April Fools Day stories, true and false
 

"April Fools Day: 10 stories that look like pranks but aren't"
(plus 5 stories that _are_ pranks)

[url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21993582[/url]

I chuckled at this parody April Fools joke. My favorite of all time April Fools joke was by [URL="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1888721_1888719_1888692,00.html"]Taco Bell[/URL]

[QUOTE=chappy;335732]I chuckled at this parody April Fools joke. My favorite of all time April Fools joke was by [URL="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1888721_1888719_1888692,00.html"]Taco Bell[/URL][/QUOTE]Unfortunately, whenever I hear the phrase "Liberty Bell", I immediately think of Monty Python. If you don't know why, Google will enlighten you.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day]Interesting history[/url] hath this foolish tradition, the oldest association apparently dating back to ancient Persia:
[quote]Iranians play jokes on each other on the 13th day of the Persian new year (Nowruz) (now means new and ruz means day), which falls on April 1 or April 2. This day, celebrated as far back as 536 BC ,[11] is called Sizdah Bedar and is the oldest prank-tradition in the world still alive today; this fact has led many to believe that April Fools' Day has its origins in this tradition.[12][/quote]
I'm sure the modern-day mullahs are busily pranking each other as I write this. "Hey, Farook - turban's untied! Ha, gotcha to look!"

April Fool's Day is for rank amateurs. My grandmother told me my pants were dirty, then laughed hysterically at her "April Fool."

I think the best thing to do would be to take a vaction day on April 1st(since it's Easter Monday, a lot of people probably get a free day off anyway) and refuse to answer the door if friends or family come by.

It's worse than the wear green on Saint Patrick's Day thing. When I go out on Saint Patrick's Day, I intentionally don't wear green and give people the stink eye if they say they're going to pinch me. If they really do pinch me, I take a swing at them, but intentionally miss. Practical jokes are not something I enjoy, on myself or others.

[URL="http://www.chessbase.com/"]Chessbase.com[/URL] always does an April fool article and prides itself on making it difficult to detect and camouflaging it with other articles which look spoof but are in fact genuine. Last year I was so impressed with their offending article that I [URL="http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=16689"]started a thread[/URL] about it here before my foolishness was pointed out by other Mersenne forum members. (At least I wasn't the only one here who was fooled for a short time, but even so, how embarrassing!)

This year, however, the spoof article is disappointingly easy to identify. I guess the Candidates tournament is so engrossing that no-one's really interested in a difficult-to-detect prank this time.

Other compilations of pranks:

[url]http://aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com/[/url]

[url]http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/[/url]

[url]http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/04/florida-djs-april-fools-water-joke/63798/[/url]
[QUOTE]Florida country radio morning-show hosts Val St. John and Scott Fish are currently serving indefinite suspensions and possibly worse over a successful April Fools' Day prank. They told their listeners that "dihydrogen monoxide" was coming out of the taps throughout the Fort Myers area. Dihydrogen monoxide is water.[/QUOTE][QUOTE] And apparently, the station, the water works, and perhaps the authorities are still trying to figure out if the two hosts could face felony charges for, again, reporting that the scientific name of water was coming out of the pipes.[/QUOTE]

Holy crap! This is such an old joke that most people were probably expected to understand it right away. The website [URL]http://www.dhmo.org/[/URL] exists for a few years now.

[QUOTE]LOL, "FIDE reform plans" - that is indeed an obvious joke![/QUOTE]You correctly identified chessbase.com's spoof article, Ernst. I didn't. I could not swallow their planted article about Saint Bobby (title under consideration) while stupidly entertaining the possibility of rating reform plans by FIDE.

[URL]http://www.chessbase.com/Home/TabId/211/PostId/4009383/the-april-fools-prank-that-was-and-wasnt-040413.aspx[/URL]

[QUOTE]The fake April Fools' prank was the one about [URL="http://www.chessbase.com/Home/TabId/211/PostId/4009341/sainthood-for-bobby-fischer-020413.aspx"]sainthood for Bobby Fischer[/URL]. We said that an application had been made by Stan Vaughan of the World Chess Federation, who had submitted to Catholic priest Jacob Rolland six miracles that he said were prayed for and verified as having occurred. Many readers found this "joke" to be in very bad taste – but of course it was a factually perfectly accurate report[...]

[B]The K-Factor prank[/B]

This was the actual April Fools' prank: we had asked a chess statistican to calculate the ratings for the last month and for the last three months using different K-Factors and added one of the more preposterous results to our [URL="http://www.chessbase.com/Home/TabId/211/PostId/4009345/fide-april-2013-ratings--and-reform-plans-020413.aspx"]April 1st FIDE ratings[/URL]. This was the prank: naturally FIDE, which has been considering tweaking the K-Factor in the past (as our links at the end of the report show), never considered anything so radical. Smeets, Vitiugov, Rapport, Rodshtein, and Wei Yi in the top ten?? Of course it was a joke – although the calculations are perfectly correct for a value of K=60.[...][/QUOTE]

Google Maps pac-man
 

[URL="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-maps-pac-man-play-classic-arcade-game-on-iphone-android-app-a7661146.html"]Google Maps pac-man game[/URL] is back again this year. [SPOILER](yup, it is already the 1st of April on half the globe!)[/SPOILER]