April fool!

Britian has a long and great tradition of pranks for April 1, with the rule that they can only be played before midday. I was tickled to read the BBC web site for April 1, 2007 , which proudly announced that it had launched "Sniff-screen technology" and urged you to put your nose closer to the screen to smell the alternating images (Gorgonzola cheese, red rose, French perfume)! Some internet news content is truly bizarre, as you can see easily by reading CNN online, so the prank is sometimes less easy to spot.

You can read about or see online some well-known hoaxes. I remember some of them well from when I lived in England. My favourites include:

• In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." Check out the actual broadcast archived on the BBC's website (you need the RealVideo player installed to see it, and it usually loads very slowly).
• In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement in honor of the tenth anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that then gripped the British tabloids in the following decades.
• 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."

I personally love the prank of giving a person one end of a ball of string and asking them to not move while you roll out the rest of the string to check the circumference of a building. The person with the ball then turns the corner, puts down the ball, and then either takes a good vantage point or worse gets other people to stand and stare as the holder stands patiently with the piece of string in hand, sometimes for hours.

It's good when you can get through the day with a good laugh and some simple fun.