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.
In its television section, the
New York Times ran a capsule review of the 1924 movie
The Sea Hawk, describing it as a "high-tech swashbuckler about a mild-mannered news assistant who ransacks a New York newspaper office via remote control." Two
Times staffers, Tim Sastrowardoyo and Marilyn McCauley, were listed as stars. Two days later the
Times ran a correction, noting that the film "is actually an adaptation of Rafael Sabatini's 1915 novel about an English nobleman sold into slavery. It stars Milton Sills and Enid Bennett." It further explained:
The mock listing came from a feature syndicate that maintains The Times's movie capsule database and assembles the daily and weekly listings. An investigation has found that the "Sea Hawk" entry was one of three dummy listings written at The Times in December 1998 and transmitted to the syndicate to test the technology; they were not supposed to be stored. "The Sea Hawk" had most recently been televised in November 1998 and was not again scheduled until last Sunday. The Times regrets any inconvenience to readers. It is also, frankly, speechless at the coincidence of the April Fool's Day publication.
The
Tucson Weekly revealed that the Disney Corporation was planning to build a 150 square-mile theme park in Kokopelli County, Arizona. The park, which would be like a 21st century EPCOT, was code-named Azcot. It would include "a simulated Colorado River adventure, featuring raft-like carts which travel on submerged rails through a 1/4-scale fiberglass replica of the Grand Canyon," as well as "a cliff-dweller city featuring animatronic Anasazi grinding corn and weaving baskets," and Duckville, "a frontier town so expansive that if it were real, it would be the seventh largest city in Arizona, complete with covered-wagon monorail and a complex municipal stagecoach system." Lawyers for Disney had supposedly tried to suppress publication of the article before the Tucson Weekly went to print with the scoop.
The animated Comedy Central series South Park had been heavily promoting that on the April 1 season premiere of the second season of the show, it would reveal the identity of the father of a character Cartman, thus resolving the cliffhanger it had left viewers with the season before. The April 1 show began as normal, with clips shown from previous episodes, but then a message flashed on the screen stating it had all been an April Fool's joke. Nothing was going to be revealed. Instead the episode focused on the completely unrelated adventures of the flatulent characters Terrance and Philip. Fans of the series were irate. Comedy Central received over 1500 angry emails. A spokesman admitted that the fans "got the joke... they just didn't like it." Fans had to wait until April 22 before the identity of Cartman's father actually was revealed.
On the eve of April Fool's Day, a lavish party was held at Jeff Koons's New York studio to honor the memory of the late, great American artist Nat Tate — a troubled abstract expressionist who destroyed 99 percent of his own work before leaping to his death from the Staten Island ferry. At the party, David Bowie read aloud selections from William Boyd's soon-to-be released biography of Tate,
Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960. Critics in the crowd murmured appreciative comments about Tate's work as they sipped their drinks. What they didn't know is that Tate had never existed. He was the satirical creation of William Boyd. Bowie, Boyd, and Boyd's publisher were the only ones in on the joke.
Hundreds of people, mostly shop girls and women, gathered in front of the Brandenburg gate in Berlin, drawn there by an announcement placed in Berlin papers the night before stating that a motion picture camera was going to take a picture in front of the gate at noon, and that everybody who was in front of the gate would be in the picture. The announcement was a prank perpetrated by a night worker at the papers. The
Chicago Tribune foreign news service reported: "Some people stood there for hours before they realized that this was the first day of April, known in Germany as in the United States as April Fools' day." [
Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr 5, 1919.]
