Would you believe me if I said to you, today I killed a man?
No?
Well, it was worth a shot.
How about if I told you the release date of A Dance With Dragons had been brought forward a fortnight?
Yeah. As if.
I'm all swings and roundabouts on April Fool's Day. On the one hand, what a complete and utter waste of time it is. Every single story that breaks you have to take with a grain of salt, and some years, some pretty big news gets buried in all the nonsense.
Oh how I wish that new Angry Robot Imprint were real...
But scrolling through all the jokes in my RSS reader this morning - the good, the bad and the butt-ugly - I wasn't taken in by a one, and I got to wondering, have we reached boiling point on April Fools' Day pranks? Because I can't for the life of me remember when I was last made a fool of, so much as made to wish it were the 2nd already, what with the widespread silliness.
So do tell: when was the last time an April Fools' Day prank got the better of you?
And please, feel free to wax reminiscent... remind me of the good old days, when the grass was greener and the other side wasn't just a Chillis song. What the best trick you ever fell for? What was the worst?
Well this wasn't so much a prank played on me, as a prank people thought we played on them, but when I called people last year to tell them Emma was born, they didn't believe me at first.
ReplyDeleteThe best prank I ever fell for was one by the Jeugdjournaal (the Dutch version of Newsround), when in 1993 they announced on their evening news that the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities had reanimated the heart of a mummy. I thought that was just the coolest thing (I was also 13 at the time) and only realised later that that wouldn't be possible in any way, shape or form.
My favourite website (The GIA) closed its doors on April 1st, 2002. I was so sure that it was an April Fools Day joke that I emailed them to laugh about it.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't a joke. I was sad. Very, very sad.