APRIL FOOL’S JOKES

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oogle this year unleashed a smattering of April fool’s gags right from really advanced search Google Maps in 8 bit for Nintendo, Gmail Tap, Google Fiber Bar, Google Voice for pets, Google Racing and more, Youtube came up with the Youtube collection the option to have your favorite videos delivered at your doorstep on DVD’s on the other hand in what seemed a bit over Mashable after kicking out its CEO pets cashmore. But let’s take a look at some of the classic April Fool’s day pranks through history.

          BBC has gained quite a reputation by coming up with some of the brilliant April Fool pranks and by far the best has been about bumper spaghetti crop in Switzerland. On April 1, 1957 a news broadcast on BBC named Panorama ran a report with video footage showing swiss farmers plucking strands of spaghetti from trees. Large numbers of viewers were fooled and BBC was flooded with phone calls inquiring about how they could go about planting a spaghetti tree and apparently they were advised to plant a strand of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce!

          Another memorable April Fools joke comes from Sweden. In 1962 SVT Sweden’s only television channel decided to pull a fast one. They had their technical expert demonstrate how they could with the help of a fine-meshed screen covering the TV screen turn it from black and white to color. And surprisingly a nylon stoking can also do the trick Kjell Stensson the technical expert also cautioned the viewers that they were required to maintain correct distance from the screen and move their head very carefully back and forth in order to align the color spectrum.

          Then in 1977 a popular British tabloid The Guardian successfully managed to fools its readers by publishing a whopping seven page special report about San Serriffe an nation located in the Indian Ocean with nothing less that several semicolon shaped islands. Its two primary islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse while its capital was Bodoni and its leader was General pica. Of course the readers wanted to know more about this supposedly idyllic holiday destination and failed to notice that curiously everything about the island had reference to typography.

          If you think people would have wished up over the years then think again. In 2008 BBC was at it again when it announced that the camera crew of its natural history series ‘Miracles of Evolution’ had filmed flying penguins near the Antarctic. The video showed penguins taking flight and it became one of the most viewed videos on the Internet. BBC claimed that the penguins flew thousands of miles to tropical South America to escape the harsh Antarctic winters.