April 01, 2005

Gurious Ceorge My calendar tells me that lots of hilarious hijinks were supposed to happen today. The Age, for example, proclaimed Paris Hilton the new Linux evangelist (actually, I think they were suckered, which is amusing). But tell me, where is teh funnay on April Fools' Day?
  • Penny Arcade has a themed comic, and Slashdot has its usual assortment of relatively lame articles that are meant to be high-larious. TidBITS, a Macintosh oriented newletter, had some jokes that got me excited about an upcoming release of OS X, but I read a little further and remembered what day it was. Hopefully someone else has found something that's, indeed, funny.
  • The Register - Apple founder Jobs joins IKEA
  • Actually, TopFive's Amazing but True Facts is a great thing to forward to all your friends. I've been considering doing something like this for years, but when it's already available, hardly seems worth the trouble.
  • fark, homestarrunner, and IMAO all have gag pages up. How come metafilter stopped doing them? I still remember they're google spoof. Aaaaah.
  • guh? my linky's didn't work? my html was ok, methought. hmmm. I always have trouble with links here. sigh. test? aaah, space sensitive. I see.
  • I think the motley fool had a nice take on this day of gaggery too. And my link should work!
  • thinkgeek has some great April Fools products.
  • Also, See this thread for a couple of good ones from the makers of Google.
  • NASA's astronomy picture of the day: Water found on Mars...
  • I just hope that everyone remembers these next week when people stumble on them and post them as real news. That's why I HATE April Fool's day in the internets. People make up joke stories and then don't take them down and so weeks afterward there will be links to these stories or google will index them. Stop the madness!!!!
  • that top five list is interesting, but i'd need to know more about how they "verified" it -- and who was doing the verifying -- before i forwarded it. here's all it says about who "they" are... TopFive consists of one moderator and over 500 hand-picked comedy writers. Every day a different topic is sent to the writers, they send back their ideas, and the moderator compiles the best ones into a finished list. so, fine, the "facts" aren't true. or are they? the real truth is tough enough to face nowadays without trying to figure out what's comedy and what's fact.
  • SideDish, every one of those top fives are BS. I think the funiest one is "Female black cats can actually see their shadows at night."
  • and this: "A bad case of laryngitis forced Abraham Lincoln to lip-sync the Gettysburg Address. The speech was actually delivered by an aide hidden beneath the stage."
  • so what is Fake Ghostlike Photons an anagram of? I tried the internet anagram server, but there are just wayyyyy too many permutations to weed thru. The best I could come up with was "The Halo of Thinkgeek posts" Anyone?
  • never mind, got it, and feel stupid.
  • Dude, if you got, you have to tell. You were asking us, now you're secretive?
  • The fool has thinkgeek? Thinkgeek has the fool? Think the fool has geek?
  • yes indeed i was, knick, just because it's so obvious. Sorry to be a cock-bong-tease. ummm... spoiler alert(i guess)? shop at thinkgeek fools!
  • Maybe it's: Fools shop at thinkgeek!
  • The girls at Go Fug Yourself have a new project.
  • I read this over my morning coffee. (Registration or Bugmenot required.) The picture that accompanied it was horrifying. Be thankful only the text is available.
  • Ninja Burger has been taken over by pirates today.
  • I burst out laughing when I got to work and saw gmail's signin page. "A google approach to math". The best part of it is they're (mostly) serious. A fantastic response to yahoo's announcement they were matching gmail's 1G storage: "Top this, biatch!"
  • anyone hear this year's NPR contribution yet? Last year's story made me do a spit take in my car.
  • See, planet 4 and Mr K illustrate why declined languages are just inherently better. Let's just forget about all that crazyness when you can't tell what bloody case the word is because 1/2 the cases are exactly alike. No, I'm not struggling with my Latin homework, whatever gave you that idea?
  • Here is a good list.
  • Jeez, you youngsters, If Rosemary Woodhouse had had to rely on her computer for anagrams, , she'd. she'd. um. She'd be dead! Yeah! She'd be dead. And there would be no suspense! And little Adrian Castevet (Jr.) would never have peaked his little slit-eyes out on the Upper West Side. She used a Scrabble board. Scrabble board.
  • Snopes has a list of today's April Fool's news stories from around the world in their "What's New" section. (Sorry, I'd link but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Ahem.)
  • I hate soccer/football, but this is some really big news!!!
  • I'm a volunteer driver for the Canadian Cancer Society and one of my regulars today told me on the way there that he was going to tell his doctors and nurses that his chief oncologist just discovered he was misdiagnosed initially and that all he has is a bad case of pumpkin fever. I hope it went well for him.
  • One of the best pranks I saw today was pulled by the guys at Overclocked Remix. They changed the whole design of the site to pretend they have "teamed" with "the Antichrist" of videogames, Electronic Arts and from now one they would only publish EA game remixes. The site was full with spoofs of common EA catchphrases and such. They even made two EA game remixes (one fake and one real) to celebrate. To bad everything came down when a (very real and scary) cease & desist order from EA made them remove everything. Including the quite funny remixes. The amount of changes and custom designs implied this particular prank was cooking from months back. To bad it couldn't last more than a few hours.
  • To bad I couldn't write "too bad" right, twice.
  • Yah, that really was two bad.
  • GramMa, that was to die for.