No posting yesterday out of deference to April Fools Day
I must admit to an affection for April Fools Day. The web has taken the well-crafted April Fools joke to a whole new level of artistry however and there were a lot of "top ten lists" yesterday of favorite April 1st pranks. There are tons of lame ones, but the best are few and artfully effected -- always with the vague possibility that they might be true. Here are my favorites:
1) "Taco Bell buys the Liberty Bell" -- This is my favorite simply because I was even taken in for about ten seconds. I think one has to live in modern America to understand gullibility to the buying-our-souls meme, but I laughed so hard when I noticed the date it had been posted. The origins of this one are unknown. Taco Bell is a "Tex-Mex" fast food chain owned, I believe, by Pepsico.
2) "Discovery making emergency landing at San Diego airfield": San Diego, CA radio disc jockey Chainsaw's morning team actually convinced a lot of people that the space shuttle Discovery was about to make an emergency landing at a tiny local airfield (because of its unique proximity and "attributes necessary for the landing"). The police were not amused when a couple of thousand people showed up. By the way, there wasn't even a shuttle in orbit at the time.
3) "The Left-Handed Whopper" (I clipped this description from Museum of Hoaxes since it sums it up nicely): In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new Whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."
4) "Alabama Changes the Value of Pi" (I clipped this description from Museum of Hoaxes since it sums it up nicely) The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough. ((Mel adds this would be higher up my list except that not many people fell for it since it was aimed at scientists)).
5) From the mid 80s: "The Soviets want to initiate unfettered discussions with Americans via Usenet newsgroups" This according to a message from what appears to be a Kremlin server (kremvax.UUCP). When Moscow's first real Usenet site appears years later, it's named kremvax.
6) "The AF/91 printer virus destroys the Iraqi air defense network during the first day of the Gulf war". This from a 1991 InfoWorld story. It was so well written that AP, CNN, ABC, Popular Machanics and major newspapers ran it as a true story later in the nineties. The story mutated and was published in a US News & World Reports book.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/147
7) "Great Fragments of Mr Lincoln": "Disneyland announces it will take the Abe Lincoln figure from its Main Street USA exhibit and shred him up to sell to the public on "collectible medallions and postcards". The proceeds were to go to the American Cancer Society with the motto -- "He
freed the slaves, now help him cure America's #2 Killer!" Looking back on this, I consider this kind of lame (see reasons below), but I include it because so many people on the Disney Usenet group believed it.
8) "Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity" (I clipped this description also from Museum of Hoaxes since it sums it up nicely)
In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
Normally I'd think #8 was too outrageous to truly work for April Fools, but the fact that so many people were fooled shows yet again how dumb I am.
9) I must say I think one of my favorite April Fools joke of all was so great simply because it wasn't intended to be a prank at all. Some fools are "self-selecting". A fair-sized US museum ran a special exhibit through an entire month -- the exhibit was called "Living Dinosaurs". The dinosaurs were, of course, audioanimatronic. Upon discovering this, over 70 people demanded their money back.
** And I can now confess the origins of # 7 -- yes, friends, I wrote it. It's my fault. Come and get me Disney Coppers!!
1) "Taco Bell buys the Liberty Bell" -- This is my favorite simply because I was even taken in for about ten seconds. I think one has to live in modern America to understand gullibility to the buying-our-souls meme, but I laughed so hard when I noticed the date it had been posted. The origins of this one are unknown. Taco Bell is a "Tex-Mex" fast food chain owned, I believe, by Pepsico.
2) "Discovery making emergency landing at San Diego airfield": San Diego, CA radio disc jockey Chainsaw's morning team actually convinced a lot of people that the space shuttle Discovery was about to make an emergency landing at a tiny local airfield (because of its unique proximity and "attributes necessary for the landing"). The police were not amused when a couple of thousand people showed up. By the way, there wasn't even a shuttle in orbit at the time.
3) "The Left-Handed Whopper" (I clipped this description from Museum of Hoaxes since it sums it up nicely): In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new Whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."
4) "Alabama Changes the Value of Pi" (I clipped this description from Museum of Hoaxes since it sums it up nicely) The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough. ((Mel adds this would be higher up my list except that not many people fell for it since it was aimed at scientists)).
5) From the mid 80s: "The Soviets want to initiate unfettered discussions with Americans via Usenet newsgroups" This according to a message from what appears to be a Kremlin server (kremvax.UUCP). When Moscow's first real Usenet site appears years later, it's named kremvax.
6) "The AF/91 printer virus destroys the Iraqi air defense network during the first day of the Gulf war". This from a 1991 InfoWorld story. It was so well written that AP, CNN, ABC, Popular Machanics and major newspapers ran it as a true story later in the nineties. The story mutated and was published in a US News & World Reports book.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/147
7) "Great Fragments of Mr Lincoln": "Disneyland announces it will take the Abe Lincoln figure from its Main Street USA exhibit and shred him up to sell to the public on "collectible medallions and postcards". The proceeds were to go to the American Cancer Society with the motto -- "He
freed the slaves, now help him cure America's #2 Killer!" Looking back on this, I consider this kind of lame (see reasons below), but I include it because so many people on the Disney Usenet group believed it.
8) "Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity" (I clipped this description also from Museum of Hoaxes since it sums it up nicely)
In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
Normally I'd think #8 was too outrageous to truly work for April Fools, but the fact that so many people were fooled shows yet again how dumb I am.
9) I must say I think one of my favorite April Fools joke of all was so great simply because it wasn't intended to be a prank at all. Some fools are "self-selecting". A fair-sized US museum ran a special exhibit through an entire month -- the exhibit was called "Living Dinosaurs". The dinosaurs were, of course, audioanimatronic. Upon discovering this, over 70 people demanded their money back.
** And I can now confess the origins of # 7 -- yes, friends, I wrote it. It's my fault. Come and get me Disney Coppers!!