Brain Drippings

I used to like April Fools’ Day when I was a kid. Sure, it was a silly day, and most of the ‘jokes’ were not that funny, but occasionally there was some classic prank that was just awesome and that I still remember 30+ years later.
 
Now I really hate April Fools’ day, and the reason is the Internet. It’s not that the ‘jokes’ on the Internet are not sometimes funny and amusing, it is that the jokes live on long after April, much less April Fools’ Day, has come and gone.
 
Last summer I was involved in an argument on a newsgroup with someone who, it turned out, had read some April Fools’ news story and not realized it was an April Fools’ story. Hah hah, very funny. Except this was June.
 
At one time the top hit on google when searching for “OS X” “Word 5″ was a fake TidBITS story about Microsoft porting the old (last good version) of Word to OS X. Or maybe it was someone else doing a word-alike, I forget. The point is, you could find that story quite easily even when it was no long April 1.
 
And of course, sometimes people only are looking at the short summary on the google page, and not even seeing a date.
 
April Fools’ would be fine were it confined to in-person pranks and transient ‘news’ like newspapers; but when it finds a home on the Internet, it becomes permanent, and that is a problem.
 
Even without the Internet there have been many times were April Fools’ actually led to very real problems. The most famous example might be the “April Fools’ Tsunami” in 1946 in which numerous people died because they thought the warnings were April Fools’ Day pranks.
 
In 2003 a prank story about the death of Bill Gates caused a marked drop in at least one Pacific Rim stock exchange.
 
The 1984 death of Marvin Gaye, who was shot by his father, was widely assumed to be a April Fools’ Day prank.
 
Besides, I’m still waiting for my case of Sugar-Free Radical Google Gulp to show up from 2005!

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