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Q: What would be the most foolish
thing a person could do on eBay ?
A: List the item misspelled.
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Here are some other
foolish things.
Spaghetti trees
This classic television
April Fool dates from 1957, when the BBC's Panorama program covered
the beginning of the spaghetti harvest in Ticino, the
Italian-speaking southern canton of Switzerland. Watch it again on
the BBC's On This Day mini-site (simply select the right date) and
consider that the bulk of the British population had never even seen
real spaghetti in 1957.
Pop goes The Archers
In 2004, BBC Radio 4's
Today program announced that the traditional theme tune to The
Archers was to be scrapped in favor of a new electronic version by
Brian Eno. While the carefully crafted report is still a pleasure to
listen to (on the Today website, click "Latest reports", then "Arts
and Culture" and scroll down to "Archers Theme"), it fails to match
radio's finest ever hoax. In 1976, Patrick Moore told Radio 2
listeners that, at precisely 9.47am that day, an unusual alignment
of the planets would lessen the Earth's gravitational pull, so that
anyone who jumped in the air would feel a strange floating
sensation. Hundreds phoned in to say they had experienced the
phenomenon.
Fake BMWs
Each year, BMW runs
advertisements in newspapers and magazines trumpeting an unlikely
new technical development - from internally adjustable tire
pressures to fly-repellent windscreens. These stopped fooling anyone
a long time ago, but are now something of an institution. The
archive of ads (click "Company Facts", then "Marketing") does not
include the best: the revelation that fake BMWs were in circulation
and could be recognized by the colors on the checkered badge being
reversed, white where it should be blue and vice versa. Naturally,
BMW owners who compared their car with the "correct" version
discovered that they had a fake.
Enormous particles
The American monthly
science magazine Discover has something of a reputation for running
stories of dubious veracity in its April edition. An early
"discovery" was the hot-headed naked ice borer, a creature unknown
to science, found living in Antarctica by one Dr Aprile Pazzo, which
tunnels through the ice by melting it with its superheated bones.
More recently, Discover reported on the bigon, a fundamental
particle the size of a bowling ball, which popped up during
experiments by physicist Albert Manque at the Centre de l'Étude des
Choses Assez Minuscules in Paris (on the Discover website, search
for "bigon").
Google on the moon
Internet April Fools
jokes are widespread, and Google got in on the act on April 1 2006
with this job ad for a position at its lunar centre. What's nice
about this spoof is that it is done so amusingly and at such length:
a splendid concept is the high-density, high-delivery hosting, or
HiDeHiDeHo. Another of Google's brightest ideas is its sewer-ducted
broadband, at google.com/tisp.
Top 100 April Fools
Fans of quality
newspaper April Fools go all dewy-eyed at the mention of the Island
of San Serriffe, created by The Guardian in 1977, ranked number five
in the all-time top 100 at the Museum of Hoaxes. Few hoaxes have
ever been so wholeheartedly perpetrated: the fictional island had an
entire travel supplement dedicated to it. Joining it in the Top 10
are the announcement by Richard Nixon (well, an actor playing him)
in 1992 that he would be running for president once more, under the
slogan "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again"; and
the news from 1996 that the Liberty Bell had been sponsored by Taco
Bell and would henceforth be known as the Taco Liberty Bell - to
which a quick-witted White House press officer responded that a
similar deal had been struck regarding the Lincoln Memorial, now
renamed the Ford Lincoln Continental Memorial.
Last year's April Fools
Visit Wikipedia and
search for "April 1 2007" and you will find an exhaustive list of
last year's April Fools in the media. Those from British newspapers
include: the craze for grow-your-own Viagra (Independent); council
inspectors demand a £5 on-the-spot carbon tax for barbecues (Mail on
Sunday); Tony Blair to appear on stage in The Crucible (Observer);
and cash-strapped London asks Paris if it will consider sharing the
Olympics (Sunday Telegraph). On the web, meanwhile, the BBC
announced its "sniff-screen technology".
USB fondue set
The Fondue is a
USB-powered fondue set, so you can dip snack items of your choice
into melted cheese (or, indeed, chocolate) while you work at your
computer. It's just one of many unlikely new gadgets at Think Geek.
Strange but true
The peculiar thing
about trying to find the April Fool story in your newspaper is that
you start doubting everything - the vast majority of stories begin
to seem extremely unlikely. Tone up your judgment muscles by
visiting this website, which specializes in entertaining science
news. It pops up unlikely facts at random (bees have five eyes; 70
per cent of the raisins we eat are consumed at breakfast; the most
popular color for toothbrushes is blue) and has an entire section
dedicated to the strange but true (click "Strange"), where you can
read a list of unlikely things invented in Britain, including the
guillotine, the turkey, Swiss roll, Champagne and the Celts.
The first April Fools
The origins of April
Fool's Day are obscure. There may be connections with a Roman event
called a hilaria celebrating Cybele, the mother of the gods, which
took place on March 25. It involved impersonating other people for
comic effect. Some authorities trace its earliest forms to late
medieval France and particularly to the period in which the
"Annunciation style" new year on March 25 was switched to the
"Circumcision style" date of January 1. (This did not happen in
Britain until 1752.) Pleasingly, though, a long-lived English
tradition says that foolishness began with the villagers of Gotham,
Nottinghamshire, in the reign of King John. Read the story in this
online version of the Chamber's Book of Days, a Victorian equivalent
of the BBC's On This Day website (click "Calendar of Days", choose
April 1 and scroll down to "The Wise Fools of Gotham").
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