Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Happy April Fools!!

Posted by Unknown

Following are a few famous hoax's for April Fools. One of them is as new as today!

  • Space Shuttle Landing (2008) Real Radio (100-101fm) anounced on its breakfast show that an American Space Shuttle called 'Endeavour' was diverted to Cumbernauld Airport! It has just returned from a 16 day mission to the International Space Station to attach a 50ft inspection pole when it had a few problems and the only airport that could accept the aircraft was Cumbernauld! Hundreds of people headed for Cumbernauld to try and get a look at the shuttle for re-entry.
  • Alabama Changes the Value of Pi: The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article written by physicist Mark Boslough claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to the "Biblical value" of 3.0. This claim originally appeared as a news story in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.
  • Spaghetti trees: The BBC television programme Panorama ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. They had claimed that the despised pest the spaghetti weevil had been eradicated. A large number of people contacted the BBC wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees. It was in fact filmed in St Albans.
  • Left Handed Whoppers: In 1998, Burger King ran an ad in USA Today, saying that people could get a Whopper for left-handed people whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side. Not only did customers order the new burgers, but some specifically requested the "old", right-handed burger.
  • Taco Liberty Bell: In 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times announcing that they had purchased the Liberty Bell to "reduce the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell." When asked about the sale, White House press secretary Mike McCurry replied tongue-in-cheek that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and would henceforth be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.[7]
    San Serriffe: The Guardian printed a supplement in 1977 praising this fictional resort, its two main islands (Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse), its capital (Bodoni), and its leader (General Pica). Intrigued readers were later disappointed to learn that San Serriffe (sans serif) did not exist except as references to typeface terminology. (This comes from a Jorge Luis Borges story.)
  • Metric time: Repeated several times in various countries, this hoax involves claiming that the time system will be changed to one in which units of time are based on powers of 10.[9]
  • Smell-o-vision: In 1965, the BBC purported to conduct a trial of a new technology allowing the transmission of odor over the airwaves to all viewers. Many viewers reportedly contacted the BBC to report the trial's success. This hoax was also conducted by the Seven Network in Australia in 2005. In 2007, the BBC website repeated an online version of the hoax.

1 comments:

SJacobus said...

I must say I was volunteering in my son's class that day and I was thoroughly impressed with teacher for talking to the kids about the fact that their pranks could hurt feelings and we're often only funny to the person doing the pranks. These ones you posted sound fun and good, but I liked that the teacher curbed what can often be a rather hard day for many kids.