live teller. The ad, which appeared on March 31, claimed that the fee was necessary in order to provide, "professional, caring and superior customer service." Although the ad was a joke, many customers failed to recognize it as such. One woman reportedly closed her account because of it. The bank then ran a second ad revealing that the initial ad was a joke. The bank manager commented that the first ad ironically "commits us to not charging such fees."
And how many banks now actually have these fees. No hoax.also the #1 hoax with the most blood spilled as a direct result.
It's actually Rock Creek Parkway in the District of Columbia. I-95 follows the eastern part of the beltway from Springfield, VA up to College Park, MD. I think you confused I-395 with I-95, because if you continue northward from Springfield you get on 395 seemlessly, which goes into the district. From there you have to go half a mile on ground streets westward to get to the Parkway.
I personally think the Rock Creek Parkway is scary when it's one-way. The two sides are always splitting apart and coming back together. It's painted with a yellow line down the center and there are no gates preventing people from going the wrong way... it's just signed like an HOV lane. At 7pm people start driving both ways again, so if you're not thinking you can get in a serious accident.
my blog
Hoax # 8:
"Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation"
That hoax is has been done before!!! Read more in Bailey, Borwein, Borwein, and Plouffe's 1996 article "The Quest for Pi". Here is the abstract: This article gives a brief history of the analysis and computation of the mathematical constant Pi = 3:14159..., including a number of the formulas that have been used to compute Pi through the ages. Recent developments in this area are then discussed in some detail, including the recent computation of Pi to over six billion decimal digits using high-order convergent algorithms, and a newly discovered scheme that permits arbitrary individual hexadecimal digits of Pi to be computed." But, in the article one may also read:
"In the annals of Pi, the nineteenth century came to a close on an utterly shameful not. three years prior to the turn of the century, one Edwin J. Goodman, M.D. introduced into the Indiana House of Representatives a bill that would introduce "new Mathematical truth" and enrich the state, which would pofit from the royalties ensuing from this discovery. Section two of the bill included the passage "disclosing the fourth important fact that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fouths to four"
Thus, Pi is 3.2... It almost became an Indiana law had it not been for a last-minute intervention by an observant prof Purdue!!! I strongly suspect this Bailey et al. article was a source of inspiration for the 1998 perpretrator, 101 years later, but alas then not in good faith.
I would have thought the Crop Circles would have featured in the top 100
Apparently, the English National Trust had agreed it, and it was only fair that the Welsh should have it, and the stones had originally been "taken" from Wales etc.
I was like, "They can't do that! It's a national treasure." etc.
Get your own free personal location tracker
(or at least, as little text as possible.)
A month or so later the other shoe dropped. The company did not in fact have any of the technology they claimed, and the Feds were on the lookout for the people who had taken a large sum of money from people who no-doubt believed that anything that appears in the Times must be true.
In retrospect it does seem extremely unlikely that any quantity of gas that could be reasonably pressurized within the small space of a double-walled soda can could produce a significant cooling effect on 12 oz of liquid.
has got to be Weekly World News. This fake news site seems to have its stories pop up on other non-fake sites, eg. Yahoo and Fark.
I guess that, unlike the Onion, the stories are more designed for hoaxness than for humorous effect, so they might skip by someone not paying attention?
Here's another one: "Saddam Hussein is a murdering louse who has raped Iraq for too long."
Or how about, "Saddam Hussein leads a regime which openly advocates suicide bombings, killing civilians and violating the laws of war, including the white flag of truce; and has `rogue regime' written all over it."
Go somewhere random
like the election of Bush.
+5 Funny,
-3 Troll,
-3 Flame Bait,
Oh well.
This is very cool. Here I am reading along, being quite amused by all these worldly and magnificent hoaxes, and lo and behold what do I see but my own wee little home town, SITKA, ALASKA at #11. Yessir, that little stunt by Porky Bickar is quite a legend around here. I imagine it went a little something like this:
"Hey, isn't Mt. Edgecumbe an *extinct* volcano?"
"What the Hell?! Run for the hills, we're all gonna die!"
What I wouldn't give to be around in 1974 when Porky lit up those tires...
So? What makes Saddam so special? There are plenty of regimes that do the same, but I don't see thousands of troops pouring into those countries, do you?
