The Fools Of April

All across the interweb, ridiculous stories are taken as the truth. But on April 1st, there is an actual conscious effort to add to the absurdities.

April Fools' Day dates back centuries, but its origins remain unclear. A widespread theory is that it dates back to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar with the term April Fool applying to those who were still following the Julian Calendar. By tradition in most countries, people can pull pranks before noon on April 1 in the name of April Fools' Day but become the fool themselves if they do it in the afternoon. Many major sites continued the tradition of lighthearted hoaxes.

Google, who last year it claimed to have invented a new technology to "index your brain", continued their annual tomfoolery by renaming itself Topeka, The gag was ironic one-upmanship with the Kansas city, which renamed itself "Google, Kan." in March to help lure the company's experimental fiber-optic network. "Google employees once known as "Googlers" should now be referred to as either "Topekers" or "Topekans," depending on the result of a board meeting that's ongoing at this hour," Google said on its web site. The company also feigned a "vowel outage" on Gmail, and a version of Google Translate for animals.

Funny Or Die was revamped as Bieber Or Die, its home page riddled with the teenybopper star Justin Bieber. I say die over Bieber. Last April Fools' Day, the site was "bought" by country star Reba McEntire (Reba Or Die?). The Lesbian Q-Tip was in the joke a spoofed a number of famous viral videos, including "Dramatic Bieber" and "Bieber After the Dentist."

Coffee giant Starbucks announced it was launching the "Plenta", a giant 128 fluid ounce cup of coffee and the Micra, a tiny 2 fluid ounce cup, saying it would meet customer demand for "more and less coffee." And Ben & Jerry's offered a different type of treat - virtual ice cream. Other sites took advantage of the recent explosion of 3-D by launching their products in another dimension. Hulu added a 3-D viewing option that, when clicked, led to a mock Hulu "orientation" video. Google Maps and Google Books both unveiled 3-D versions. And YouTube offered the curious option of watching videos in text — essentially a stream of code instead of images.

But the pranks were not limited to companies. In a bid to close the city's budget deficit, New York's mayor's office announced on its Twitter feed that Mayor Michael Bloomberg had decided to sell naming rights for Central Park, the East River and even ubiquitous former mayor Ed Koch. "I appreciate the honor bestowed by the mayor when he included me with two of the city's major assets," Koch said by telephone. "I urge the bidding start at $25 million for me and $200 million for Central Park," he added.

A spoof website identical to the Boston Athletic Association's official site showed new, tougher qualifying standards for the city's annual marathon, as well as a much smaller total field of runners planned for 2011. Achieving a Boston qualifying time, or "BQ," is a holy grail for many runners. The suggestion that most would need to slice another ten minutes off their 26.2-mile race times caused howls of protest until the prank was realized.

News organizations, which often have to fend off fake news, embraced the day's mockery, too - British media have stuck to the tradition for years. The Daily Telegraph reported that ferrets were the key to delivering broadband to rural areas. The Guardian newspaper employed the services of its mixed-up April Fool correspondent Olaf Priol for a full page story on the ruling Labour party's secret ad campaign depicting Brown as a tough guy character from a Quentin Tarantino/Arnold Schwarzenegger film.

A newspapers also ran a spoof BMW ad offering branded roundels for BMW cars in the color of the political party the driver supports. "BMW is giving you the chance to personalise your car depending on your political view," the small print says under a picture of three BMW badges in red for Labour, blue for Conservative and yellow for the Liberal Democrats. The advert promises the badges can be replaced in seconds and in the event that the election, which is expected to be launched next week, results in a hung parliament.

Australian broadcaster ABC put out a spoof interview with an injured David Beckham in which the former England soccer captain said he was set to join the Australian national team, the Socceroos, as assistant manager and lead them to World Cup glory in South Africa this summer. On a more scientific note, Britain's Independent newspaper reported that London Underground was in talks with the body that created the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland about putting a similar particle collider into the underground tunnel system on the Circle Line. It said the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has worked out that a particle collider could be created inside the tube line which will see proton beams traveling clockwise and counterclockwise "at speeds of 99.999999 percent of the speed of light within feet of Circle Line passengers stuck in perpetual immobility."

There's also some real stories that have come out on the 1st, which makes the whole day even more chaotic. Since Google is known for announcing ridiculous news stories, such as telepathic search engines, being taken seriously when you have real news can go either way. In 2004 (the same year they created job listings for the moon), they announced the release of Gmail. While this may not seem all that funny, many people still thought it was a prank because the idea of a mail service with one full gigabyte of storage seemed preposterous –at the time, Hotmail only offered 2 megabytes. They followed the success of this announcement by announcing the increase of the mail service’s storage to two gigabytes the next year, also on April Fools’ Day.

Figuring their employees played some really great jokes on each other, you could imagine that when an employee’s pet ball python escaped its enclosure on the holiday, the news was met with some disbelief. An email was sent out to the entire staff that started out, “The timing of this email could not be more awkward.” It then moved on to say: “Tempting as it might be, this is not an April Fool’s joke! We are sending this message to alert you to the situation and to let you know what to do in the event you see the snake." The beastie was eventually found and returned to his owner’s house a few days later.

CBS obviously had a lot to learn about making serious announcements on April 1st. Last year, they infuriated a number of loyal viewers by announcing the cancellation of the seventy-two year old daytime soap Guiding Light on April Fools’ Day.

There have been many situations where people do not believe a person has died, simply because of the date, and some of the best examples of this are all so strange that it’s not surprising that people believed the news to be a hoax. In 1984, one day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was murdered by his own father after intervening in an argument between his parents. Many fans refused to believe the news because it seemed so odd that his dad would have been the murderer. It wasn’t until the news was confirmed officially that many people stopped believing the murder was more than a cruel joke. Surprisingly, Marvin Senior was only found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to five years imprisonment because his son beat him before the shooting.

If you heard a NASCAR champion nicknamed “The Polish Prince” died in a Hooters corporate plane, would you believe it? A lot of fans thought they were hearing a bad joke in 1993 when racing star Alan Kulwicki was announced to be dead in exactly those circumstances. And is there a more fitting day for a comedian to die than April Fools’ Day? While Mitch Hedberg actually died on March 30, 2005, the news wasn’t spread to the media until very late on March 31st. Not surprisingly, many people thought the death was merely a prank or a bad publicity stunt put on by Mitch himself.

Then there's the tsunami of 1946, when over 100 people died, largely because they believed storm warnings were a joke. The incident occurred after an massive earthquake on the Aleutian Islands near Alaska, which caused a series of massive tidal waves that spread all the way to South America. Most of the damage hit Hawaii though, where the tsunami reached up to 45 feet tall. Unfortunately, because so many people doubted the news of the impending tidal wave and refused to evacuate, over 165 people died -159 of them in Hawaii. Scientists are still unable to find any reason the 7.8 magnitude earthquake was able to launch such a massive tsunami. It was originally thought that the waves were intensified by a major underwater landslide in the area, but scientists have still found no evidence of this hypothetical landslide. One of the researchers who recently mapped the ocean floor looking for a landslide in the area summed up the matter by noting, “almost 60 years after the event, the 1946 tsunami is still making fools of all of us.”