Subtitled: You can fool some of the people some of the time and then snicker to yourself about mankind’s gullibility.
I never heard of this site until today and a search of the boards drew a blank: The Museum of Hoaxes (dot com)
In their April Fools Section, they list the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time.
Truth is, I only vaguely recall the Plimpton chestnut about Sid Fitch in Sports Illustrated.
Here are the Top 20 from their site:[ol]
[li]The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest[/li][li]Sidd Finch[/li][li]Instant Color TV[/li][li]The Taco Liberty Bell[/li][li]San Serriffe[/li][li]Nixon for President[/li][li]Alabama Changes the Value of Pi[/li][li]The Left-Handed Whopper[/li][li]Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers[/li][li]Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity[/li][li]UFO Lands in London[/li][li]Kremvax[/li][li]The Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff[/li][li]The Eruption of Mount Edgecumbe[/li][li]The Case of the Interfering Brassieres[/li][li]Wisconsin State Capitol Collapses[/li][li]The Sydney Iceberg[/li][li]The 26-Day Marathon[/li][li]Webnode[/li][li]15th Annual New York City April Fool’s Day Parade[/ol][/li]
I guess that’s the beauty of April Fools pranks is they’re forgotten about quickly and can be recycled or tweeked every few years.
How about you?
How many of the ‘Top 100’ do you recall hearing or reading about? Do you have a ‘steel trap’ for a mind and are asking yourself ‘how in the hell did I miss that one?’
Are there any that the Museum missed?
The only one I recall (on a very regional level): Jim Mongahan doing a live news report from Yankee Stadium on Dennis Elsas’ WNEW-FM AOR radio program announing the sale of the NY Yankees from Steinbrenner to Donald Trump. I fell for it hook line & sinker. In my own defense, It was a Saturday morning, I was hungover like a pig and had absolutely no idea it was April 1st.
I remember number 17, the iceberg in Sydney Harbour. The person responsible, Dick Smith, also tried another hoax one year. During March, he annouced that he had found a Japanese submarines which had sunk (if that’s what happens to wrecked subs!) in Sydney Harbour during World War 2. In the next couple of weeks he said that he planned to bring it to the surface and salvage it.
There was such a backlash in the media that he eventually had to admit that it was a hoax. His plan was to schedule the “salvage” for April 1, then reveal the hoax to the undoubtedly numerous media representatives covering the event. Knowing Dick Smith this was probably going to be used as an opportunity to promote one of his ventures, but I don’t recall whether this was the case.
Unrelated to these hoaxes, Dick Smith is a minor hero of mine.
I was just reading about the annual, er, NYC April Fool’s Parade in the NY Post and had to laugh because they do announce such outrageous, over the top “planned events” that it’s amazing that anyone wouldn’t spot it as a hoax.
I seem to remember another one by the BBC, not unlike the spaghetti harvest, but this one about the Alaskan Ice Cream Farms
I was talking to my parents yesterday and they told me about the #3 joke. I’d be willing to bet that their parents probably fell for it as well. Makes me proud to be Swedish… Color TV? All I need is a nylon sock? Honey, get a pair of your nylon socks and scissors, we’re getting color TV!
I remember how disappointed I was to find out that the Tasaday were a hoax. We watched the films about them in school, and found it all terribly interesting. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I went back to find out more about them and discovered it had all been a hoax. Sheesh.
Our local news did one kinda like the “spaghetti harvest”. Instead of spaghetti, the people were shown picking fresh-grown marshmallows from the marshmallow plants.
A long time ago, I read a story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. This stodgy old business paper often ran whimsical pieces on the the front page. There was a piece about a guy who developed remote control robot jockeys for little horses (Hackney ponies.) The original idea was low-cost perimeter sucurity for large industrial site, but the inventor realized that groups of these pintsize steeds could have a horse race in a stadium-sized venue. He had backers, but the whole thing got nixed in the city council.
It didn’t occur to me until years later to check the date. I understand it’s tricky to look up WSJ stuff if you’re not a subscrber to the Dow Jones News retrieval system. Is that true?