Fergus Cassidy

These foolish things

April Fool's hoaxes, pranks or general foolery was noticeably absent online last week. Try as I might, it was difficult enough to find much doing in the spoofing department.

Much more of it went on in the mid to late 1990s. There is still stuff happening, it's just very localised. Very few pranks these days get out loose and wild on the net. The last biggie was probably this one in April 2001:

"IT IS URGENT THAT YOU DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM MARCH 31st to APRIL 2nd.
"It's that time again. As many of you know, each year the internet must be closed down for a 24-hour period of time in order to receive maintenance. Many dead links on the World Wide Web will be removed, as well as ftp links that are no longer used. Lost email will also be removed from the system at this time....

"It is very important that the entire internet community be notified of the upcoming maintenance before it gets underway...." [1]

That last line was very important because it's the way that a prank like that spreads around the net. Like the days of the first email viruses when it was sometimes a toss-up which was doing the greatest job of slowing down net traffic - viruses or people sending warnings about them via email.

So does the lack of pranks online mean that the internet has lost its sense of humour on the one day officially designated for foolery?

Then again, isn't the internet supposed to be a haven for spoofing ALL year round? As has been referred to many times, isn't the net supposed to be a fertile ground for jokes, phonies, rumours, misinformation, outright lies and a medium where it's impossible to tell truth from fiction?

Well, er... yes and no. There is all that stuff and more, but it's possible to check it all out. What journalist's call 'checking sources'. I think that's the main reason why online spoof attempts last as long as a fiver in a casino. The 'innocence' of the early internet has gone, as the amount of people online is now so huge that you can't kid all of the people even some of the time.

Then again the kind of spoofs and pranks on 1 April that take place offline is more than a match for the internet. Traditional media has built up such a reputation for trustworthiness that they can afford to run April Fool's stories and have them believed. Like these from last week:

The Afrikaans Beeld newspaper told its readers that Saddam Hussein had accepted an offer of exile in exchange for a top job running the country's oil industry.

'Oscar withdrawn in punishment' ran the headline in Greece's Eleftheros Typos. The story said that the Academy had called back the award to Michael Moorer.

Germany's Tageszeitung ran a report saying that Washington had decided to rethink the location of its new embassy in Berlin because the area it was going to be built in was called Pariser Platz, which means Parisian Square. The paper quoted American sources as saying they "could live with being next to the French, but only if the name of the square is changed".

The Japan Times ran a front page headline 'Beckham to join J League team' with a story written by Shigatsu Baka, which translates literally as April Fool.

The real stuff is good too. In Columbus Ohio, a clothing store clerk called her manager at home and said the store was being robbed at gunpoint. When she called him back to declare "April Fool" he had already called the cops. The clerk was arrested for inducing panic and was fired from the job.

The zoo in Racine, Wisconsin was as prepared last week as it always is. Zoo spokeswoman Ginger Minneti said: "It's constant. We probably get 50 or 60 calls on the day with people looking for Mr Lyon, Mr Fox, Mr Guy Rilla or Mr Albert Ross."

There was also the restaurant chain in Avon, New York which made its own special April Fool's day flavour ice cream - spinach. One 13-year-old customer who tried it said: "Eeyoo, what's in here?" But Butch Witherow, a 76-year-old spinach lover, liked it and suggested a way to make it more appealing: "You ought to change the name to Irish ice cream". Huh????

These was the best and worst of the reported pranks last Tuesday. Maybe the war in Iraq has sapped the energy for humour and fun. Well if it has, it hasn't affected some of those directly involved.

At a press conference in Moscow on Tuesday, the Iraqi Ambassador to Russia apparently read out a news flash from Reuters. "The Americans have accidentally fired a nuclear missile into British forces, killing seven", he is reported to have said. Before grinning and announcing it was an April Fool's.

If 1 April lacked foolishness this year, maybe it has something to do with what Mark Twain once wrote: "The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year".

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LINKS

[1] Internet clean-up day hoax archived at Hoaxinfo.com

The Top 100 April Fool's day hoaxes according to Museum of Hoaxes