Well, I finally got taken in by a hoax myself.

And if I’d just trusted my gut, it never would have happened.

Late last night, when all I wanted to do was go to bed — but as I was also concerned about not having posted anything to the blog that day — I put up a picture I’d received via email. At the time, I thought the pic “looked funny” because there were tons of dials on the computer. “Why would a computer have dials?” I wondered. The printer didn’t seem to quite fit, either. And somewhere, in the back of my brain, was this other nagging thought: “Weren’t they predicting really amazing things for the year 2000 back in the 1950s and 1960s?”

Bob Marcotte came out of tendonitis-recovery-retirement to point out the hoax was a hoax.

The irony of this is that I’d spent about an hour or so yesterday morning (while looking for vegetarian cookbooks, actually) poring over a book called “When Pancakes Go Bad.” The book shows how to make realistic-appearing fake pictures of such things as cell phones with rotary dials and pancakes with evil fang-filled drooling mouths. Creating fakes is one of my (few) hobbies.

Well, I got bit. But it wasn’t by a pancake.