Hoax Museum Blog: April Fools Day

BMW Offers New Way to Cook — BMW has announced a cutting-edge innovation for commuters that allows them to prepare dinner, while driving home in the car. It's called SHEF, which stands for Satellite Hypersensitive Electromagnetic Foodration. Basically all your oven controls are built into the dashboard of your car, and they communicate wirelessly with your actual oven back in your home. You can monitor the progress of your meal via a built-in oven-cam.

Google Copernicus Center — Google has announced that they're now hiring for their new 'lunar hosting and research center': Copernicus Center. Applicants must be "capable of surviving with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes, The Sopranos and a steady supply of oxygen."

Google Launches Gmail — Google has announced a new email service called Gmail, that will give each user one gigabyte of free storage. Strangely, the press release is dated April 1, leading many to speculate that it's an April Fool's Day joke. Maybe it is, but if so it would seem a very odd one. Usually April Fool's Day jokes involve a certain minimum level of wit, and you should feel foolish for believing them once you find out they're a joke. But if someone were to tell me that Gmail is a joke, I wouldn't feel foolish. I'd just feel like Google had lied. There is some goofy language in the press release, but otherwise it just doesn't seem over-the-top enough to be a joke. But time will tell.

BBC Ducks the Issue — I just heard about this early April Fool's Day fumble on the part of the BBC. As the Times of London reports: "Declan Curry, the intrepid television hack, broke the embargo on a fascinating British Waterways study that revealed that ducks living on canals weigh, on average, about a pound more than those living on rivers. The slow-moving canal water, so the story went, provides less opportunity for the ducks to swim and as a result they piled on the pounds. Mr Curry and the BBC should have taken note of the embargo date. April 1. The name of the academic quoted, Olaf Priol, is an anagram of April Fool." Unfortunately I can't find a link for this.

More Spam on April 1st — Makers of network security software are warning that there may be an increase in spam leading up to April Fool's Day. "Spammers are expected to use subject lines such as "great joke," "free jokes," "prank," or "April fools" to entice users into opening attachments that carry viruses or objectionable content, potentially putting company networks at risk."

April Fool’s Day Survey — Survey finds that two-in-ten workers participate in April Fool's Day at the office. The best part of the article are the examples of office pranks it lists: moving someone's office to the front lobby, telling colleagues they can leave early, super-glueing drawers shut, etc. One of the best office pranks that I've heard about occurred at a small company and was played on the human resources manager. One after another every employee went into her office and told her that they were quitting. Not realizing it was April 1st, the poor lady was in a state of panic by the end of the morning.

Ice-Cream Potatoes, and other food pranks — Family Fun magazine has quite a few suggestions for April Fool's Day pranks over at its site. I especially like their list of food pranks, such as preparing ice-cream potatoes (shown to the right). That's not potatoes with gravy. It's ice cream with butterscotch sauce. Also check out their recipe for creating green beans out of Jolly Rancher Fruit Chews.

April Fools Day — Because April Fool's Day is fast approaching, I revamped my list of the top 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes of all time. I juggled around the top ten a bit to better reflect the popular favorites. Most significantly, I added Sweden's 1962 classic 'Instant Color TV' hoax into the list, placing it at number three. Plus, by using pMachine I added the capability for readers to add comments to any one of the April Fools.

Harrods vs. the Wall Street Journal — In 2002 the upscale British department store Harrods issued a press release on April 1 announcing plans to 'float' the company. At first it indicated that this would involve a "first-come, first-served share option". Later it revised this to indicate that it was not planning to float shares on the stock exchange. Instead, it was planning to create a floating version of the store on the river Thames. It was just an April Fool's Day joke, but the Wall Street Journal fell for it. In retaliation, four days later the WSJ ran a story asking whether Harrods was the British Enron and suggesting that "investors would be wise to question its every disclosure." Now Harrods is suing the WSJ in order to stop this story from being included in the WSJ's online archives. The Guardian covers the story.

Office Prank — April Fool's Day Office Prank. "Priceless."

Beware of Lirf Loopa — Edward Ingram writes in:
Several years back I remember being taken in be a news story on KAKE-TV
in Wichita KS. Supposedly, a woman was driving when her infant began
playing with her garage door opener. To her surprise it was noticed by
the woman that when the opener was clicked within 100 YDS. of a traffic
light, the light would obligingly turn green. The story even went so
far as to show a city traffic engineer standing by an opened traffic
control box, puzzled. They went on to report that the garage door
opener was manufactured by a Swedish company called Lirf Loopa, who,
when contacted, informed KAKE that they had met all regulations and laws
concerning the device and were not about to change it.
Only at the end of a very detailed story did the newscaster reveal that
Lirf Loopa was an anagram for April Fool.

Superman Vanishes — Jeff Germann, webmaster of the Superman Museum in Metropolis, IL, writes to tell of an April Fool's Day prank he pulled in the Superman Collectors Monthly Newsletter. With a little help from Photoshop, he managed to convince quite a few people that the Superman statue standing outside the museum had been stolen. He says:
This one article resulted in more emails than any other article we posted.
Believe it or not, I am STILL receiving emails at times from people who are upset over the theft of a fifteen foot tall bronze statue, even though on the "update" link, I come clean about it being a prank.

 

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