Sunday, February 08, 2009

HOAX!

FauxWonderTree

This just came in, purporting to be an amazing tree "somewhere in India" (no, wait, Andhra Pradesh was specifically named). I'm as gullible as anyone else and have fallen for any number of hokey-pokey e-mail scares so maybe it's Grizzled Experience that led me to doubt this tree could possibly be Indian. In the further photographs of the tree, details of astonishingly well-carved animals can be seen, amongst them a number of distinctly non-Indian beasties, such as a hippopotamus. SO I used my now-favourite web site Tin Eye, (ref the post further down on this page, in which I reverse-searched design objects) and it led me to Break The Chain, a web-site dedicated to busting e-mail hoaxes. I think I've GOT to enter both of these sterling sites to my list at right!!

MOMENTS LATER: It is done. I have also removed a couple of sites, notably the LitterBoxWatch coz it was no longer active (or wasn't, the last time I clicked on it).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whoever worked on that photograph did have depth and quality. I liked the scorpion the best. If she / he also had the sense of humour to float it across as a real tree, not just in AP, but anywhere in the world, and if there were folks who'd fall for it, well, I'd say it confirms my suspicion that there really are some among us whose IQs are two degrees less than that of an average moron's! (I'm not techno-savvy enough to insert a smiley at this point. Consider one inserted!)

Manjula Padmanabhan said...

The photograph is of a physical object in Disney World, in Florida, USA. It IS covered in carved animals (something like 300 distinct creatures, I think), but so far as I know it isn't, and wasn't ever, a living tree. The carvings are cleverly done, whatever the medium. The other photographs of it which were circulated along with this one were fairly detailed.

An earlier version of this hoax claimed that the tree -- this same photograph -- was situated in China! On the subject of gullibility, you might enjoy visiting BreakTheChain ... lots of interesting stuff there.

EYE said...

the pic is of the tree of life in Disney land. i mailed back each and everyone who sent me this one with the correct info.