Yahoo! News confused on theft of Lego giraffe's todger

Anatomy 101

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Odds and Sods, 26th August 2009 00:16 GMT

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Editors at Yahoo News are either horribly bad at anatomy or have a better sense of humor than they're given credit for. Or maybe both.

How else to explain an article on the UK version of the site reporting the repeated theft of a 30 cm penis from a Lego giraffe at a Berlin tourist attraction?

At time of writing, it read:

Visitors to a tourist attraction in Berlin have been making off with an unusual memento - the 30 cm long penis of a Lego giraffe. The Lego phallus belongs to a six metre tall model that has stood outside the entrance to the Legoland Discovery Centre on Potsdamer Platz since 2007.

A more prosaic version of the article can be found here.

It states:

Visitors to a tourist attraction in Berlin have been making off with an unusual memento -- the 30 cm long tail of a Lego giraffe. The Lego tail belongs to a six metre tall model that has stood outside the entrance to the Legoland Discovery Centre on Potsdamer Platz since 2007.

We've seen a lot of snafus in the world of journalism, but none like this. Interestingly, editors posting a later version of the story didn't take such creative licenses.

The fun was too much for even The Malaysian Insider to pass up. It was also caught running the article, which concludes with this gem:

It takes model workers about one week to restore the long-necked animal's manhood at a cost of 3,000 euros (2,600 pounds), the spokeswoman said. The centre is now erecting a metal construction to protect the giraffe's genitalia.

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