Book description
The following news story apparently first appeared in the Las Vegas
Sun: 'A circus dwarf, nicknamed Od, died recently when he bounced
sideways from a trampoline and was swallowed by a yawning hippopotamus
waiting to appear in the next act. More than 1,000 spectators continued
to applaud wildly until they realized the tragic mistake.' And yet, of
course, Od never existed; which doesn't stop the story appearing every
few years as a news item, set in fictional circuses from Manchester to
Thailand and Sydney. The hippo-eats-dwarf story is a) bizarre, b) almost
certainly fake and c) masquerading as real, which describes a disturbing
amount of what we hear and read about in magazines and on the web.
Scientific investigator Alex Boese, who has for ten years run the web's
biggest myth-busting website www. museumofhoaxes. com, has collected
together a wonderfully entertaining anthology of the best urban myths of
recent years, from bonsai kittens reared in jars to keep them small to
male lactation, and confirms or de-bunks them once and for all. So did
Burger King really release a left-handed Whopper, with all of the
condiments rotated through 180 degrees? Is dehydrated water available to
buy online? Or are they just hippo-eats-dwarf urban myths?
