pril Fools jokes are a centuries-old tradition (or so I assume) and may be as popular as ever, due to the Internet. The Internet makes it so easy to create and post jokes and hoaxes, easy to link to jokes other people are perpetrating, and easy to retract or explain them the next day that it's almost a perfect medium for this sort of frivolity.  Every year, innumerable sites run April Fool's pranks of one kind or another, with varying degrees of success. And when I hear about them, I post links to them, since I enjoy them.

I've perpetrated my own more than fair share of April Fool's jokes on the D2 site, but never on this site. Not yet, anyway.

More recent additions are added on top of this page.

April 3, 2003

April Foolery

¤ This article on Baseball Prospectus cracked me up.  I was happy to see it at first, thinking it was real, but soon realized the hoax.  And that made me laugh harder, since it's just real enough to be believed, like a good April Fool's Joke should be. The article is about the Oakland A's suddenly signing their best player, who they had previously said they wouldn't try to sign, since he wanted more money than their low-revenue team could possibly afford.  The ending line was my favorite.

A's owner Steve Schott, missing since a March 25th hunting trip with Assistant GM David Forst, was unavailable for comment.

They have another one that's more sarcasm/tongue-in-cheek than joke, but it's an amusing read as well.

¤ One funny thing on April First was the semi-organized "Make fun of Dick Cheney" program that Neal Pollack spear-headed. Right now you can just visit his site and scroll down, but in an effort to make this easily found if you are reading this later than say, April 6th, 2003, use the following permanent links.  In order, since he strung out his April Fool's Cheney Style stuff into three posts. Intro.  Cruelty.  First. Second.  Third.  Fourth.

If any of this seems unfair to the inarguably-insane Dick Cheney and his unlovely wife, just remember that he brought it on himself. And that it's the only way he'll learn.

¤ While this sounds like an April Fool's joke, I don't think it is.

Print advertisements for the teen comedy originally featured a photograph of star Amanda Bynes wearing an American flag T-shirt and flashing the peace sign with her fingers as she stands between two British royal guards.

With the war in Iraq sparking anti-war protests in the United States and abroad, however, Warner Bros. quickly changed the ad. The studio said Monday it feared the peace sign would be viewed as a political message.

Because wanting peace is so, you know, Anti-American.

March 29, 2003

Informative article about April Fool's stuff and other pranks that can be found on the web. The article links to this site which has collected a decent number of April Fool's pranks from the last few years.  This reminds me that I have an April Fool's Article page, which has some info about the history of April Fools, and several broken links to scams that were run last year.  I'll have to copy stuff entirely this year, when I add some to it.

I generally do some April First mischief on the D2 site, but nothing really occurs to me this year, other than rerunning the page from last year, in which I made up a bunch of ridiculous and impossibly awful changes to D2 and Battle.net in the upcoming v1.10 patch. The funny part is that we're still waiting for that patch now, 12 months later.  In fact that's funnier than anything I could make up for the occasion, isn't it?

April 2, 2002

April Fools Day was yesterday, and left wreckage strewn here and there.

On the D2 site we (meaning me) ran our usual assortment of joke news items, and even though I wrote the fake patch change article to be as absurd and unbelievable as possible, lots of people still did.  There is just no ingrained skepticism or cynicism in most people, despite what you hear about the younger generation being all media savvy, etc.  It's all lies, we're (they're?) a bunch of gullible sheep.  They just think they are media savvy and street smart, which of course makes them even easier prey for scammers.

It's not just the kids though, adults fall for things left and right also.  This is why in times of chaos or anarchy enterprising robber barons can amass incalculable fortunes nearly overnight; since most people are colossal victims or marks, or else smart enough to avoid being an easy mark, but not smart (or unethical) enough to think up their own scams and make their own fortune.  In the US there are enough laws that such people are kept under control, but in many other countries Pyramid schemes, illegal companies and businesses of every kind, tricks, buying low and selling high, etc run wild.  We get that a lot in the US, but not on the street.  It's mostly in higher level stuff, with massive companies existing through tax loopholes, buying off regulators and congress to write them favorable laws, etc.

See Enron paying virtually zero taxes for 5 years, while growing to be one of the largest companies on earth, for one example.  "Corporate Welfare" they call it, though that's not a real accurate term, since companies get 100x the money of a welfare person, relatively speaking, and they do a lot of work to steal it.Anyway, AFD jokes abound on the Internet, and many are funny, and the funniest are when they are taken seriously.  Here's a few I found yesterday.

First off, here's an explanation for April Fools' Day.  It sounds somewhat apocryphal, but it's fascinating if it's true:

The usual explanation is that it began shortly after 1562, when Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar and moved the start of the year from April 1 to January 1.

News traveled slowly in those days, and it took years for some people to realize, or accept, that the calendar had changed - with the result that they continued to hold new year festivities on April 1. Those who had adapted to the change more quickly regarded such people as stupid and started playing tricks on them.

More April Fools stuff.

Bill Gates was a busy guy, being assassinated, and then joining Nintendo.  The assassination one is a spoofed CNN URL, not anything they actually posted.  It's in pretty poor taste as well.

Google reveals how their search engine really works.  This might explain why this site doesn't show up on any google searches, despite having been online for nearly two months.

In more animal news, ESPN.com covers the hair-raising new sport of cat racing.  They even had an online chat about it.

The funniest one I've seen, at least the funniest reaction to one, is this.  It's entirely obscure, about some Canadian finance minister, but when news of it broke the Canadian wampum dropped against both beaver pelts and hockey sweaters. Plus it's worth a look just for the phrase, "handsome fawn runner ducks" which you'll probably never see again in your lifetime.

Can one derive any deeper meaning from the April Fools' Day jokes?  Do they speak of a deeper stain on the human soul?  Not the jokes so much as the reactions they get, are interesting to me.  Mainly that people are so willing and eager to believe just about anything, and forget that April Fools Day is a minefield for the gullible.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.