This handout photo -- obtained on April 1, 2010, from the Statens Naturhistoriske Museum -- shows a mermaid skeleton placed on the rock where Copenhagen's famous 'Little Mermaid' statue habitually sits, as an April Fool joke. Calgary Herald file photo.
As a kid, I remember a highlight of the school year being April Fool’s Day. Playing a successful trick on our teacher was simply delightful, with the best April 1 being the year we were in Grade 4. I can’t quite recall how 20 or so of us kids got into our classroom before the teacher did that day, but we did. We took everything from her desk — every book, every paper, every pen — and hid the items throughout the classroom. I remember being amazed at the time that our teacher, Miss Flynn, took the whole thing in stride. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t annoyed. In fact, she had a slight smile on her face as she searched the room for her belongings. Whenever she found something, such as a math book, she’d decide that’s what we were going to study at that moment. In our nine-year-old minds, we were comic geniuses.
This screen grab from a Google web page depicted the April Fool’s joke that alleged Gmail could be controlled by motions and hand movements.
Over the years we realized, however, that there were much more elaborate stunts being performed on April 1. Last year, the most popular hoaxes were false stories that the engagement between Prince William and Kate had been called off. We also heard that billionaire Richard Branson had bought Pluto, that IKEA was making highchairs for dogs, that Groupon acquired the trademark for the day, and that we would now be able to control Gmail with our bodies.
Professor Moublanc, the only member of the of the French General Direction for Alien Research, poses on a “flying saucer” that crash landed in the Space city of Toulouse Theme Parc on March 31, 2010. The professor claimed there were aliens inside. It was an April Fool’s Day joke to draw attention to an exhibit on Extraterrestrials. Calgary Herald file photo.
There’s one organization, the Museum of Hoaxes, that even ranks the best April Fool’s Day tricks of all time. Based on creativity, notoriety and number of people fooled, the museum says the number one April 1 hoax was the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest. A TV news program staged a fake story in 1957 about Swiss families harvesting spaghetti off trees; the spaghetti farmers said this was a bumper crop because the winter had been mild. Number two on the museum’s list was a hoax played by Sports Illustrated in April 1985. It told the story of a baseball pitcher who could throw pitches at 168 mph with complete accuracy, about 65 mph faster than previous record of the day. Other hoaxes on this list include Burger King’s left-handed whopper (designed to be eaten by left-handed people); flying penguins; bra underwires that were causing interference in TV and radio signals; and the fact that Big Ben in London was changing to become a digital clock.
Here’s an archive photo from past April Fool’s Days, right here in Calgary. Cory Dingman went outside his workplace in 1998 and found someone had “shrinkwrapped” his entire car. Calgary Herald file photo.
Here are a few other things you may or may not know about April Fool’s’ Day.
* In some countries, including Canada and Australia, people generally follow the practice of jokes lasting only until noon. In other countries such as the United States, Italy and Japan, the jokes occur all day.
* In France, it’s common practice for a child to paste a picture of a fish on a friend’s back and then yell “April fish,” or as they say in France, “poisson d’avril,” notes Encyclopedia Britannica.
* April Fool’s’ Day dates back hundreds of years, with early stories of hoaxes going back to times of Chaucer and Ancient Rome.
