So far today, the three best April Fool’s Day jokes I’ve heard or read have been as follows:
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On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, they had a good piece about new regulation to limit mobile phone ring tones in New York:
The city’s Center for Reduction of Noise Pollution issued a public call to action last month, citing an increased number of confrontations spawned by a new phenomenon: It’s called “ring rage,” and it involves strangers getting into fights over obnoxious cell phone ringtones.David Yassky, a member of the New York City Council for the 33rd District in Brooklyn, has proposed a bill to regulate cell phone rings.
Distracting ringtones in the workplace cost the economy more than $1.2 billion each year, says Yassky. His bill mandates that New York residents choose between four more palatable rings, custom-made by the city.
The audio of the interview is here (along with the funny ringtones). NPR almost completely ruined the idea by being too obvious (you could almost hear them going “eh!?”, “eh!?”, after every sentence), not choosing a credible-sounding interviewee as the main subject, and then immediately reminding you of the date at the end of the interview. Are they afraid people will sue? It’s such a shame they had to be so obvious.
- On NPR’s Marketplace Money this afternoon1 there was a much better one. Better, because it was much more subtly executed, the interviewee was better and so overall, the piece was (while clearly a joke) still almost believable:
There are more billionaires in the world now than ever. And as you can imagine, they need a lot of help to stay rich. We hang out with an essential member of a billionaire’s support team: the wallet guardian.Listen to the really excellent interview here. Again, the program makers could not resist stepping away from subtlety by saying at the end that the report was filed by Joe King. (Why!?) But it was a lot more subtly executed than the Weekend edition piece.
- On blogs about science, I thought that Resonaances’ post continuing the saga of the (real) construction problems at CERN’s LHC was really funny. It reports on the resignation of the director general of CERN, and the quote from the new appointee is funny. See that April Fool’s Day post here (it riffs on an earlier post located here, which also has some good – if alarming – humour).
Much better was the following:
So that’s three I’ve liked so far. Can you point to any that you liked, or tell me/us about them if you’ve nothing on the web to point to?
-cvj
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1 I’m not sure why I listen to this; it’s not like I have actual money to invest… but then people who don’t have cars listen to Car Talk.
Dear Fred, Do you consider yourself Siciliian? If no, then you are supporting a hypothesis I have, which is that the only people who were not caught by Davide’s April Fools joke were Siciliians…. (P.S. Nice to hear from you! I’ve known about you for at least a year, but never said hello.. so then hello!)
Ciao Amara,
I live on the other side of Etna, in Linguaglossa, Davide caught me too, particularly as I had an email from some friends in Texas asking me about the Mountain being active. Since all my friends know of Davide and his mountain blog, I assumed the news had travelled that far! Only today when I looked at his blog did I see I was an April Fool. or fish as they call it here, hence the cartoon which I didn’t link to at the time. My friends had seen the news of the explosions on 29th March.
Hey, as long as we are all well and happy , who cares?
Fred.
Amara, That’s hilarious! I particularly like the link to the cartoon! Thanks!
-cvj
Dear Clifford,
I am so gullible. Every year, someone gets me with an April Fool’s joke. This year, I was so stubborn in my gullible-ness, that even when it was obvious it was a joke, I didn’t believe it!
This year, it was my friend Davide Corsaro at the Hotel Corsaro, who fooled me. His hotel blog is the best source I know for what is happening at Mt. Etna. His hotel is located at 2000m, right at the base, where you can hear and see some of the explosions, plus frequently the INGV and other people monitoring the volcano, stop there or sleep there.
On the 1st of April, I saw his blog entry (see the link above), indicating that not only is Etna active again after a few months of quiet (which is true), there appeared to be nearby vent, newly opened, causing major problems for the hotel. This would be extremely unusual, because Etna’s variety of volcanic activity is monitored ‘religiously’, people _always_ have time to investigate and evacuate and anything sudden like this is wierd and frightening.
So gullible Amara immediately sends her volcano friends news that ‘Etna is not only active again, but has entered into a dangerous mode and our friends at the hotel are in danger…’
Of course Davide’s blog entry was an April Fool’s joke, indicated by the link of a cartoon, which I had thought was his hurried mistake to the ‘wrong image’. Italians can pull even bigger pranks than Americans, I think!
Perhaps the saddest, scariest, most wistful of yesterday’s contributions would be this one from Pandagon. Would it be true, but not, but then again yes???
There were more on today’s astro-ph! 🙂
From Often:
It seems that, after the success of the last year, a lot of cosmologists decided to trick a bit on the arXiv 🙂 . This Monday, you can find no less than (at least) three pranks on astro-ph (besides its own format, which changed today 🙂 ).
arXiv:astro-ph/0703783v1
Natural Dark Energy
Authors: Douglas Scott, Ali Frolop
arXiv:astro-ph/0703806v1
On the origin of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies
Authors: Ria Follop, Anais Rassat, Asantha Cooray, Filipe B. Abdalla
arXiv:astro-ph/0703774v1
The Stryngbohtyk Model of the Universe: a Solution to the Problem of the Cosmological Constant
Authors: Jordi Miralda-Escude
I liked the cosmological constant solution on the arxiv “The Stryngbohtyk Model of the Universe: a Solution to the Problem of the Cosmological Constant”, http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703774, – especially because it had so much real content. Unfortunately the author also felt in necessary to make it very clear that it was a spoof….
You might also consider:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2411405.ece
Now, the sheep thing is good, and the Krauss article is good….. but TiSP is brilliant! I’d missed that…. hilarious.
“last hundred smelly yards” – ha ha ha ha !
-cvj
Did you see this:
http://www.google.com/tisp/
[I was taken in by the NPR report – it took me a second hearing before I realized]
Without doubt RealClimate’s Sheep albedo feedback is at the top of the list!
I sent out an email today telling people that I was engaged to a Cambodian petrol station attendant but not to worry, we’d get married before I started to show. Except all this meant I’d have to stop the physics degree but that was ok because I was getting really sick and bored with it anyway… apparently it was that last comment that finally tipped a lot of people off. 😉
Blatant plug- I write for the humor magazine on campus back home, and wrote about five articles for them on various topics. Don’t have an electronic edition of this year’s to point you to but I put my favorite article online- Krauss calls for Vote of No Confidence in God.
Other than that, Google has a cute joke on their main page, but they do every year. APOD’s got a good one too.
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