These hoaxes are getting boring already.
Though clearly not as popular as the Miley Cyrus hoax, or the Oprah Winfrey hoax, another death hoax is making the rounds online, this time about Eminem, otherwise known as Marshall Mathers.
An alleged (Yahoo) news story is what’s causing the buzz, only there seem to be no actual reports of it, and often you end up at an Angelfire page showing a 2003 death hoax attempt. That story looks real until you notice, as with the other hoaxes… bad grammar and spelling errors. I won’t be giving them the benefit of a backlink, so if you want to see it for yourself, copy and paste the url into your browser… but remove the word ‘fake’ from the url first. Though they don’t get a link from me, your going there still gives them hits. If you’re ok with that, then go. If you’d like to deprive them of the hits too, feel free to view the screen cap of the full page (with location bar and all) by clicking here. The broken url is below:
http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/FAKEyahoonews000/
I suppose your average, everyday, garden variety kid wouldn’t notice the grammatical errors, but you’d think they’d notice something as obvious as the misspelling of Marshall Mathers! Frac, I’m an old lady and I noticed it.
At any rate, he’s not dead and here’s the rule of thumb to go by with these death reports that seem to be happening about one per week…
If all you can find is a questionable source that’s been added to Digg, or a “real” news report that’s not still displaying at the original alleged news agency but is being brought to you via some other site and a screen cap… it’s probably not real, it’s someone’s “I want to fool the internet and get lots of attention” attempt.
I don’t have any idea if these hoaxes are all being put out there by the same kids, but they have so far, involved kids.
And by that, I don’t mean goats. Although at this point, that would be more interesting, wouldn’t it?
Goats… fooling the internet!
However… the only goats I know online are Nanny Goats in Panties, and this fellow who, while he doesn’t call himself a goat… is a bit of an old goat. Just please don’t tell him I said that. He’s likely to ’cause some kind of a barnyard kerfuffle if he finds out.
Lastly… no, I don’t mean goatse either.
That’s just sick.
You’ll have to look for photos of that yourself. The only link you’ll get from me, is to Urban Dictionary.
Carry on….
Oh my does Getrude know about DP and this cow?
Rotfl. The original animal was a ram and the cartoon was about RAM. When I took off the horns I did think it looked not so much like a goat anymore, but then after viewing the goat pictures over at nanny goats, I decided to just let it be. I figured we’d all be too captivated and in awe by the good looks of the goat herder anyway…
(And I gave him a female goat because I thought one male animal pet was enough for DP)
Blimey – I must lose some weight! …….. nice to see a piccy of my Nanny though ……..
Are you referring to the goat, or the lady reprimanding the goat? If it’s the latter, all I can say is, “How terribly lucky for you!” Rofl.
(And you’re far too self-conscious DP. I’d thought it was just a baggy/saggy sweater…)
The goat looks as if it is pleading to get rid of DP.lol
It’s so silly that people are using someone’s death stories to make themselves famous. Why don’t people do some real stuff and get their share of fame? I was laughing when I read the ‘blamed for the cell phone’ part but I wonder doesn’t all these big companies do anything to stop such craziness? I mean they are using Yahoo’s name, it’s not a small thing.
CNN was used (see the fracas blog story) and they did take legal action to have the auto-CNN-story-generator removed.
Yahoo seems to be used fairly often though. I haven’t heard if they have plans to take action. I suspect they like the attention and since it always comes out that it’s a hoax and not them… they probably just like the extra publicity.
I myself, used TMZ to do a parody spoofy thing with Miss Piggy… but I made sure I added a disclaimer at the bottom so no one would think I was really trying to cause damage to Miss Piggy, Kermit, or TMZ.
You have blogged a subject near and dear to my heart and I’m not referring to just the goats! I’m talking about hoaxes!
Thanks for the link, Fraccers! You are a goat among ladies, er, something like that.