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The April Fool's Day Archive
A catalog of April Fool's Day hoaxes, pranks, and related events throughout history, categorized by year and theme.
April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:
A catalog of April Fool's Day hoaxes, pranks, and related events throughout history, categorized by year and theme.
April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:
| Before 1900: | Origin of April Fool's Day | 1700-1799 | 1800-1899 |
| Early 1900s: | 1900 | 1901 | 1915 | 1919 | 1920 | 1923 | 1925 |
| 1930s & 40s: | 1933 | 1934 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 | 1940 | 1949 |
| 1950s & 60s: | 1950 | 1957 | 1959 | 1960 | 1962 | 1965 | 1969 |
| 1970s: | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 |
| 1980s: | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 |
| 1990s: | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 |
| 2000s: | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
| 2010s: | 2010 | 2011 |
Pinanas (2009)
British supermarket chain Waitrose placed ads in newspapers announcing the availability of a new fruit, the pinana (a combination of pineapple and banana). The text of the ad read:Pinanas. Fresh in today and exclusive to Waitrose. If you find that all Waitrose pinanas have sold out, don't worry, there's 50% off our essential Waitrose strawberries."
| Categories: Botany, Food and Drink, Businesses, United Kingdom, 2009. |
Gmail Autopilot (2009)
Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a feature that automatically reads and responds to your email, saving you the time of doing this. It boasted that Autopilot could mirror any communication style, could also work for Gmail chat, and would work even if both sender and recipient had Autopilot on:Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.
| Categories: Internet Technology, Businesses, Websites, United States, 2009, Internet, Google. |
Guinness Reversed (2009)
Guinness ran a print ad showing its famous dark beer reversed (foam on bottom, beer on top). The caption on the ad read, "For Today Only."
| Categories: Food and Drink, 2009. |
Tartan Sheep (2009)
The London Times ran a photo of "tartan sheep" said to have been bred by Grant Bell of West Barns, East Lothian. However, the Times warned, "Before you complain of being fleeced, check out the baa-code for today's date."
| Categories: Animals, Newspapers, United Kingdom, 2009, Photo Hoaxes, London Times. |
Flying Penguins (2008)
The BBC announced that camera crews filming near the Antarctic for its natural history series Miracles of Evolution had captured footage of Adélie penguins taking to the air. It even offered a video clip of these flying penguins, which became one of the most viewed videos on the internet. Presenter Terry Jones explained that, instead of huddling together to endure the Antarctic winter, these penguins took to the air and flew thousands of miles to the rainforests of South America where they "spend the winter basking in the tropical sun." A follow-up video explained how the BBC created the special effects of the flying penguins.
| Categories: Animals, Birds, Television, United Kingdom, 2008, BBC. |
YouTube UK and Australia "rickrolled" their visitors, rickrolling being a popular bait-and-switch-style prank in which people are baited into clicking on a link that sends them to a video of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley singing his hit Never Gonna Give You Up. All the "featured video" links on YouTube's front page sent people to a rickroll page set up by YouTube under the user name YTRickRollsYou. Over 7 million people were rickrolled by the site. (YouTube is owned by Google.)
| Categories: Music, Businesses, Websites, Australia, United Kingdom, 2008, Internet, Bait and Switch, Google. |
List Universe posted a list of the Top 10 Bizarre Genetically Modified Organisms. The list included the "paper tree":The paper tree has been developed to reduce production costs and loss of tree life in the paper manufacturing industry. The recent explosion in popularity of recycled paper products lead a Swiss based company to develop a tree which grows square leaves that, when dried, are already usable as writing paper. In the image above we see a company employee holding a dried leaf beside the trunk of one of the many Paper Trees now grown by the company.
As well as the Fern Spider:The fern spider is unique on this list as it is the only combined plant and animal. At the time of writing this is the only animal that has successfully been crossed with a plant. The spider is a cross between a common Italian Wolf spider (Lycosa tarantula) and the ponga fern (Cyathea dealbata). The purpose of this bizarre crossbreed was to study the survival rates of spiders with built in camouflage versus those without in a series of studies on Natural Selection at Massey University in New Zealand. The results of the study have not been published yet.
Other creatures on the list included the graisin (a giant raisin), the rubber cork tree, the Umbuku Lizard (a flying lizard), the Dolion (a cross between a lion and dog), the Tiny Piney (a miniature pine tree), and the Lemurat (a cross between a lemur and a cat).
Two items on the list were actually real. They were the GloFish (a bioluminescent Zebrafish) and the Grapple (a cross between an apple and a grape).
