How RSS Has Ruined April Fools Day
April 1, 2008 at 10:27 am by Eric| April fools day is always a bit stressful, but in a fun way. I admit I do live in a slight state of fear that someday someone really will be in trouble on April 1st and my calloused incredulity will offend them deeply. Some of my favorite moments have been the stories I've heard, like when Starbucks announced its plans to create the first coffee pipeline to deliver beans directly to stores, not realizing that it was the first of April. But now that's all ruined. With all my RSS feeds, I've been inundated with stories of the best past April Fools Day pranks (my favorite was Disney's 1998 announcement that thy had purchased MIT and would rename the School of Engineering to the School of Imagineering). And on top of these stories come all the blog posts which are themselves April Fools pranks. Like Virgin and Google teaming up to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Gmail has also added a special new feature today--the ability to send email to the past, very handy. The problem is April Fools Day really only has one shot to catch you. Once you remember what day it is, all the other attempts will fall flat. And when you start your day reading RSS feeds there's really no possibility of ever getting fooled. Too bad, I enjoyed the occasional gotcha. Like when Mark O'Brien called me as his alter ego Michael Ryan and convinced me he needed a website for his class action suit against Ruth's Chris steak house for passing off dyed antelope meat for their steaks. I bought that one for twenty minutes. He had me give a full Newfangled capabilities presentation to him. (Of course I did manage to convince him that Pakistan had Nuked India, but that wasn't on April Fools day so I won't share the details now.) Then again, maybe it hasn't ruined April Fools. Maybe it's just raised the bar. Maybe we now need to take pranking to the next level. We have to assume everyone is aware of what day it is and go so far that we can prank even the suspecting victim. Hmmmm, I better starting planning for next year now. |
Tags: funny
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
