Thursday, April 1, 2010

April Fools' Day

"April Fools!" -- in our household, soap covered toothbrushes, red colored "strawberry" milk at breakfast, the news that we had a new dog, a fake mustache, shower head loosenings all were greeted with this gleeful cheer of April Fools'.

I do like the creative jokes that are taken to rather extreme measures. And while News Corp may have a point that Google is thieving content from other providers (or might not), Google does seem to have a sense of humor. They ran their Animal Translator (Beta version), which purports to help humans to understand animals by translating it into English (link here).

The sober National Public Radio also gets into the act. One year they echoed the Charlton Heston anguished line in this April Fools' promo: "Support for NPR comes from the Soylent Corporation, manufacturing protein-rich food products in a variety of colors. Soylent Green is People."

It was unfortunate, but prophetic, that the AMC Gremlin was launched on April 1, 1970.









But the greatest April Fools' prank, in my view, is still the BBC flying penguins (link here).