Beware the Calends of April

[kevin_standlee]

Because I don't think everyone reading this is also reading debgeisler's journal (although you should), here's a link to the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time.

Thanks to fine hoaxes like these, no sane person will issue a legitimate news story on the first day of April. Every now and then, I've see groups in Fandom forget the date and issue a real announcement that day. Sometimes the announcements are so odd that people assume that they must be hoaxes.

Comments

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

When I was in college, so this would have been 1985-1989 -- and I'm pretty sure it wasn't 1989, the University of New Mexico Daily Lobo produced their annual hoax filled edition with the note that one story was real. A couple of days later they had to run an apology to the subject of the one real story, since nobody recognized it as a hoax.

Another year, purely by coincidence, April 1st happened to be the day that Bloom County featured the revealing of the Billy and the Boinger's world tour: one stop at the Motel 6 in Albuquerque; just a few blocks North of the UNM campus. A major front page article was on the upcoming concert.

Of course this also reminds me of the guy I worked with for a few years in college. He was the ad manager for the Lobo, and got the idea to run a page of vintage ads for existing businesses on April 1st, and did very well by both the paper and the businesses.