Tuesday, April 1

Don't Believe a Thing You Hear Today

I am not an April's Fools Fan. I don't particularly enjoy Punk'd or any event where someone is made to feel stupid for someone else's pleasure. BUT, there have been some good pranks pulled out there. And I'm not just talking about the rubberband that the kids and I put on the kitchen spray nozzle so it shot straight at Allan when he turned the water on this evening.

* A few years ago when I was listening to NPR, they did a long story about changing the Boston Celtics (seltics) to the Celtics (keltics), to be culturally sensitive to the Irish. They interviewed players, people in Ireland and Boston - giving all points on both sides. I was shocked - Can they change the pronunciation of such an institution? It wasn't until the next day that I realized that I had been snookered [other yearly spoofs include last year's iBod, federal health care for pets (2002), and advertisements projected onto the moon (2000)].

* Today I was checking in with one of my regular reads - Tim Ferris and his 4-Hour Workweek. Part of his regular message is smart workflow and outsourcing pretty much everything (he has even outsourced his dating - seriously). Yesterday, which he reasoned was April's Fools somewhere in the world, he wrote a post about how he was confessing to have outsourced the writing of his blog for the past year. People were outraged and disappointed - until he fessed up today.

* In 1996, Taco Bell announced it had bought the LIberty Bell, renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. A White House spokesman furthered the joke by stating that the LIncoln Memorial was now the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

* In 1998, Burger King introduced a Left-Handed Whopper. It had the same ingredients, but the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of left-handed customers. They received thousands of requests for specific handed Whoppers.

* In 1957, BBC made an extensive report on spaghetti trees, which remains one of the most well-known April pranks.

4 comments:

Cheryl Russell said...

Good one! The rubberband trick just never grows old. I wanted to call Tim and play a joke on him since he is out-of-town, but it was ruined by the fact that the battery really did die on the van!

Lori Ann said...

Nathan did the rubber band trick on me. I was in the middle of dinner, I did not find it funny, until I changed my shirt. lol.

Unknown said...

Have you followed the GMAIL April's Fools gags? Very clever.

brenda said...

American Idol tried to say they were pre-empted by some other boring program on 4/1. Good thing I was changing the channel anyway! I have heard of the whopper joke, but not the spaghetti tree one. I like it.