Here’s the nineteenth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly
LiteratEye #19: Had It With Airport Hassles? Grab a Rug and Go!
By W.J. Elvin III
June 26, 2009
Last week we looked into imaginary destinations so it seems reasonable to follow up with a look at imaginary transportation – from the perspective of literary hoaxes, of course.
This “hoax,” as it is now known, comes from Australia, though you will now find it scattered around the world-wide web as genuine. It claims to report new findings regarding flying carpets, also known as magic carpets.
Australia sometimes seems a hotbed for literary mischief. It’s probably no hotter than any other bed, just a society engaged in a struggle for cultural identity that makes for a climate more sensitive to fakery. Here in America such things are a bit of yawn. We’ve had fifty years or so of journalists educating us to the fact that our culture is a gob of scandal and artifice, so that today, who cares?
But back to Australia, thinking back to the spinning globe on a brass or wooden holder that decorated the high school geography classroom, maybe it has to do with how Australians walk around upside down. You don’t see as much literary foolery coming out of, say, Canada, where people are more straight-up. Continue reading “LiteratEye #19: Had It With Airport Hassles? Grab a Rug and Go!”
Who owns knowledge? One way to get a clue is to try to access research papers published in expensive, exclusive scientific and scholarly journals. Can’t do it with a simple Google search. To pick that lock, you’ll need a credit card.
A telephone prankster posing as a sprinkler company employee caused havoc Saturday morning at an Arkansas Holiday Inn when he convinced an employee to set off the hotel’s fire alarm, smash windows, shut down electricity, and break a sprinkler head that flooded the building lobby. The bizarre incident is 
Why be everyday poor when you can easily fake upscale, major-league financial ruin? For a few bucks you can be in the game in grand style. When your happy hour pals crank up the wailing and lamentation, you can jump right in, waving evidence of really big losses.
Germany, the land of Goethe, Thomas Mann and Beethoven, has an unlikely pop culture hero: Donald Duck. Just as the French are obsessed with Jerry Lewis, the Germans see a richness and complexity to the Disney comic that isn”t always immediately evident to people in the cartoon duck”s homeland.