The possibly funny, and the not at all amusing
My pick for the Guardian's April Foolery this year.
Kathryn Hughes:
I was actually six and three-quarters when I first discovered that practical jokes aren't funny. What they are, in fact, is acts of bullying performed with a sly grin. The physical ones - in Scotland, apparently, you have to kick someone's bottom on April Fools' Day, which must make going to work a riot - are nothing more than simple thuggery.
While I personally incline to the belief that there is such a thing as harmless spoofery - I still remember the San Serife supplement (there is lamentably little about this elaborate hoax on the internetz) - this is, I recognise, not necessarily shared: remembers the unfortunate fallout from shared joke that proliferated on a scholarly mailing list about entirely chimerical exotic pet of eminent Victorian author.
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Not At All Amusing:
Judges admit they get round law designed to protect women in rape trials.
Homophobia rife in British society, landmark equality survey finds.
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Woman of valour: Sharpshooter, paratrooper, hero: the woman who set France ablaze: Secret National Archive files show insiders' accounts of Briton's heroism against the Nazis . (NB when will journos plz 2 stop referring to 'secret files'? - or indeed ' buried in the archives' - since this remarkable lady died only recently, the file in question was presumably her personal file closed under Data Protection legislation. Duh.)