useless information

I've just spent probably a good hour trying to verify the authenticity of a factoid I just read in The Best Book of Useless Information Ever:

"Male rhesus monkeys often hang from tree branches by their prehensile penises."

This would be extremely interesting, if it were true. But I can't verify it. A google search turns up only identical repetitions of the same fact, repeated word-for-word 3,210 times on 3,210 blogs (I'm not making this number up). And that's not including all the other passers-on who put the information into their own words instead of just plagiarizing it directly.¹

Being the academic I am, I delved into several scientific research papers on the mating capabilities of rhesus monkeys, and though I found several descriptions of macaque penises (which are red and violet-colored, in case you're interested), not one researcher saw fit to mention the member's prehensibility. I am going to take this as proof that these are perfectly normal genitalia we're talking about, because surely no scientist would ever leave out the characteristic of prehensibility if it applied to a penis.

I mean, really.

But this leads me to the much more urgent (if less interesting) problem that has lately been concerning me: the utter unreliability of web information. A single sentence can be replicated and passed on as fact ad infinitum. If even one blog picks up the claim and passes it along, then another does, too, and pretty soon the fiction has become fact, because it has the weight of 3,210 blogs behind it. The genital functionality of rhesus monkeys is a fairly harmless piece of disinformation. But I've been reading about the extremely damaging web rumors, too, some of which are deliberately planted in order, to, say make a company's stock prices crash, or to embarrass someone running for office. And even newscasters are duped by these things.

So anyway, now I'm cynically wondering if it's true, as my book claims, that termites produce more farts relative to their body size than any other living creature (how would you measure this, anyway?!),² or--most unbelievable yet--whether it really does take twelve people twenty hours to make one Oscar statuette.

'Cause I find that one really hard to believe.
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¹ Oh, excuse me....the sentence was not entirely plagiarized. The bloggers in question all added the tag "amazing" to the sentence: i.e. "Male rhesus monkeys often hang from tree branches by their AMAZING prehensile penises."

And then it was replicated 3,210 times.

² After more exhaustive research I have determined that, in fact, you can measure the fart of a termite. You can read the scientific article here.