Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Did you get April Fooled?

I'm usually quite the jokester but, for some reason this year, just didn't feel up to April Fooling anyone. I briefly thought about talking to a couple people at work who are active in the gossip mill and saying "Hey, did you hear we got bought???" I could really see that one backfiring, so I decided to leave it alone.

So, did you prank anyone or get pranked? The local NBC affiliate ran a story on the morning news about some of the best tricks on the web:

  • Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes - an alleged joint venture between Virgin Atlantic and Google, Project Virgle was a plan to establish the first manned colony on Mars. Google did a brilliant job with this--their co-founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) recorded a YouTube video for the project, as did Sir Richard Branson (videos are here).
  • Rickrolling - The joke here is you give someone a link to an innocuous website, but the link ends up taking them to a YouTube video of Rick Astley performing his 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up." YouTube got in on the act--all their featured videos yesterday ended up being rickrolls.
  • Tribune Company changes names - Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company (The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV, and the Chicago Cubs are a few of the company's properties) issued a press release stating that the company's name was changing to ZellCoMediaEnterprises, Inc or ZCMEINC. He was quoted as saying: "I put $315 million into this thing...the least I ought to get is my name on the company's stationery..."
  • More room in coach! - Canada's Westjet Airlines offered their customers the opportunity to get more room and really stretch out in coach. Passengers were told that, for an additional $12, they could stretch out and sleep in the overhead bins. Westjet touted the fact that their overhead space was the "most generous" in the industry.
  • April Fools' roundup from ZDNet Australia - this was such a great catch-all story I had to highlight it. Among the pranks it recounted were Google's new feature offering tomorrow's headlines and sports scores today, Virgin Blue airlines offering "standing room only" spots on flights over 2 hours for only $12, and a story run by an Australian radio outlet stating that the Pope would hold a special mass for gays and lesbians.

So...regardless of whether you tricked, or got tricked yourself, it looks like you had lots of good company.

Just curious, did any of you do anything memorable?

3 Comments:

snowelf said...

I didn't do anything, but someone tried to convince me we were having a fire drill at work.

Then the power went out.
For real.
And we lost all our phones.
And our computers.
Oops.
It was some craziness for a minute.

--snow

Rick said...

I got nothin'. We're pretty lame here.

jtj3 said...

Snow what an awful day to have the power go out--you're probably thinking "Is this someone's idea of a joke???" Hopefully you didn't lose any data...

Rick, yeah...I was pretty lame this year myself. I thought about a few things but didn't execute on them. They were all pretty funny in my head, though...