5 Feet of Fury

‘First, there was the little fact that the initials on the cover read ‘F.H.’ instead of ‘A.H.’…’

Which I noticed while standing in the checkout line, the week TIME magazine put the “Hitler Diaries” on their cover back in 1983.

I was in high school, and happened to own a gigantic reference dictionary that included a page of alphabets in different fonts, including Germanic calligraphy.

But hey, what did I know…?

Meanwhile, the really useful bit of this Cracked.com piece on “outrageous hoaxes that actually fooled people”?

The next time you mutter to yourself, “Sheesh! I wish Frank Rich would go back to being an entertainment critic, and write about a topic he knows something about, instead of (still) railing about George Bush being a moron who should’ve been impeached…” etc., well, here ya go:

For most of the early 1990s in London, Alan Conway, travel agent and small-time con man, lived a second life as famed director Stanley Kubrick.

During this time, he fooled celebrities and regular people alike, getting free dinners and movie tickets, all while promising people roles in his upcoming films.

It gets even weirder — people who had met the real Kubrick were still fooled somehow, such as New York Times writer Frank Rich, who bought the “shaved beard” story and never questioned why Kubrick had changed his accent and forgotten the details of all of his own movies.