In the 1950s, a DJ named Jean Shepherd hosted a late-night radio show on New York's WOR that was unlike any before or since. On these broadcasts, he delivered dense, cerebral monologues, sprinkled with pop-culture tidbits and vivid stretches of expert storytelling. "There is no question that we are a tiny, tiny, tiny embattled minority here," he assured his audience in a typical diatribe. "Hardly anyone is listening to mankind in all of its silliness, all of its idiocy, all of its trivia, all of its wonder, all of its glory, all of its poor, sad, pitching us into the dark sea of oblivion." Shepherd's approach was summed up by [...]

Let's take a moment today, on this third anniversary of the amazing "Balloon Boy" hoax, to remember that, as Twitter user pourmecoffee says, "if it's on TV, it's important!" Also on this day in history, it is the 229th anniversary of man's first ride in a balloon, which probably should have tipped us all off in the first place. [Via]

The great newspaper hoax artist Tommaso Debenedetti has confessed. He made up five interviews with Philip Roth alone, as well as interviews with dozens of others. His defense: "Italy is a joke." What a sad day for fun!

The heroic Iranian monkey who supposedly rode a rocket into space last week returned to Earth with strange new powers. For instance, the monkey's distinctive face mole was completely gone when the creature was photographed by government officials upon landing. The creature's white-blonde hair had changed to brunette, too, much like the hair of Moses changed from black to white after he spotted the Hebrew God cowering under a bush. What other mutant powers could the Persian primate have developed while exposed to dangerous gamma rays or whatever, in orbit?

The Times of London doubts the superhero animal's mysterious changes occurred in space. Could the sneaky Iranians have [...]

This time it's not a hoax: man can actually hijack Times Square screens. Congrats, Adi Isakovic!

Val Temple, the producer of Cooking the Books, reenacts the most famous hoaxes of the 00s.

Mary Toft was 23 when she gave birth to her first rabbit. Other rabbits—six, seven, eight of them—followed. It was 1726. Toft lived in Godalming, a small rural town in Surrey; news of the births skipped its way to London, and the king's anatomist was dispatched to investigate. He was unimpressed with Mary, describing her as "of a very stupid and sullen Temper." Nevertheless, after witnessing a rabbit birth himself—the 15th!—he returned to London convinced of the extraordinary, preternatural nature of the births. (And why not, amazing things happen to stupid country people all the time: they're sold magic beans, they haul talking fish out of the water, they give [...]

Apple PR is saying that the e-mails sent from "Steve Jobs" telling a steamed iPhone 4 user to calm down about his new device's tech issues because "it is just a phone" are fakety fake fake fake.

A study purporting to show Sydney as Australia's most gullible city was revealed to be a hoax, but not before it was widely reported as fact in the Australian media. One tipoff might have come from the fake report's explanation of methodology: "These results were completely made up to be fictitious material through a process of modified truth and credibility nodes."