Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time

[elehhhhna]

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/

#4: The Taco Liberty Bell
In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called up the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell is housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed that it was all a practical joke a few hours later. The best line inspired by the affair came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale, and he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold, though to a different corporation, and would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

[bookman]

1. Humor from the Press Secretary

Those days are over.

[skylarmae]

3. I totally agree

Those days are over, over and gone
No more laughing, only horror and scorn
Ole georgie porgie’ll be gone soon, I pray
So save smiles and laughter for another day.

[TheDebbieDee]

6. Georgie may be gone, but......

he and his group may be replaced by someone who even worse!

[AllegroRondo]

2. Similar one - St Louis sold the Gateway Arch

to McDonalds - they wanted to build a second one next to it and paint them both yellow.

[rkc3]

4. My favorites - to do on your RW neighbors.

1. Hose clamp a bicycle inner tube filled with baby powder to the muffler of your least favorite car enthusiast. The car sounds like shit as the exhaust fills up the inner tube. The heat expands the tube to the point where it explodes filling the air with powder - it literally looks like the car has died.

2. Fill a capsule (like a Contact pill) with RIT dye and put it in the shower head. Works well in college dorms. The hot water from the shower melts the capsule and sends the dye onto your victim. Usually washes off in a day or four.

3. Write obscenities in your meighbor's lawn with a combination of lime and fertilizer. Neighbor comes home, sees the obscenity, and hoses it off - it either burns the words into the lawn or makes them greener than the rest of the lawn. Takes weeks to correct the problem.

I'd consider moving after trying 1 or 3 in your own neighborhood.

[Speck Tater]

9. While in high school ...

We emptied a large bottle of dishwashing detergent into a recirculating water fountain in the garden of a local cemetery. The pond overflowed with suds that bubbled, foamed and expanded faster than "The Blob", till it looked like the whole area had gotten a heavy snowfall, which wouold be pretty rare for Los Angeles.

[BuyingThyme]

5. Terrance & Phillip

(sp)

[Maple]

7. #42

#42: Canadian Finance Minister Quits to Breed Cows and Ducks

is from this site:

http://www.bourque.org/

We're waiting to see if he pulls another one this year.

[cynatnite]

8. Love the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest story

Thanks for the site! Good stuff!

[htuttle]

10. I got fooled by this one hook, line and sinker

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/tall-tales/antarctic-ice.html



Hell, they even had a picture!

In its April, 1995 issue Discover Magazine announced that Dr. Aprile Pazzo, a noted wildlife biologist, had found a fascinating new Antarctic species: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These bizarre creatures were each about half a foot long, very light, and had a bony plate attached to their head that could become burning hot, allowing them to bore tunnels through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins. Packs of them would melt the ice beneath a penguin causing it to sink into the slush, at which point the borers would surround the hapless creature and consume it.

Dr. Pazzo discovered the borers by chance as a result of their predatory nature. While studying a group of penguins, she noticed one frightened member of the group rapidly sinking into the ice. When she pulled the hapless creature out of the fast-growing slush pool that surrounded it, she found a host of small creatures attached to it. These creatures turned out to be the Hotheaded Ice Borers.

After careful research of this fascinating new species, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. "To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin," the article quoted her as saying.

One of my co-workers spoke Italian, and realized immediately that the author's name, "Aprile Pazzo" meant 'April Fool'.

I was the laughing stock of my department at work for months after this one.. :eyes:

[Hugin]

12. *heh*

You weren't the only one tuttle...

I didn't get as far as sharing it around work tho.
I noticed Philippe Poisson (a famous French Comedian)
had disappeared in 1837... Long before most Antarctic
Expeditions.

We can be forgiven though... That was 4 years B.G. (Before
Google). ;)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

11. The Cornell Daily Sun pulled off a great one in 1972

You first need to know that it was delivered under dorm room doors at about 7AM, so often people weren't quite awake when they read it. You also need to know that coed dorms had been in existence for only about five years. You also need to know that Cornell is partly private and partly funded by the state of New York.

It was not April Fools' Day, but fall alumni weekend, which had somehow become a traditional time for hoaxes.

The paper appeared under the door with the screaming headline: COED DORMS BANNED:STUDENTS MUST MOVE. The story said that some legislatures had discovered a law that said that no state money could be used for immoral purposes. Therefore, coed dorms were banned at all schools supported by New York State. There followed a list of which dorms would become all-male and which would become all-female. (Mine was going to be all-female.) Students were supposed to report to a certain building before noon in order to get their new room assignments.

That's what tipped me off. The building that students were supposed to report to was a tiny one, certainly not capable of holding the thousands of dorm residents on campus.

But some of my fellow dorm residents took longer to figure it out. As I headed down the hall to my class, one of my dorm neighbors came out of her room looking glum. "Did you see the paper?" she asked. "It just won't be the same without the guys here."