Hippo Eats Dwarf

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?

Product details

• Authors: Alex Boese, Boese Alex
• Publisher: Pan Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.02.2016
• EAN: 9781509823192
• ISBN: 978-1-5098-2319-2
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 156 mm x 234 mm x 17 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Comic, cartoon, humour, satire; Guides > Spirituality > Ancient knowledge, ancient cultures; Humor, HUMOR / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, popular science, Humour, Popular beliefs and controversial knowledge