This year's best April Fool's Day stories

None of the publications I work on ran an April Fool's Day story today, but here are some others I enjoyed:


Your Local Guardian: 'Croydon to be renamed in £50m scheme'

Guardian.co.uk: 'Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink'

Diss Express: 'Obama to visit Diss'

Buyitdirect.co.uk: 'Free funerals from Laptops Direct'


If you have any other favourites from this year, let me know and I'll happily add them to the list. Your contributions so far (thank you!):

EcoAsia: 'Interstellar spacecraft to be TV powered'

Writer's Digest: 'Announcing a Brand-New Market Book!'

The topic of the Writer's Digest story is a (fictitious) book called Plagiarist's Market, and the ISBN given for that book actually belongs to a rhyming picture book called April Foolishness. A nice touch there.


Update 8.40pm: I've spotted another hoax, this time on YouTube. The site has a "new layout" which displays video clips upside down, as per this screengrab:

Click for a larger version of this image

And rather amusingly, all of today's 'Spotlight Videos' on YouTube show things that in some way relate to the theme of upside-downness, from bats to handstands.

I do, however, note that the site isn't displaying its adverts upside down. April Fool's is all very well, unless it upsets the advertisers...

YouTube: 'Your New Viewing Experience'

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try this one:

NASA Space craft to be powered by old TV sets

http://www.eco-asia.info/content/en/sp-crt-rocket

RJ said...

Writer's Digest had this to offer: http://blog.writersdigest.com/norules/Announcing+A+BrandNew+Market+Book.aspx

Apus said...

The manager of our local post office here on the Isle of Wight put up a poster on 1 April announcing the launch of a 65p coin.

And to remind us that fact's often sillier than fiction, our local rag has been busy calming fears inspired by a story in the Mail on Sunday, quoting a Home Office official as saying ID cards would be needed on Isle of Wight Ferries.

tellurian said...

The origin of the phrase 'happy as larry'.