Family Fun magazine has quite a few suggestions for April Fool's Day pranks over at its site. I especially like their list of food pranks, such as preparing ice-cream potatoes (shown to the right). That's not potatoes with gravy. It's ice cream with butterscotch sauce. Also check out their recipe for creating green beans out of Jolly Rancher Fruit Chews.

If you love beer, then this is the church for you: The Church of Beer. It really is a church. If you're ordained as one of its ministers, then you can legitimately perform wedding services. But by its own admission, it doesn't take itself that seriously. I signed up to join right away. I'm even tempted to become an official Church of Beer minister, but I'm not sure about shelling out $15 for the honor.

Three years ago Robert Ligon announced that he had invented a low-fat doughnut. He stood to make millions off the invention. But a few days ago he was hauled off by the police, who simultaneously raided his warehouse and confiscated over 18,000 of his doughnuts (all of which, I'm sure, will be held as evidence... not one of them will mysteriously disappear). You see, Ligon's doughnuts weren't actually low-fat. He was simply buying normal donuts and slapping a low-fat label on them.

Around the world hungry hackers and coders are about to eat pizza. But the question that vexes them is this: what if there is an image of Jesus hidden in that pizza? Now the JesusPizza Project will harness the power of thousands of computer users, via the miracle of distributed computing, to search images of those pizzas that are about to be eaten, to find out if one of them contains the image of Jesus. Just like the Seti-at-Home project, you download some software. When your computer is in screensaver mode this software goes to work, scanning downloaded images of pizzas. (Thanks to Phil Carmody for the link)

Here's a new sport that's taking the world by storm: Cheese Racing! The concept is that you throw one of those plastic-wrapped slices of processed cheese onto a hot barbeque. Instead of melting, the plastic puffs up and expands as the cheese inside heats up. If a bunch of people throw their slices onto the grill at the same time, then the winner is the person whose slice fully expands first. I didn't dare try this on my grill to see if the plastic really would expand instead of melting. But based on the pictures on the cheese racing site, I'm guessing that they're telling the truth. The hoax here may be in referring to the stuff inside the plastic as 'cheese.' I believe that 'processed cheese food' is the proper term. (Thanks to Emily de Saint Jores for the link).

Behold the power of Cheesus! Cheesus Industries manufactures and sells "premium quality, religious-themed cheese sculptures." That would be statues of Jesus made out of cheese. Of course, there's nothing to stop someone making a statue of Jesus out of cheese and selling it, but in this case there's no way to buy what Cheesus Industries claims to be producing. In reality, Cheesus Industries appears to be a satirical promotional tool for the 'cheesy' lounge singer Richard Cheese.

I've often heard tales about all the weird, disgusting things that get thrown into hot dogs and chicken nuggets during the manufacturing process... but soy sauce! I always figured that would simply be sauce made from soy beans. Turns out I was wrong. Over in China they're cracking down on companies that are surreptitiously manufacturing soy sauce from human hair. Watch our for sauce that's described on the label as being 'blended,' because that means it's not really made from soy. It's made from people!!

If you're feeling a little sinful, wash away your sins with some Diet Holy Water. Now, I don't think this is a hoax in the sense that this stuff isn't really for sale. Instead I'm linking to it because it seems like a marketing effort that has tongue firmly in cheek.

The Guardian has an editorial piece about Bush's recent Turkey-gate scandal (the photo-op in Iraq with the inedible turkey). But Mark Lawson, the author of the article, points out that the bread-and-cheese pub food known as a ploughman's lunch is also a bit of a fake. Ploughman's lunches "claimed to link yuppies in pubs to their ancestors who toiled on the soil" but the seemingly traditional lunch was actually "an invention of the contemporary advertising and catering trades." I've enjoyed quite a few ploughman's lunches, and I never knew that.

It turns out that the turkey President Bush was proudly holding on his recent visit with the troops in Iraq wasn't for eating. It's what's known as a 'Trophy Turkey': one that is just for decoration, not for consumption. I guess it wouldn't have looked as good for the cameras for Bush to walk around holding the slices of processed turkey meat that the soldiers really got.

People are up in arms about the Great Chili Scandal. The scandal occurred at the 37th annual Original Terlingua International Frank X. Tolbert-Wick Fowler Memorial Championship Chili Cook-Off, which is like the superbowl of Chili Cook-offs. Don Eastep won first place this year. Problem is that Don hadn't actually cooked any of his own chili. His brother Terry had dropped out of the contest at the last minute, so Don posed as his brother and took his place. But instead of cooking something of his own, Don simply walked around and took one spoonful of chili from each of the 80 contestants. Then he mixed these eighty spoonfuls together in a bowl and handed that in as his entry. Much to his surprise, he won first place. He immediately admitted what he had done, and the trophy was taken away. But everyone is still riled up about the whole thing. They're calling Don a 'chili terrorist.'

This woman claims that she was happily eating her clam chowder at a restaurant in Irvine, CA when to her horror she discovered a condom floating in it. Actually, she discovered the condom by biting down on it. Incessant vomiting followed. The restaurant, meanwhile, is denying any responsibility, so the woman has filed a lawsuit, which will commence Jan. 12, 2004. It seems obvious that someone is lying here, but it's basically the woman's word against the word of the restaurant managers.