Museum of Hoaxes

Reuters

As April Fools' Day looms, the curator of the Museum of Hoaxes has a word of caution for those who want to believe the unbelievable -- a good hoax is hard to find.

Alex Boese, the curator of the museum which exists online only at museumofhoaxes.com -- despite the lovely photographs of its nonexistent headquarters in San Diego -- has issued his annual list of 100 top hoaxes and cautioned, in the interest of truth, that none of the items have changed this year before April 1.

"There are no new entries this year, you have to be pretty good to get on it," said Boese, the author of three books on hoaxes including "Hippo Eats Dwarf, a Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S."

"A hoax has to be a rare combination that gets something ridiculous that people will believe," he added.

Take his Top 10 list: all are examples of faux news stories that people jumped to believe, headed by "The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest."

According to Boese, the BBC news show "Panorama" announced in 1957 that a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil caused Swiss farmers to enjoy a bumper spaghetti crop.

The show displayed footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees

The British, coming through World War II rationing and never known for their refined palate, called up wanting to know how to grow spaghetti trees.

Also on the worst hoaxes list was a 1962 report by the only television station in Sweden that viewers could convert to color TV by pulling a nylon stocking over their TV screen. Hundreds of thousands of people were taken in.

Then there was the case of Sidd Finch, the make-believe pitcher who wanted to play for the Mets, according to a famous April 1985 Sports Illustrated story by George Plimpton.

The magazine said Finch threw a baseball faster than anyone in the game and had mastered the "art of the pitch" in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa."

was the April 1, 1996, hoax in which Taco Bell Corp. announced it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.

We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing
- George Bernard Shaw

Techie wipes out $38 billion fund

Everyone has heard the dumb computer user jokes. I’ve told several of them myself. But it’s time for one really good Techie screw up.

JUNEAU, Alaska -

Imagine wiping out a disk drive (computer hardware that holds information) containing a business account worth $38 billion. That’s what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. Can you just imagine his/her face when the s/he realized the problem? I don’t think “oh shit” would cover it.

While the tech was doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted information for an oil-funded account which just happened to be one of Alaska residents’ biggest perks …but it gets better. The Tech also mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well. Any good knowledgeable and prepared company IT Team wouldn’t worry too much because hey! “we still have the back up tapes that we did last month.”

No, the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.

“Nobody panicked, said Permanent Fund Dividend Division Director Amy Skow.

I call Bullshit!

“ we instantly went into planning for the worst-case scenario,” said Amy Skow.

Over the next few days, as the department, the division and consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. labored to retrieve the data, it became obvious the worst-case scenario was at hand.

Nine months worth of information concerning the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.

And the only backup was the paperwork itself — stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.

The computer foul-up ended up costing the department more than $200,000.

Future Telecommuting Positions