The New York April Fools' Committee has announced that, once again, the city will host a parade on April 1st. But for those planning to attend, please note that "the parade route has changed temporarily due to construction in Washington Square Park. This year the parade will detour east across Fourteenth Street to Union Square where the post-parade festivities will begin."

This year, floats will include Michael Vick "taking bets on his Dog Fight Float with caged, snarling pit bulls," as well as "a dazed Britney Spears looking for the Halloween Parade."

Inquiries about the parade can be directed to the Committee Chair, Joey Skaggs.

The International Rising Tide network has declared this April 1, 2008 to be Fossil Fools Day. It's urging pranksters to target the fossil fuel industry on April 1st. They write: "Find a fossil fool in your community and pull a prank that packs a punch."

Some of the pranks they suggest:

Rumors have been floating around suggesting that Bungie Software might be coming out with a new game called Lego Halo. It would be the same as the Halo series, except everything would look like it was made out of lego. The rumor is based on a scan of an article from an upcoming issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly which describes this game.

There really is a Lego Star Wars game, so there's a precedent for this concept. However, Lego Halo appears to be a hoax. Gaming Today reports:

Does anyone reading this happen to speak Swedish? I'm looking for someone who could help me translate some material relating to SVT's famous "instant color TV" april fool's day hoax that took place in 1962. SVT has a page with a paragraph discussing the hoax. And the same page links to a video of the hoax itself. I'm hoping to be able to come up with an English transcript of the hoax. Anyone willing to help me out with this, I'd be happy to send them a free signed copy of my latest book. I'll ship it all the way to Sweden, if need be.

Last year the Daily Mail ran an April Fool's Day article in which it claimed that Brits would have to pay a "carbon offset" tax if they wanted to barbecue in their backyards:


Yesterday, in a case of an April Fool's Day joke almost becoming reality, the European Union announced that it was considering banning patio heaters in order to protect the environment:


The two aren't exactly the same (barbecues vs. patio heaters), but pretty close. Here in Southern California we love our patio heaters. The slightest chill in the air prompts us to fire them up, so we can continue sitting outside. It would hurt to have to give them up.

Recently Big Ben's chimes have been silenced as repairs are made to it. Apparently this has inspired policemen at Westminster to revive the BBC's 1980 April Fool's Day joke. The BBC Reports: (Thanks to Andrew Nixon for the link)

Students at Hugh McRoberts School in Richmond, British Columbia were stunned when they learned that donut-maker Tim Hortons was going to become an official sponsor of their school. As a result the nickname for the school's team would change from the "Strikers" to the "Dunkers". Also:

The school’s Snack Shack had been sold, students were told in a survey that asked which doughnuts they preferred for the new shack’s menu.
What’s more, the school was to undergo a complete re-branding, with new colours and a logo featuring a coffee cup with Tim Hortons in big letters.

Students responded by protesting and calling up the press to let them know what was happening. (Though other students were excited about the change... especially the possibility of free donuts.) Turned out it was all an experiment in mass manipulation crafted by the school's language-arts class (I have no idea what "language arts" are... it must be a Canadian thing. Maybe it's like rhetoric, or debate), and timed to coincide with April 1st. Now, presumably, students are protesting because they won't be getting their free donuts.

Imagine getting delayed because of this:

STUNNED holiday-makers flying back to Britain from Tenerife said they were told by the captain they could not land because an air traffic controller was on a tea break.

Because this occurred on April 1st, the passengers initially thought the captain was joking when he announced the reason for the delay over the intercom, but it turned out he wasn't. So the plane had to circle for almost half an hour until the guy came back to work. The British do love their tea breaks.

The Brainerd Dispatch (requires registration) reports on an April Fool's Day prank that went slightly wrong, ending up with the prankster, a 57-year-old woman, getting charged with disorderly conduct:

About 10:15 a.m. Saturday, the woman stopped at Wells Fargo Bank at 424 W. Washington St. in Brainerd to make a legitimate withdrawal from an account. When she was finished, she handed the teller a note that read, "I'm here to take money," said Brainerd Police Chief John Bolduc... a bank employee called 911 indicating the bank was being robbed. Officers from Brainerd and Crow Wing County responded to the bank but the woman had left, Bolduc said. She was stopped by a Crow Wing County sheriff's deputy a short time later at Highways 18 and 25 in east Brainerd, where she was arrested for disorderly conduct and taken to the Crow Wing County jail.

I guess banks, like airports, are one place where you don't want to joke around about security issues.

