Hit and Myth

Weird Internet story of the week discovered by Nora and me comes from the media navel-gazing site Crikey.

The long and short of it is many Muslims are being hoodwinked by an Internet hoax in which it is claimed a girl was transformed into an animal after having thrown the Koran on the ground. Circulating with it is a picture which sort of looks like a hairy, arthritic Kate Moss.

However, rather than the 'mighty power of Allah', it is in fact the work of a very cross Patricia Piccinini who takes umbrage at the unauthorised use of her 2003 artwork The Leather Landscape which is supposed to be 'about genetic engineering and our evolutionary links to animals'.

At least in our part of the world, belief that an 18-year-old girl could be turned into a strange looking creature after throwing a book on the ground would be confined between the start and finishing times of that week's episode of Charmed.

We would imagine that only an utter dullard would believe in something like this as fact.

Perhaps reducing their people to dullards quite suits the Islamic elite...

-- Nick