March 31 2020 - Island Homes

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day.  My searches bring forth strange objects from the sea of information.  Pinterest is such a site and full of real and imagined picture stories.  They seem like April Fool's Jokes available year round. Fact check:  viral photo of castle built on rock is just a fairytale, not reality. The doctored image shows a castle on top of a V-shaped rock which towers steeply over the water. A door with a ladder leading down to a boat on the water can be seen carved into the lower part of the rock. The misleading post’s caption states: “Castle on the rock..” with a shocked emoji. News 18 Buzz went about checking the story.  The island is an islet in Thailand's Phang Aga province and known as the James Bond Island as it was in the 1974 film, "The Man with the Golden Gun." The castle is the 19th-century Lichtenstein Castle in southern Germany.  Here are the comparisons: These are photographic hoaxes.  There are a number of amazing pictures of elevated islands with houses on top.     These pictures go off to ads and various lost websites. That's a feature of Pinterest.  One seldom finds the article to read about the topic.   A pretty Dahlia bouquet for today's image.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://www.blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Help Me Headlines

Why do parrots make such great news?  We just don't expect them to make the headlines with a desperate cry to help.  But wait, today I again saw the "Help Me" headline - so let's see what it's about. CNN recently carried a story of concerned drivers who called police in California after seeing a child hold up a sign with a plea for help - "Help me, she's not my mom!! Help!!"   Poor mother got stopped by police in Sacramento,  who found out it was "a hoax" and "a joke".  The police quote: "This is a reminder that parents need to keep an eagle eye on their children." That was it for children hoax news.  There weren't any other articles like this. What I did find, though, was the "Momo Challenge Hoax" which was covered widely in the press.   The 'Momo Challenge" -  the stories about 'momo' were that she would appear on children's phones unexpectedly and set dangerous challenges to harm themselves.  She's a zombie looking doll figure with bulging black eyes and the body of a chicken. (The original figure has been traced to a Japanese special-effects company Link Factory).   It turns out to have been images that has been found edited into unofficial copies of children's cartoons on YouTube.  Snopes investigated it and identified it as "far more hype or hoax than reality", but warned the images could cause distress to children. Here's the BBC Story on it. On our immediate horizon is the call for a 5 to 10 centimetre snowfall, followed by rain today.  It has dropped from the earlier warning level of 15 cm. In comparison, Newfoundland experienced 51 cm of snow yesterday and today is getting more - up to a total of 75 cm is expected. This will include gusts of wind as high as 120 km per hour.  They are in a state of emergency. So to bring things around to calmness, I found a wonderful image of Notre Dame Cathedral that I'd taken 15 years ago - of course with a new sky.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

The Spaghetti Harvest Celebration Day!

Before we find out if there are any amazing April Fool's Jokes today, let us revel in the past. Here is the link at CNN telling us their top ten April Fool's jokes of all times.  Number 1 on the list is pasta growing on trees.  It is a BBC joke from 1957 showing the Swiss spaghetti harvest.  This has been ranked Number 1 by the Museum of Hoaxes.  The Museum's listing is HERE. This is the pinnacle of the year for this website and its day to shine.  At this site you can read the top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of all time, or find out the early modern hoaxes from 1500 - 1700, Hoaxes of the 1990s, Television hoaxes, Journalists hoaxed, and so on. They are listed by decade - all kinds of listings and stories. After the Swiss spaghetti harvest, the Instant Colour TV of 1962 is the second joke - tv viewers in Sweden were advised to pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen and the images would appear in colour. I liked the Taco Liberty Bell hoax of 1996, in which the Taco Bell Corporation took out a full-page ad that they had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it to the Taco Liberty Bell.  "The best line of the day came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale. Thinking on his feet, he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold. It would now be known, he said, as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial". Look out for our hoaxes today - and all completes by noon.