This story offers a sad commentary on the state of affairs in America. Five teenage girls living in Ravenna, Ohio got into the spirit of April 1st by decorating a few public places in their town with brightly colored boxes designed to look like the power-up cubes in the Super Mario Bros. game (the ones you jump up to hit and get extra energy). They got the idea from qwantz.com. Local residents who didn't recognize what the boxes were supposed to be weren't amused and called out the bomb squad. And it seems like the police are coming down pretty hard on the girls:

[Ravenna Police Chief] McCoy said even though no harm was intended by the girls, they could face criminal charges for their actions. “The potential is always present when dealing with a suspicious package that it could be deadly,” McCoy said. “In today’s day and age, you just cannot do this kind of stuff.”... McCoy said the incident will be referred to the Portage County Prosecutor’s Office for possible charges against the girls.

Lots of blogs are posting this story, and it seems like everyone agrees that the police seem to be overreacting. The incident reminds me of April 1, 2003 when seven young guys were charged with making terrorist threats because they posted signs reading "All your base are belong to us" around Sturgis, Michigan.

Update: It seems that the prosecutor has decided not to charge the girls with any crime: "The girls were imitating an art project which they found on the Internet,” the prosecutor said. “None of the girls had any prior contacts with the police or juvenile court and are all good students.”

Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it sure seems like all the items in UKTV's list of 20 Great April Fools, which Jon Holmes presented on air on April 1st over in Britain, were lifted almost verbatim from my list of the Top 100 April Fools ever. Not to complain (actually to complain bitterly), but it took me a long time to create that list... a lot of tedious searching through decades of old newspaper archives to find all the April Fool's Day classics that had been, for the most part, forgotten. If UKTV did their own research and collected together what they thought were the Top 20 April Fools, that would be fine. But their research seems to have simply consisted of visiting here and cutting and pasting what they found, and then presenting this to their viewers as their own work. Can that actually be legal?

Happy April Fools, everyone! Sorry about the light posting recently, but the past few days I've been doing almost back-to-back radio interviews to promote Hippo Eats Dwarf. (I've got a few more radio interviews today, then I'm doing a book signing at the Borders in downtown San Diego.) You may also have noticed that the site is loading slowly. That's the April Fool's Day effect, which happens every year. Traffic to the site spikes, causing the server to grind to a halt. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm lucky the site is loading at all.

Whenever I have a chance during the day (which may not be often), I'm going to try to list some of this years April Fool's Day hoaxes here. I should note that for the past few years Jason Pearsall of urgo.org has been keeping a great list of April Fools internet hoaxes, and he's doing it again this year, so definitely check that out. Hopefully I can supplement what he has by noting some of the offline hoaxes from newspapers and advertisers.

[Note: if anyone in the UK could scan some of the April Fools-related pictures appearing in the UK papers and email them to me, I'd love to see them.]

♠ Google Romance. "Search for love in all (or at least a statistically significant majority of) the right places with Soulmate Search, our eerily effective psychographic matchmaking software." And "Endure, via our Contextual Dating option, thematically appropriate multimedia advertising throughout the entirety of your free date."
♠The Hair Color Diet: "The Hair Color Diet tells you how to eat right for your hair type."
♠The Fat Tax (An Esquire article, with an accompanying website).
♠ Jackass Penguin: The Sun ran a photo of a penguin wandering along the banks of the Thames. "It is believed to be the first time a penguin has been spotted in the Thames -- and comes weeks after tragic Wally the Whale got stranded... Experts said the penguin, normally seen at the South Pole, may have been released into UK waters by fishermen who accidentally snared him... Marine biologist Lil Faroop said: 'It looks like a Jackass. They feed on sprats and fly through the water at five miles (eight kilometres) per hour. They have a donkey-like bray.'"
♠ Biscuit Highway: The Daily Express claimed that biscuits were being mixed into tarmac to help make roads safer. "Scientists yesterday revealed that broken biscuits are in fact the perfect material to help resurface roads... Years of experimental research revealed that crushed-up ginger nuts are the best biscuit for a road's sub-base, as they are more porous and allow water to drain away."
♠ Royal Family Tree: The Daily Mirror claimed that an oak tree bearing the likeness of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip and Prince Charles had been found by "Lionel Day" as his dog chased a squirrel. "The exact location of the tree in the New Forest, Hampshire, is being kept secret because of fears it could attract druids."
♠ Red Door for 10 Downing Street: The Daily Mail reported that Tony Blair, in a "literally incredible break with decades of tradition," had decided to paint the door of 10 Downing Street red. ""After 270 years, Blair paints No 10 front door socialist red."
♠ Coldplay singer becomes conservative: The Guardian reported that Coldplay singer, Chris Martin, known for his liberal views, had decided to throw his support behind Conservative David Cameron.
♠ Chip and Sing Cards. The Times reported that "Britain's banks are developing a system of credit card security that uses the voice's tonal range. Rather than needing to recall a PIN, you will need to remember a line of a song... Optical scans are too fallible, and standard voice recognition too easy to mimic electronically. But no two people sing the same way. Tills and cash dispensers are to have microphones."