Days That End in 'Y' - editorial 'toons & mems

'We're all Home Schooling Preppers Now' edition

== Famous hoaxes ==

Crop Circles

"In 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, of Southampton, England, confessed to having made more than 200 crop circles since the late 1970s with nothing more complex than ropes and boards. They had initially been inspired by a 1966 account of a UFO sighting near Tully, Queensland, Australia, in which a flying saucer supposedly landed in a lagoon and left behind a depressed area of reeds. As crop circles became more prominent in the media, Bower and Chorley’s patterns became more complex, and they delighted in confounding the expectations of those who studied the circles."

The War of the Worlds Hysteria

"The War of the Worlds" is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode became famous for allegedly causing panic among its listening audience, though the scale of that panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners."

Piltdown Man Scam

"Piltdown man, (Eoanthropus dawsoni), also called Dawson’s dawn man, proposed species of extinct hominin (member of the human lineage) whose fossil remains, discovered in England in 1910–12, were later proved to be fraudulent. Piltdown man, whose fossils were sufficiently convincing to generate a scholarly controversy lasting more than 40 years, was one of the most successful hoaxes in the history of science."

Alien Autopsy Hoax of 1995

"The film was dropped at a moment when the population was primed for paranoia: not only was pop culture full of the paranormal, but it was also a time of heightened real-life suspicion, the year of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Unabomber Manifesto. So it’s no surprise that the tape set off immediate controversy. A documentary special purporting to be an objective investigation into the authenticity of the film—dubbed Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?—was so popular it aired on Fox three times, at one point attracting 11.7 million viewers to a single screening.”"

Archaeoraptor Scandal

"National Geographic magazine prominently featured Archaeoraptor in 1999 article. The magazine claimed that the fossil was a "missing link" between birds and terrestrial theropod dinosaurs. Even prior to this publication there had been severe doubts about the fossil's authenticity.

Archaeoraptor would later be dubbed “Piltdown chicken”. Like England’s infamous Piltdown man it turned out to be a cut-and-paste fossil made of different species by poor Chinese farmers seeking a quick buck from gullible evolutionists. For National Geographic, a bastion of scientific publishing, to have been taken in by the hoax showed the sophistication of the forgery.

In 2002, archaeoraptor was conclusively proved to be a forgery. The scandal brought attention to illegal fossil deals conducted in China. National Geographic published a retraction to their "missing link" article on the back page - the following year."

Lonelygirl15 'reality' Show

"Her followers quickly ballooned and she became one of the young site’s most popular stars. The New York Times had a recurring blog about her. She had her own forum. Hundreds of people wanted to be her friend on Myspace.

The thing is, Bree wasn’t real. Lonelygirl15 actually had a small team of writers. Bree and her best friend Daniel were played by actors.YouTubers and the media had been duped. Yet this was no mere flash in the pan hoax – this was YouTube’s first web series. This was the first time someone proved you could actually make money on YouTube. And that changed everything."

The Cardiff Giant

"It was a 10-foot-tall (3.0 m) purported "petrified man" uncovered on October 16, 1869, by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell in Cardiff, New York. Both it and an unauthorized copy made by P. T. Barnum are still being displayed. The original is currently on display at The Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

The giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument at a Methodist revival meeting about Genesis 6:4, which states that there were giants who once lived on Earth."

The Great Coelacanth Canard

"Coelacanths (seel-a-canths) were once known only from fossils and were thought to have gone extinct approximately 65 million years ago, during the great extinction in which the dinosaurs disappeared. That dramatically changed in 1938 when the captain of the fishing trawler caught a living coelacanth while fishing in the Indian Ocean.

Evolutionists had long imagined this ancient fossil fish to be a 'missing link' species, an ancestor of tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates), on the verge of walking onto land, and morphing into amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

Professor J.L.B. Smith was convinced this imagination was fact, and published 'Old Fourlegs: The Story of the Coelacanth' in 1956. He created an international sensation. The book brought science into the living rooms of thousands. It was published in six English editions, and translated into ten foreign languages, as means to confirm the theory of evolution that Charles Darwin proposed in his 1859 book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."

Since then, many specimens of the coelacanth have been photographed, captured, autopsied, and examined. In 2013, DNA sequencing revealed that coelacanths weren't the missing link between sea & land. The 'four legs' imagination was, in fact, fabulism gone around the world. Smith took his own life in 1968, and to this day, no book, or scientific paper has been written to apologize or admit The Great Coelacanth Canard."

Napoleon Crashes the Stock Market

"In 1814, during the Napoleonic Wars, a man dressed as a colonel went around London claiming that Napoleon was dead, and that the Bourbons had won the war. The news resulted in British stock prices rising, before falling back to normal, when it was revealed that Napoleon was not dead. Lord Thomas Cochrane, the man who benefited from the stock fraud, was subsequently arrested for fraud."

The Mechanical Turk

"The Turk beat all comers during its first exhibition, and it soon became something of a sensation in court. Audiences simply didn’t know what to make of it. Some speculated that the automaton was somehow controlled by magnetism, while others argued that it was designed so that a dwarf or a child operator could hide inside.

For every doubter, however, there were just as many others who considered it a technological marvel. As one observer wrote of Kempelen, “it seems impossible to attain a more perfect knowledge of mechanics than this gentleman has done.”"

The Left-Handed Whopper

"April Fool's Day - 1998: Jim Watkins, senior vice president for marketing at Burger King, was quoted as saying that the new sandwich was the "ultimate 'HAVE IT YOUR WAY' for our left-handed customers." The advertisement then noted that the left-handed Whopper would initially only be available in the United States, but that the company was "considering plans to roll it out to other countries with large left-handed populations." 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."

Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax

"On April 25, 1983, Stern magazine—the German answer to Life—held a press conference to make a sensational announcement: their star reporter had discovered a trove of Hitler’s personal diaries, lost since a plane crash in 1945. Now Stern would begin publishing what he’d found. The magazine claimed that the diaries—of which, remarkably, there had been no previous record—would require a major rewriting of Hitler’s biography and the history of the Third Reich.

The handwritten volumes included everything from descriptions of flatulence and halitosis (“Eva says I have bad breath”), to an account of Braun’s hysterical pregnancy in 1940, and the revelation that a surprisingly sensitive Hitler didn’t know what was happening to the Jews.

Two weeks later, the diaries were exposed as fakes—and not particularly good ones, written at great speed by Konrad Kujau, a small-time crook and prolific forger."

Youtube is shutting down

"On April 1st, 2013, G00gle announced it would shut down Youtub the following day.YouTube will start to announce the best video nominees at 9 a.m. PT on April 1 via a livestreamed broadcast. While 30,000 technicians go through the YouTube submissions, a panel of judges, which includes famous YouTubers like Antoine Dodson and iJustine, will vote on the best video. The best video will be selected by 2023 when the site will relaunch."

April fools.