April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:

Charlie Bee, a disc jockey at country music station WAPG-AM in Arcadia, Florida, locked himself in the station's studio while repeatedly broadcasting Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It." He explained to listeners that he was "fed up" with not receiving an adequate salary and would play the song until his employers agreed to give him a raise. Police eventually arrived and escorted him out of the building. The next disc jockey in the studio, Bill Madison, dedicated the song to Bee and played it one last time. However, the entire incident turned out to have been a staged prank with which the police were cooperating.

Finally, Byte magazine featured a new portable computer, available from the Honda Corporation, called the "Transporter":
Byte later received a call from a USA Today reporter inquiring about the Transporter.

The Rivereast News Bulletin (Glastonbury, Connecticut) announced that the city's Board of Education had devised a plan to eliminate overcrowding in classrooms. The plan was to forbid families from having more than .75 children per household for the next 15 years. The Board of Education admitted that it had not yet figured out how families could limit themselves to .75 children, but that a computer had determined that this was the ideal number. It was suggested that families unhappy with this ruling move to California. The Board added that the new ruling would not become law for another ten months. Therefore, parents who wanted more than .75 children were urged to "get started this afternoon."

Byte magazine described a new product called the MacKnifer:

"Ennui Associates has announced MacKnifer, a hardware attachment that mounts on the side of your Macintosh and sharpens knives, scissors, lawn-mower blades—anything in your home that needs sharpening. With MacKnifer's patented double-action grinding wheel, you can easily sharpen any utensil in less time than it takes the Mac to open a file. According to the manufacturer, MacKnifer is so easy to use that you can operate it within 30 minutes of taking it out of the box. Turn your spare computing time into extra cash with a knife-sharpening business on the side... of your Macintosh."

Byte Magazine featured a section called "What's Not," instead of its usual "What's Hot" section. Included were technological gadgets such as computer disks made of soybeans:

Representative Thomas J. Downey (shown), a Democrat from New York, issued a news release proposing that the minimum age for Congressmen be lowered from 25 to 15. He cited the need for "new blood in Congress." He argued that teenagers could usefully lead a Select Committee on Acne and noted that "junkets could become field trips; the carry-outs could sell Twinkies; missed votes could be excused with a note from Mom." He did concede, however, that there would be an increased risk of "food fights in the cafeteria."

Sports Illustrated published an article about the Mets’s new rookie pitcher, Sidd Finch (short for Siddhartha Finch). He could reportedly throw a ball with startling, pinpoint accuracy at 168 mph. Sidd Finch had never played baseball before. Instead he had mastered the “art of the pitch” in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the “great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa.“ Mets fans celebrated their teams good luck and flooded Sports Illustrated with requests for more information. In reality, this legendary player sprang from the imagination of George Plimpton. (For more information, see the Sidd Finch article in the Hoaxipedia.)

New York City Comptroller Harrison Goldin called a news conference at which he announced that the city was purchasing the professional football team, the Green Bay Packers. City retirement funds would be used to make the purchase, and the Packers would replace the Giants and the Jets. Reporters had already phoned the story into the New York Post and Daily News when a press representative in Golden's office announced that the news was an April Fool's day joke. The Post complained that they had almost put the story on their front page, a mistake which would have cost them $100,000 to correct.

The students of Newtonbrook Secondary School in Canada placed an ad in a local newspaper putting their school up for sale. The ad read: "For Sale—106-room mansion, 5 1/2 acres of well-kept grounds in the heart of Willowdale. $1 million." According to the principal, Richard Frise, the school's secretaries answered a number of calls from interested buyers before they realized what had happened.