Super Pii Pii Brothers (2008)
ThinkGeek wrote about an unusual new Nintendo Wii game: Super Pii Pii Brothers. It was described as an "Amazing Virtual Pee Experience from Japan."Prepare yourself by strapping on the included belt harness and jacking in your Wiimote. A series of toilets are presented on screen and the challenge is to tilt your body to control a never-ending stream of pee. Get as much pee in the toilets as you can while spilling as little on the floor as possible.
| Categories: Entertainment & Celebrities, Technology, Computers, Businesses, Websites, United States, 2008, Fictitious Products. |
Energy From Starlight (2008)
The Norwegian energy company Statkraft released a video announcing they had developed a way to generate power from starlight:Our planet needs more energy — pure energy. And thanks to pioneering Norwegian technology we may be able to provide it. The energy source of the future is starpower...
When stars explode, gamma rays with vast amounts of energy are hurled out into space. Now game capturers will be placed in orbit around the earth to capture this energy. This pioneering breakthrough has been developed by researchers and engineers from Statkraft.
When stars explode, gamma rays with vast amounts of energy are hurled out into space. Now game capturers will be placed in orbit around the earth to capture this energy. This pioneering breakthrough has been developed by researchers and engineers from Statkraft.
| Categories: Energy and Fuel, Technology, Strange Inventions, Businesses, Norway, 2008. |
Sleeper Cabins (2008)
Canadian airline WestJet announced it would be converting overhead compartments on its planes into sleeper cabins:WestJet (TSX:WJA) today announced that on April 1, 2008, sleeper cabins will be introduced onboard its existing fleet of 73 Boeing 737 Next-Generation aircraft. These sleeper cabins can be booked on all of WestJet's existing flights for a nominal incremental fee of $12...
"The overhead compartment has traditionally been a place where guests have placed their carry-on baggage. Given that the overhead bins on our fleet are among the most spacious of any airline, we made the decision to offer sleeper cabins in that space."
"The overhead compartment has traditionally been a place where guests have placed their carry-on baggage. Given that the overhead bins on our fleet are among the most spacious of any airline, we made the decision to offer sleeper cabins in that space."
| Categories: Traffic and Transportation, Businesses, Canada, 2008. |
Hillary Clinton’s Bowl Off (2008)
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton challenged rival Barack Obama to a "bowl off." She said, "today I am challenging Senator Obama to a bowl-off. A bowling night right here in Pennsylvania. Winner take all. I’ll even spot him two frames. It’s time for his campaign to get out of the gutter and allow all of the pins to be counted. And I’m prepared to play this game all the way to the tenth frame." The challenge was a joking reference to Obama's poor performance when he spent an afternoon bowling in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He scored a 37 out of a possible 300.
| Categories: Politics, Sports, Government Officials, United States, 2008. |
Nestle’s Finger (2008)
Nestle put out a press release (with an accompanying website) announcing they were changing the name of the Butterfinger candy bar to "The Finger," in order to give the candy "a shorter, more contemporary name."| Categories: Food and Drink, Businesses, United States, 2008, Fictitious Products. |
Dogs on Ice (2008)
The Daily Mirror reported that online bookmaker Blue Square, inspired by the popularity of ITV's Dancing On Ice and trying to boost the popularity of greyhound racing, had organized a "Dogs on Ice" event:There have been concerns that the new sport might be in some way cruel, although reports from trial runs, suggest that the dogs really love it. They have to wear special non-slip shoes, but there have still been occasions when one has slid into the crash barriers which ring the track. Organisers are talking to animal rights activists to get them on board before the big launch."
| Categories: Animals, Sports, Newspapers, United Kingdom, 2008. |
gDay Mate (2008)
Google Australia debuted gDay technology "enabling you to search content on the internet before it is created":The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation). Using MATE's™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google's Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future. Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now. We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow's share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they're written!
| Categories: Technology, Internet Technology, Time and Date, Businesses, Websites, Australia, 2008, Google. |
Canada Buys Ely (2008)
The Chamber of Commerce of Ely, Minnesota announced that Canada had expressed interest in buying the town and moving it north of the US/Canada border. In response to the offer, the town launched a "Keep Ely in Minnesota" campaign. Other buyers said to be interested in the town were Kansas, Oklahoma, Uzbekistan and a private party who wanted to move Ely to the South Pacific. The Ely Tourism Board subsequently said it dreamed up the hoax as a way to remind tourists that "we're still here." Reportedly, one woman phoned up the Chamber of Commerce in a panic, worried about what would happen to her property once the town moved to Canada.
| Categories: International Relations, Government Officials, United States, 2008, Unlikely Acquisitions. |