Friday, March 30, 2007

April Fools pranks


From the Museum of Hoaxes’ list of Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes of All Time:

1957: The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.
A BBC news show announced that a mild winter and the elimination of the spaghetti weevil caused a bumper spaghetti crop in Switzerland. The show ran footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti from trees. Many viewers called the station to learn how they could grow their own spaghetti trees.

1979: Operation Parallax.
A British radio station announced that the government planned to resynchronize the calendar. The reason? Britain had gradually become 48 hours ahead of the rest of the world because of switching back and forth from British Summer Time, so the government decided to cancel April 5 and 12 that year. The station received numerous calls. One woman asked if she had to pay her employees for the missing days.

1998: A Whopper of a Whopper.
Burger King published a full-page ad in USA Today announcing the introduction of a Left-Handed Whopper, specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the ad, the new Whopper included the same ingredients as the original, but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees. 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 ask for the burger.
What's the best April Fool's Day prank you've pulled? Or even heard of.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Each of my parents was the butt of a pernicious prank from yours truly.

Dad went to the store three times the year I taped down the light switch inside the refrigerator.

Rather more evil than that was the year I was away at school and had a friend call my mom at midnight, posing as a police officer, to say I'd been arrested for public intoxication. I was 16 or 17 then, and she still hasn't forgiven me - the mark of a great joke.

On the J side, my hometown paper in rural Indiana once ran an A1 story about a newly discovered volcano that had erupted out in the county somewhere. Good stuff.

Willow said...

In the 80s when I was about 7 or 8, a local radio station said that U2 would be performing on the roof of some building downtown. My mom got very excited and took my baby sister with her downtown and waited w/ hundreds of other Springs residents for U2 to play, before finding out the radio (I think it was KIKX or something...anyone remember that station?) had played a joke on them. My mom wasn't laughing.