Fink's Links #58

It having just recently passed I thought I would make the links this week April Fools related (look, a theme!) -

So lets start with a few of the April fools jokes from this year (I've already shared the BMW magnetic beam one with you), but did you see the Guardian announcing that they were switching everything over to Twitter (including their entire archive of stories stretching back to 1821?

A very nasty blogger in Japan ran a high profile piece saying that the latest and greatest Dragon Quest game had been released early, cue loads of frantic Japanese fans rushing to stores, their only reward being their own red faces (trust me, it's a very big deal over there)...!

Macworld announced that Steve Jobs was going to be taking part in the US version of Dancing on Ice...

The dogs trust pretended that a doggy dietary breakthrough resulted in the unpleasant aroma of K9 droppings being transformed into a pleasant waft of roses (if only)...

Oh and of course, Wikipedia removing "Gullible", suggesting instead that you may want to read an article on "Gullibility"....

None of these, of course, rank anywhere near these classics from years gone by, starting with a few *real* news stories that people *thought* were hoaxes thanks to the date, in April 2004 Gmail's launch was widely believed to be a joke (Google have a bit of a reputation for pranks), their cheeky behavior caught them out again on April 1, 2007, when Google's NYC office staff were alerted that a snake kept on an engineer's desk had managed to escape and was on the loose somewhere in the building, an internal email stated that "the timing…could not be more awkward" (but it was perfectly true)...!

Sir Patrick Moore fooled hundreds of listeners to his Radio 2 show back in 1976 when he announced that a strange gravitational effect would allow people to experience a floating sensation if they jumped in the air at precisely the correct moment (lots of people rang in to say that they had indeed felt the phenomenon)...

In 1965 the BBC pretended that they had perfected Smell-o-vision and asked viewers to join in with a trial broadcast, prompting huge numbers of people to call up and confirm that they had detected the broadcast odor and the trial was a success!

In 1962 Sweden's only TV channel fooled *thousands* of it's viewers into thinking they could convert their TV into a colour model by cutting up a pair of stocking and gluing them to the screen...

Anyway, if you like this kind of thing then the Museum of Hoaxes has (as you would expect) a rather longer list than mine for further reading...have a good weekend!