The Orlando Sentinel featured a story about a creature known as the Tasmanian Mock Walrus (or TMW for short) that it said made a perfect pet. The creature was only four inches long, resembled a walrus, purred like a cat, and had the temperament of a hamster. What made it such an ideal pet was that it never had to be bathed, used a litter box, and ate cockroaches. In fact, a single TMW could entirely rid a house of its cockroach problem. Reportedly, some TMWs had been smuggled in from Tasmania, and there were efforts being made to breed them, but the local pest-control industry, sensing a potent threat in the TMW, was pressuring the government not to allow them in the country. An accompanying photo showed protestors picketing outside the offices of the Orlando city government to call attention to the plight of the TMW. Dozens of people called the paper trying to find out where they could obtain their own TMW.

The Eldorado Daily Journal, an Illinois paper, announced a contest to see who could save the most daylight for daylight savings time. The rules of the contest were simple: beginning with the first day of daylight savings time, contestants would be required to save daylight. Whoever succeeded in saving the most daylight would win. Only pure daylight would be allowed—no dawn or twilight light, though light from cloudy days would be allowed. Moonlight was strictly forbidden. Light could be stored in any container. The contest received a huge, nationwide response. The paper's editor was interviewed by correspondents from CBS and NBC and was featured in papers throughout the country.

MIT's Technology Review published an article titled "Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth" that described an effort by Soviet scientists, led by Dr. Sverbighooze Yasmilov, to insert DNA from woolly mammoths found frozen in Siberian ice into elephant cells. The cells would then be brought to term inside elephant surrogate mothers. Many members of the media believed the report to be real.

The Durand Express, a Michigan weekly, reported that Nissan would built an auto plant outside of Durand City. The new plant would reportedly employ thousands and pay higher wages than the nearby General Motors plant. Furthermore, Nissan would pay farmers $10,000 an acre for the land on which the plant was to be built. Many unemployed auto workers believed the story and inquired about how to apply for jobs at the plant. However, the story was exposed as a fake by a reporter working at a newspaper in Flint, Michigan. Many people responded angrily to the news that the story was a prank and cancelled their subscriptions. The paper’s editor explained that he hadn’t been trying to hurt anyone, and thought that he had exaggerated his story enough to make it unbelievable.

On Cable magazine reported that a huge publicity blitz was being planned around an upcoming Michael Jackson song called "Tingle." The song was said to be three minutes and twelve seconds long, and a video of it would feature Jackson walking out of a boutique and catching fire. Jackson's record company had reportedly also developed a 37-minute promo clip to hype the video, and this promo was, in turn, being developed into a 3-hour film by Paramount. Three video versions of the song would be sold: "Michael Jackson's 'Tingle'" for $39.95; "Making the 'Tingle' Video" for $79.95; and "The Making of 'The Making of the "Tingle" Video'" for $99.95. MTV was going to show the 37-minute promo clip hourly. Parker Brothers would release a board game designed around it. Pepsi would be the official soft drink of the video, and Allstate would sell "exclusive fire insurance" along with the video. At the bottom of the article a note said "On Cable, April Fool, 1984." Nevertheless, two weeks later a reporter for "Breakaway," a syndicated news-magazine program broadcast on 55 television stations around the country, went on the air and reported the "Tingle" story as breaking news, not realizing that the article was a joke. The reporter, in his defense, later explained that he had never read On Cable Magazine, and that he had heard the story instead from "a woman that I know who is a friend of the family."

The debate over the origins of April Fool's Day has been long-standing and entirely inconclusive. Joseph Boskin, a History professor at Boston University, added a scholarly voice to this debate by explaining to a reporter from the Associated Press that April Fool's Day had begun during the Roman Empire. According to him, a court jester had boasted to Emperor Constantine that the fools and jesters of the court could rule the kingdom better than the Emperor could. In response, Constantine decreed that the court fools would be given a chance to prove this boast, and he set aside one day of the year upon which a fool would rule the kingdom. The first year Constantine appointed a jester named Kugel to rule who immediately decreed that only the absurd would be allowed in the kingdom on that day. Therefore the tradition of April Fools was born. The Associated Press reporter transmitted Boskin's story to news media throughout the country who ran it in their papers. However, not a word of this history was true, which Boskin admitted two weeks later. Boston University issued a statement apologizing for the joke, and many papers published corrections.