Customer Reviews

Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S.

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Following the huge success of 'The Museum of Hoaxes' I waited in anticipation for the follow up, 'Hippo Eats Dwarf'.
However dear readers, I was shocked when I learned the horrible truth behind this book. Alex Boese DID NOT write this book. Nor did he even pen MoH.
The truth is, a team of highly trained monkeys have been working around the clock for the past two years, getting paid literally peanuts, to churn out yet another best seller.
I'll give you a minute to come to grips with this shocking news.
At first I was in denial, I felt cheated and gullible. However, after a while I began to realise just how wonderful this breakthrough was. If we can help these monkeys have a successful career just by buying their book, isn't that worth something? So buy this book now! Do your bit to help an underprivilged primate suceed in the cut throat publishing industry today.

Reading this book was a life-changing experience for me. It made me reflect on my own life and say to myself "Wow...something has to change." And Alex Boese showed me how. I needed to pull more pranks and create more hoaxes.

As soon as I realized why I felt there was a hole in my life, I set immediately to fix it. That's where this book shined once again...it served as almost a guide, inspiring me on what pranks to pull. Creating fake mermaids, chain letters, stories about placing kittens in boxes...you should have seen me, I was on a roll!

Alex Boese is my hero. I know that this book will help bring about a change in anyone who reads it.

Honestly, this book is far and away the worst book I've ever had the misfortune to kill someone with. It's construction is amatuerish in the extreme, for instance after only two blows the spine cracked and the pages started falling out. Honestly, I actually had to resort to using a bat to finish the bastard off, which tells me there are much better uses for trees than printing books such as this. Save yourself some money and purchase something by Robert Jordan instead. Those are some hefty, well crafted books that will endure hours of family violence. Hell, even if the repeated blows don't finish them off you can always resort to reading the damn thing to them, but that's a bit inhumane.

Translated from the original German, this testament has a few inaccuracies which lead to some confusion (and thus the title), but for the most part it can be followed by the faithful as a devotional and spiritual guide (which is it's true purpose after all).

Alex Boese has transformed his knowledge of hoax and deception into an inspirational message of peace and love through the very vehicle which he so eloquently debunks in one paragraph and utilizes for his missive within that very same paragraph. An adept wordsmith, interlacing scripture with text in a seamless series of lessons meant to raise awareness and spark enlightened to what shall surely become comme il faut.

I found myself becoming morbidly fascinated by the number of subtly prophetic insights Alex injected into this manuscript. The numerous animal references obviously point out that we should all be more open minded about our relationships with animals and the expression of our feelings in a more romantic fashion without fear of ridicule or judgement by the less enlightened masses, and yet there are certain prohibitions which are to be observed in order to preserve the decorum of this most sacred act. A less astute writer would have missed this fine point and mislead his readers. There is also the interjection of the need for the reader to proclaim their allegiance to this religion and modify their behavior in such a way as to lead the masses into a new age of enlightenment. This IS truly a field guide to hoaxes, BUT what is written between the lines is that which we must all follow: The prescription laid out in this tome to create a new utopia, through guile and deception, as the "ends justify the means".

The gullible and moronic few will only see the superficial camouflage Alex has deviously woven his message into that can be interpreted as a "follow-up" novel to his previous work, Museum of Hoaxes. The reality of this effort is a crusade by a visionary prophet to guide & convert the populace to Nirvana through subliminal and carefully crafted nemonic clues within this masterwork. I applaud my new mentor and recommend this fine work to everyone, everywhere.

At face value, this book appears to be merely a collection of amusing tales--a poignant portrait of the interaction of guile and gullibility. That is, until you realize that it is also a vehicle for encrypting the prophesies of cult leader and pareidolically-recognizable religious icon, Alex Boese. This neoskeptic messiah has posted his challenge to his hoaxaphilic disciples in a way that only the best can appreciate.

His encryption methods don't appear to be new. After a thorough search using the techniques employed in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, I found very little that was more complicated than the equidistant letter sequences of the Torah Codes. In public interviews Boese has made oblique references to the existence of an additional, deeper layer of encryption, which is only evident when you've decoded all the messages in all of his books. Not for one minute do I doubt that Alex had the foresight to begin this complicated undertaking with his first book, but given his penchant for hoaxes, I'm reluctant to begin the search.

