Pay no attention to the shooting.

March 31, 2003 10:25 PM

As a brief distraction from all the death and destruction, let's head over to the museum of hoaxes, where we'll find the top 100 April Fool's day pranks of all time. Good luck with your own respective hoaxing.
posted by jonz (5 comments total)

Only today did I realize that April Fools (or is it Fool's, or Fools') Day was almost upon us. I wonder if there will be less fooling around with the war making us more serious.
posted by jaden at 10:41 PM on March 31, 2003

Just looked in the dictionary. It's April Fools' Day.
posted by jaden at 10:53 PM on March 31, 2003

Hey, that link took me to a midget rodeo porn site!




April Fools ...

Actually, my favorite site for net-centric April Fools' Day pranks is Dave Barberi's archive of "April Fools On the Net". Hands down, imho, the funniest net.prank was the imfamous 'Kremvax' post back in '84. Though 'MicroSoft acquiring the Catholic Church' and the revelation that 'Unix is a Hoax' are close. My own 'Loofbot Alert' made the list in '95.

Did "Project Emu" back in '99, but my personal best was a year earlier, when I created a fake webpage called the "Internet Color Registry", where people were encouraged to register their own personal web page color codes to prevent others from using them without proper permission. I then sent out courtesy warnings to several dozen webmasters, warning them about illegal colors on their sites. I was stunned at the number who didn't realize it was a joke and asked for further instructions so that they could bring their pages into proper compliance.

I especially miss the annual HappyNet Manifestos from "Kibo"

(Hope I get this posted before the InterNet cleaning begins ... )
posted by RavinDave at 11:43 PM on March 31, 2003

I like MeFi's theme today better than the other choices. Beautiful job, mathowie! Kuro5hin has a thread to talk about April Fool's pranks, too.
posted by tbc at 7:09 AM on April 1, 2003

Hmm.

I think I would have preferred that Metafilter purchase Google.

Some poetic justice there, doncha think?
posted by mikewas at 8:08 AM on April 1, 2003