'Naked Chef' Jamie Oliver 'Bares All' in 2004 Calendar

A photograph purporting to show the cover of a new Jamie Oliver calendar generated a fair amount of Internet chatter this past week because, in the words of Sun columnist Ian King, "people thought the Naked Chef was showing off a whopping French stick between his legs."

The photo appeared in the online catalog of Boots, a U.K. health and beauty retailer whose Webmaster judiciously cropped the image once the embarrassing double-entendre became known. "It did look rather obscene," a Boots spokesman reportedly said. According to The Sun, the offending object was simply a brown paper bag distorted by digital rendering. However, skeptics wonder if the photo was authentic in the first place. As of this writing, no images of the calendar are available for comparison on other retail sites such as Amazon.com, though I did manage to find a contender on eBay boasting entirely different cover art. Is one real and the other fake, or are both the work of pranksters? [See update]