April Fool's Day
Did you know that the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary? Really? Hey, wait…We’ve all fallen prey to a practical joke or prank in our lives.
On April 1st, jokes and pranks rule for April Fool’s Day. It’s been that way for a long time. Canterbury Tales, published in 1392, first linked the first of April with mischievous behavior.
In recent years, major companies and public organizations have gotten in on the fun.
- Back in 1957, the BBC staged a still famous prank through their Panorama program. A film showed spaghetti “farmers”in Switzerland harvesting their crops. Viewers contacted the BBC hoping to score their own spaghetti tree. The BBC really used their noodle to get one pasta the public that year!
- Naming rights are a big business, so many people believed Taco Bell’s full-page advertisement in the New York Times that ran on April 1, 1996. Taco Bell announced the purchase and subsequent renaming of the Liberty Bell to the Taco Liberty Bell. After stirring up a lot of attention, and a little controversy, Taco Bell admitted to the prank and pledged $50,000 to the upkeep of the Liberty Bell (no naming rights included.)
- Search engine Google first got into the foolish spirit in the year 2000. They introduced a new concept, the MentalPlex, where one could search the internet by the power of their brain. Google provided humorous responses to users as reasons why the technology was not functioning. For example, some searchers were told “Weak or no signal detected. Upgrade transmitter and retry.”Yikes!
Don’t miss the fun this year. You don’t need a big budget, just some creativity to dupe some April fools around you. Be prepared though, someone may try to spring an April Fool’s Day joke on you.