As for "violating the laws of war", has Bush decided what to do with those "Illegal Combatants" yet? I ask because I understand that these people are still festering in an open air "jail" in Cuba with no reognised international classification. Maybe nobody clued Bush in on the Gevena Convention (Hey, one more internationl convention he can ignore!) or the concept of basic human rights.
Its O.K, you can ignore me. After all, you're morally superiour (Sounds familiar...Heil!), arn't you?
Here in Oz we have had several Hoaxes that had some serious repercussions:
1) "Illegal Refugees throw Children Overboard"
This was used by our present Government in order to sway public opinion and win another term, which they did. There were no children thrown overboard, the photos shown on national TV were survivors after their boat had sunk.
2) "This new Tax will make everyone better off"
I havent met anyone better off after the GST.
3) "I will never introduce a General Consumption Tax"
Used 2 elections back to win government. See point 2 above.
4) "We are not committed to a war in Iraq"
6 weeks before the war officially started the same man who made the statements above sent our SAS to the Gulf.....
So it seems to me that there has been an enormous hoax perpetrated on the people of Oz...
by Mr Bell, when it was infact invented by an Italian guy Mr Meucci and the american patent office messed around with the papers? (they just admitted it these days)
Enlightenment 0.17 is out...
Raph
In 1997 an email message spread throughout the world announcing that the internet would be shut down for cleaning for twenty-four hours from March 31 until April 2. This cleaning was said to be necessary to clear out the "electronic flotsam and jetsam" that had accumulated in the network. Dead email and inactive ftp, www, and gopher sites would be purged. The cleaning would be done by "five very powerful Japanese-built multi-lingual Internet-crawling robots (Toshiba ML-2274) situated around the world." During this period, users were warned to disconnect all devices from the internet. The message supposedly originated from the "Interconnected Network Maintenance Staff, Main Branch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology." This joke was an updated version of an old joke that used to be told about the phone system. For many years, gullible phone customers had been warned that the phone systems would be cleaned on April Fool's Day. They were cautioned to place plastic bags over the ends of the phone to catch the dust that might be blown out of the phone lines during this period.
Where is the famous Microsoft buys the Catholic Church hoax? Anyone remembers beside me?
I once read on /. that Stephen King had died. I was really worried back then, as he still has to complete his "the dark tower" series!
#8: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a good idea ?.
How could anyone fall for this? I thought it common knowledge that pasta is egg and flour. Raw pasta even taste flour.
I love the one where below the equator, the water going down
your bathtub drain is supposed to spin counter-clockwise.
The urban legend was that the infamous John Dillinger's penis was abnormally large. So large, in fact, that when raped women, his penis would kill them due to internal hemoraging. This penis was supposedly removed postumously and sent to (A) The Smithsonian or (B) The Walter Reed Army Medical Museum.
Naturally, people would approach the information desk every now and then wanting to know where it was.
Note that the date on this post is April 2. The urban legend exists; and yes, I was personally asked about it by a visitor (I could hardly contain my laughter). The information desk manual had all the appropriate disclaimers catagorized under D for Dillinger.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Did you know that k5 reported this item earlier in the day?
Show me a hoax about bank fees, and I'll show you a bank dumb enough to try it:
From the "Top 100 Hoaxes" article, #88: Bank Teller Fees
"In 1999 the Savings Bank of Rockville placed an ad in the Connecticut Journal-Inquirer announcing that it would soon begin charging a $5 fee to customers who visited a live teller. The ad, which appeared on March 31, claimed that the fee was necessary in order to provide, "professional, caring and superior customer service." Although the ad was a joke, many customers failed to recognize it as such. One woman reportedly closed her account because of it. The bank then ran a second ad revealing that the initial ad was a joke. The bank manager commented that the first ad ironically "commits us to not charging such fees."
TRUE STORY: In 1989, another Connecticut bank "Society for Savings" charged a $6 fee in any month in which a customer visited a live teller. I know someone who had a checking account with this bank. She paid her landlord by check. The landlord visited a live teller at the bank and cashed the check in person, causing the account owner to get whacked $6/month. In a classic case of "reality stranger than fiction", the bank decided to count that activity as a "live teller" visit even though the person writing the checks has no control over how they are cashed. Stupid landlord (tenant moved out), idiotic bank (lost many customers, eventually merged & purged). Aside from the person who got whacked with lame fees, everyone else got that they deserved.
