Long names

[Razgovory]

It's an excellent hoax, especially given how he tangled up the city bureaucracy!

Not to mention some of the posters in this thread.

[mongers]

Uh, yeah, this is a hoax.  Lots of clues here, including the Feb 29th birthday, the fact that the name doesn't use real German words, the fact that it uses the English, not the German, alphabet for the initial letters of the names, and the fact that there is no historical evidence whatever for it.  I think the fact that the Guinness Book of World Records has dropped the name is also telling.  Add to that the discrepancies between the story in the GBWR and the newspaper story about this guy which preceded it (in the newspaper story he wasn't German but was "of German extraction," and in the newspaper story he was born in 1917), and you have enough disproof to satisfy me.

It's an excellent hoax, especially given how he tangled up the city bureaucracy!

This is a good tell; whenever I make a throwaway sign up for a website, or register a non-serious/joke persona on a new forum, I always use Feb 29th and to make it really obvious, I use an odd numbered year, if the forum software doesn't have an inbuilt calender.

[merithyn]

It's an excellent hoax, especially given how he tangled up the city bureaucracy!

Not to mention some of the posters in this thread.

Never said it wasn't a hoax. I said it wasn't an Urban Legend. There were enough things that were "off" for me to be skeptical, but it's still pretty clear that it wasn't an urban legend.