Beware the first of April

"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year." - Mark Twain

Forget the ides of March; most of us are better warned to beware the first of April - the day when it is perfectly reasonable to wonder if your salt shaker is filled with sugar, or if that unclaimed dollar bill on the floor might be attached to a fishing line. And while there isn't a great deal of creativity in setting someone's clocks ahead a few hours to make them think they're late for work, history has provided us with hoaxes (on April 1 and throughout the year) that must be given their due for both impact and ingenuity. This week, in recognition of this annual observance of recreational fraud, a few sites that pay tribute to some of the greats. (But if you're hatching any plans of your own for this Saturday, remember the words of Hippocrates and "First, do no harm.")

Founded in 1997 (if we can believe the webmaster) the Museum of Hoaxes is the logical first stop for this week's tour - with its immense collection of deception dating back to before the invention of the word "hoax" in the 1700s. Averaging close to a million page views per month, the Museum is clearly not just for April Fool's, but it can be safely assumed that the traffic is up a little around this time of year.

With its home page set up as a blog, the Museum of Hoaxes dedicates the center of its layout to real and unreal events of current interest - from leprechaun sightings in Alabama and a denominationallychallenged counterfeiter (found in possession of 250 billion-dollar bills), to a recent theory about the Loch Ness monster, and an Everest expedition mounted by an 85-year-old and her dachshund. Along either side of the main content are listings of various subsections of content, while the top of the page holds a Google-powered keyword search and links to the site's feature categories.

The most important of these features (at least for the purposes of this article) is the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of all time - with the No. 1 entry being a 1957 BBC television report that convinced thousands of Britons that spaghetti grew on trees in Switzerland. (The BBC has a page of its own dedicated to this famous fraud - complete with a low-quality RealVideo copy of the original broadcast, and collected memories of viewers taken in by the story.) Other notable efforts in the Top 100 list include Sports Illustrated's biography of the too-good-to-be-true Sidd Finch and his 168 m.p.h. fastball, Burger King's attempt to corner the southpaw market with the introduction of the left-handed Whopper, and New York's annual April Fool's Day Parade. (Now in its 21st year, the parade doesn't actually exist, but always manages to attract members of the media.)

Page: 1 | 2