With 300K votes less than the competitor and a lot of help from brother.
The Biggest Hoax of All Time has to be ....
There is a God, and Jesus Christ is His Son.
is that saddam has weapons of mass destructions, US is liberating iraqis and they are Not going for the oil...hehehe
The Bible doesn't say that pi is 3.0.
No, but there is an argument that 3.0 is a "Biblical" number, if unrelated to pi -- consider the perfectness of the Holy Trinity, and so forth.
When the stoner finally saw that, his roomie said he totally freaked.... He would turn the water on whenever he was talking to someone, he would go to the other side of the room and whisper, and all of his dope cleared the room in about 60 seconds... He just KNEW the DEA was going to show up at any moment...
I don't know whatever happened to that guy, but I'm pretty sure he has to know Ted Kazinski personally....
ahhhh.... good times....
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...
#63 would be true if the power company conspiracy hadn't killed Tesla...
Actually the lizard thing is real. I saw one the other day. ' course I was under the influence of the flue. Isn't it weird that the full name of flue is Influenza and that when you have the flue you are under its influence? I say this because the only difference between the two words are two letters at the end. Maybe the flue was developed by the government to control their people only to have it go completely awry. Conspiracy ho!
With so much time you,d think there would be more than 100? lol
(from The Courier-Mail, Brisbane newspaper 1/04/03)
"MINI introduces VPL
Introducing a revolutionary new technology from MINI.
The world's first Vertical Parking Locator (VPL). With VPL
the MINI will be the first car in the world to be able to
be parked vertically.
This technological breakthrough is the result of nine
years of extensive research.
The technology works with the existing traction control
(ASC+T), which electronically controls wheel spin under
acceleration. VPL provides an extra sensory element
which enables the tyres and wheels to literally cling to
the side of designated buildings.
The Park Distance Control (PDC), a sonar device which
allows the driver to know how far they are from other
objects when they are parking, will be as effective
whether the car is parked vertically or horizontally.
Altitude will in no way inhibit the accuracy of the device.
MINI is working in conjunction with local councils
and architectural heritage trusts to lease the sides
of buildings for exclusive parking.
The new parking spaces will be electronically linked
to the MINI satellite navigation system (GPS). Which,
along with navigating drivers throughout the country
and metropolitan areas will also be able to find these
execlusive parks.
More specific information about VPL is available from
Dr. Uve Beenhad at MINI Australia. Please note that the
purchase of VPL is only available on April 1. So hurry to
your nearist MINI Garage, you'd be a fool to miss out."
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
So? What makes Saddam so special?
;-)
/. journal and let people respond to that. Responding to ACs is not quite worth it.
What makes Saddam (and the rulers in Syria, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, the wahhabis in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the lunatics in N.Korea) `special' is that they routinely export terror into countries that have no way of striking back ("asymmetrical warfare") because there is no formal declaration of war, and all the other formal things that real countries fighting real wars do.
Saddam's ties with weapons suppliers in the middle-east (through Syria mostly) is well-known, and more information will emerge in the days to come.
Usually, the countries that suffer are (surprise!) the two non-Islamic democracies that border West and East of the middle-east: Israel and India (although the former Soviet republics, and even China, can tell you how charming Islamic terrorists can be). The US has only been a very recent target of these groups, but the US' ability to retaliate is on a far higher level that most of the other targets.
There are plenty of regimes that do the same, but I don't see thousands of troops pouring into those countries, do you?
Hey, we've just gotten started!
Its O.K, you can ignore me. After all, you're morally superiour (Sounds familiar...Heil!), arn't you?
Never said I was `morally superiour' [sic], so stop putting *your* words into *my* mouth. And FYI, I don't think my value system, religion, etc., is `superior', it's merely the case that I object to being shot at/bombed by a suicide bomber when I'm on my way to work/at a deli/in the subway. I have a selfish interest in not ending up dead.
OTOH, you *could* be ignored because you choose to not stand behind your words, instead you post anonymously. You needn't give your email address away, open a
Go somewhere random