Buy the book. Leave it on the coffee table for chuckles. But if you desire the gnosis of Boese, you'll need to dig below the surface. Happy decoding.

The popular series that began with HIPPO EATS TOULOUSE LAUTREC, stumbled with HIPPO EATS COWBELL (how many obscure Christopher Walken references can one really stomach?), then completely fell on its face with HIPPO WILL EAT ITSELF (the endless flatulence gags were moronic). But the series has now returned to original form with HIPPO EATS DWARF. Our protagonist engages in a series of new adventures. Will she drink the Kool-Aid? Will she succumb to Munchausen Syndrome by Internet? I won't give away any secrets, but pay attention to the twist that occurs on page 112.

Hippo Eats Dwarf is a story that a lot of American's can relate to. It is the story of obesity.

The story is told of a female trapeze artist called Ursula Shipton who due to an accident is unable to continue her high flying work. Due to these she quickly gains wait and notoriety for eating just about anything. It finally gets to a stage where she has to choose between continuing her glutinous ways or doing the right thing.

Overall the book is light hearted written well. 3 out of 5

In "Hippo Eats Dwarf" Alex Boese takes on a variety of hoaxes, frauds, distortions, and misconceptions that are to a large degree enabled by the Internet. I liked the book, but found it wandered off track on occasion. Most annoying, I found it physically difficult to read. In addition to standard black on white type, there is an abundance of brown and green which are distracting at best but when brown type appears on green background, which is quite common, it's fairly tedious to read.

That is likely not a decision Boese made, but the content is, and it's mostly good though some of the text is less hoax-debunking and more straight humor. My favorite example is the personal ad from the "Dublin News" reading "Optimistic Mayo man, 35, seeks a blonde 20-year-old double-jointed supermodel, who owns her own brewery, and has an open-minded sister." I was highly amused, although most people are sly enough not to need the questionable nature of the ad pointed out. I was also entertained by the prank product found online called the "Real Sheep" that it involves silicone and is listed as a romance product. That is all that need be said.

The real value of the book (besides entertainment, obviously) is in showing how easy it is to deceive people using fake Internet sites, elaborate schemes (and some fairly obvious ones, such as the famous Nigerian banking scam,) and digital photograph alteration. On that basis alone I found the book worth the purchase price. Frequently Boese punctuates points with outlandish true tales, my favorite of which involves the Klingon translation of "Hamlet." Really. Despite Klingons being wholly fictional, it may not surprise you that their language (started at the University of California, Berkeley, naturally) has now been given an official stamp of approval by the Oregon mental health authority, which in 2003 made it a patient right to have a Klingon interpreter present on demand. Some of us aren't surprised, but we all should be.

Ignoring the horrible typesetting issues involved, this is a generally informative and entertaining book, and I recommend it to open-minded readers looking for something a bit off the beaten path.

Covering such diverse topics as the Turin Shroud and the 'death' of Elvis Presley, this is an extremely witty and informative guide to notorious hoaxes. It never fails to go into detail and often comes out with little-known facts. I had never before realised that the publication of Alan Sokal's spoof scientific-paper constituted treason, or that he was jailed for seven years (a portion of the sentence having been served in Al Capone's former cell at Alcatraz). Similarly, it was a shock to learn that John Major is a dedicated crop-circle maker, who regularly rose before 3am to create arable-mischief: while serving as Prime Minister! Amazon users may be interested to note the inclusion of Amazon.com's top 500 reviewer Henry Raddick, whose many spoof reviews are well-known across the internet. Boese spends a little time exploring the psychology of hoaxers but, despite his best efforts, he is unable to come up with an answer to the biggest question: What actually motivates these morally-bankrupt buffoons to waste everybody's time on such vapid, unfunny pranks?

Possibly one of the most risque romance novels I have ever read. A young man with height problems and his predeliction for large pachyderms. A love that is more than requited.
I was surprised that Alex (the writer) could actually get away with such a potentially inflamatory title.

Well, it's more of a cook book really, one thousand and one was to cook a dwarf, aimed at a special audience.

Basically the book is set in downtown New York where two street gangs known as the Hippo-ninjas and the Dwarves are fighting over turf. the title comes from possibly the most powerful line in the book when the leader of the Dwarf Gang stands before the leader of the Hippo gang and says 'Eat Me.' just before all hell breaks loose.