Can anyone find a more trivial sounding headline than this?

Bizarrely it doesn't appear to be an April Fools' Day joke, though that was my first thought.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

!

Google has announced a new feature allowing users to access websites by scent. BobHale's last post is at the top of their search engine since it's a real stinker.

Twitter also announced that they are going to a two-tier system under which there will be no charge for using consonants but adding vowels to your messages will cost five dollars a month. I guess it was inevitable.

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It really is a slow news day. The local TV station ran this old British newsreel describing the annual Italian spaghetti harvest. link

Where were the Pastafarians protesting the desecration of their god?

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
It really is a slow news day. The local TV station ran this old British newsreel describing the annual Italian spaghetti harvest. link

I remember seeing it when it was first broadcast. (That gives away my age. ) At that time spaghetti wasn't all that common a food in Britain and what there was available generally came in cans and swimming in "tomato sauce". It's hardly surprising that most people had no idea of the provenance of spaghetti. It was one of the most successful April Fool's gags in the UK ever.

Geoff,

In 1957 no-one here had heard of Rastafarians or pasta (yet). We'd heard of spaghetti and macaroni, but hardly anyone called them pasta, or even connected them (other than being "foreign"); spaghetti when raw came in cans, as I said, and macaroni came in hard crunchy sticks.

I found several more modern attempts at spaghetti harvest humor on YouTube but none could match that BBC original. I also so it when it was first telecast here in the previous century.

Our local zoo had an amazing animal called naked mole rats. Ugliest creature I've ever seen. They live underground in beehive-like communities with a queen and drones. Since they are under desert sands, they don't need hair but require lots of heat to survive.
So we were not taken in by an article in Discover magazine on April 1 several years ago announcing the discovery of the Antatctic species of naked mole rats that lived under ice and bored tunnels through snow drifts. But a lot of readers fell for it.

I didn't hear about any April Fool's jokes this year. Did any of you?

Yes. Several papers and sites have round-ups. Google tried one.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
I didn't hear about any April Fool's jokes this year. Did any of you?

Or did you?
Maybe you just figured they were real...

BobHale may appreciate this one. Link

quote:

The Great Language Change Hoax

Ir'a onlY hoax if you son'r believe in it.

And who is this "B. O. Wolf"? Any relation to Virginia?

Oh, those are great. I especially loved the Google Nose one!

quote:

Or did you?
Maybe you just figured they were real...

You think I'm gullible, don't you?

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Oh, those are great. I especially loved the Google Nose one!

quote:

Or did you?
Maybe you just figured they were real...

You think I'm gullible, don't you?

Well... you are a self-proclaimed literalist and that might mean you take all the stories in the papers at their literal face-value.

Ah, yes, that's true. I am a real Amelia Bedelia, you are correct. However, given that, I am the biggest April Fooler in our family. I had my daughter calling and emailing all her friends one year when I told her our popular mall had gone bankrupt and was closing. I did feel a little bad about it when I found out she was emailing friends in Boston and LA! I didn't think she'd take it that seriously.

Back in my basic training days in the Army, I was in radio school. One of the NCO instructors was not well-liked and the subject of practical jokes if we could get away with them. The classroo had radios around three sides and the teacher's desk was at the front. I could whistle and sound like a Morse code signal, so I would hide behind one of the other students and begin to whistle a Morse message. The instructor, without interrupting his lesson, would begin at the first radio and hit all the switches. In those days, there were many buttons and knobs so it took several seconds to make sure everything was off. He'd then go to the next radio and continue the process. At some point, I'd stop and he'd go to the frnt of the classroom, still talking.

After a few minutes, I'd whistle again. He'd think one of the other radios that hadn't been checked was still on and would start the rounds again. I did this sucdessfully several different times. Even when he'd gone completely around the room and shut off all the radios, you could still fool him since he could never be sure he hadn't accidentally turned one on, thinking it was in another position, and we all hoped he'd go crazy some day and destroy the internal machines.

We were discussing practical jokes on April 1 and several YouTube "pranks" were mentioned. Most of the "pranks" involved actual physical damage to the recipient of the joke, like the man awakened in bed who jerks awake and hits his head on the end table they've placed above him on the bed. Those jokers should be executed. If someone is physically in danger, it's not a joke.

Oops didn't notice this had become an AprilFool-sighting thread. This was the local gag in my onetime stomping grounds. Particularly silly to us oldsters; in our day there'd been no good method of figuring out how deep our 40-miX2-mi lake was, & word had it that curious scientists had drowned trying. (Now it's known to be about 435ft at its deepest).

Here is one I thought very funny but at first might be true.

Also, two Florida disc jockeys have been suspended from their radio station and arrested by police for warning residents that vast amounts of dihydrogen oxide was being pumped out of faucets all over the state. Panic ensued and police and DEM officials were not pleased. That's the chemical formula for water. Unfortunately for the radio guys, there is a state law making it a criminal offense to make any comments disparaging water quality to the public.

Those are funny!

I agree, proof, that injury doesn't make it a joke. There's also a gray line, I think, when the joke makes the person feel bad. I stopped doing April fools jokes on my daughter after one where I told her someone had given me a puppy and I wondered if she'd like it. I really didn't think she would...but she desperately wanted it. I felt so bad.