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Hippo Eats Dwarf
Hippo Eats Dwarf
other
Published:
9 February, 2010
Popular Books by Alex Boese
View All Books by Alex Boese
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?
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9780330512916 |
| ISBN10 | 0330512919 |
| Number Of Pages | 288 |
| Item Weight | 240 g |
| Product Dimensions | 130 x 22 x 194 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | Pan |
| Format | other |
| Edition | Reprints |
GoodReads Reviews
Author's Bio
Recognized as an expert on hoaxes by CNN and the New York Times among others, Alex Boese holds a master's degree in the history of science from the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Elephants on Acid, a fascinating tour through the weirdest science experiments ever conducted, and is the creator and curator of www.museumofhoaxes.com, which receives over a million page hits every month. He lives in San Diego.