Were you fooled this April 1?

Posted on 01. Apr, 2010 by Sarthak K in Featured

All fools’s day happened to be yesterday and cerain individuals and organisations made it their mission to befool as many of us as possible. Let’s see some of the follery that was done:

Search engine giant Google played its annual April Fools prank on its users.

Millions of search customers woke up to see that Google had changed its name to “TOPEKA.”

When I logged into Facebook I was shocked to see a close friend of mine had changed her relationship status to “in a relationship.” Usually I would have known before this coming on Facebook but then wisdom dawned before I could comment anything stupid on that status!

Some of the best pranks were played by the British media to their readers.

The Sun reported it has developed the world’s first flavoured newspaper page and invited readers to lick a square of newsprint “to reveal a hidden taste.” Just below the spot to be licked was the fine-print warning: “May contain nuts.”

The Daily Mail reported that the Automobile Association (AA), which deals with emergency callouts to car breakdowns, had equipped its staff with jet-packs to fly over gridlocked traffic to reach stranded motorists faster.

In an elaborate mock-up, The Guardian said the ruling Labour Party was to use Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s “reputation for anger and physical aggression” in a new poster campaign ahead of an election expected on May 6. Posters appeared alongside the article — one showed a photo of Brown scowling next to the phrase “Step outside posh boy,” while another pictured him grinning and saying “I took billions from pensions wanna make something of it?”

The Daily Mirror ran a picture of Queen Elizabeth apparently taking a a flight with the budget airline easyJet, while The Independent reported that nuclear scientists want to turn London’s Circle Line subway into a particle accelerator similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. It said there were safety concerns about “a mini-black hole being created at Westminster (home to Britain’s Parliament) when the two proton beams collide.”

Not all were foolhardy….

Not every story that looks like an April Fool is an April Fool. A number of news items published yesterday might have given rise to suspicion of a hoax but were actually true. For example, coastguards in Falmouth, Cornwall, picked up a distress signal from the MV Titanic in the Caribbean. Three people were on the vessel, which was taking on water and suffering from electrical failure, and details were passed on to the US Coast Guard.

Elsewhere, a British van driver who hit two ducks while driving home through Belgium discovered one of them alive, wedged under the bonnet, when he stopped to inspect the damage at a motorway service station on the M1. He took the duck to a rescue centre, which said it had a broken wing but should make a good recovery. Unlikely it may have been – but it definitely happened.