Could have fooled me

Pranks on April Fool’s Day have been commonplace in my life. Though, with the advent of technology, these days, my friends have (thankfully) chosen emails and mobile text messages over the more elaborate pranks we used to play on each other while growing up. So, apart from the usual jokes that filtered in or beeped into my inbox yesterday, the day had ended rather uneventfully.

However, while surfing the internet before going to bed, I came across two hilarious April Fool’s Day pranks – both, amusingly, from the world of journalism – that, if it hadn’t been April Fool’s Day yesterday, could have easily fooled me, and perhaps the rest of the world, into accepting their facts as reality.

The first was a Guardian article announcing Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink – a light-hearted account of how Guardian’s news stories will now be available on a message service. And the second, a Christian Science Monitor story, titled Scientists worldwide admit global warming is a hoax, on how Al Gore and his mantra on global warming have really been fooling us for years.

You can read the stories here and here.

I wish the Indian media had a sense of humour to match these stories.

[Citation: Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink by Rio Palof from The Guardian website dated 1 April 2009; Scientists worldwide admit global warming is a hoax by Eoin O’Carroll from The Christian Science Monitor website dated 1 April 2009.]