Marcu 30, 2005 : Friday is April Fool’s Day.

Did you know on April Fool’s Day...

Compiled by Man-Sum Yau Production Manager

The BBC television program Panorama ran a famous hoax (in 1957), showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. A lot of people wanted spaghetti trees of their own.!

e In 1962, the only Swedish television channel convinced many viewers that they could convert their black and white TV into a coloured one by simply stretching a nylon over the screen. (Colour television transmission didn’t start until Apr. 1, 1970 in Sweden.)

e The Dutch television news once reported that the famous Tower of Pisa

had fallen over. Many shocked and even mourning people contacted the

television studio.!

e A Vancouver radio station successfully tricked many listeners into believing that the space shuttle had to do an emergency landing at the Vancouver International Airport.'

e In 1977, the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven page supplement in honour of the tenth anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi colon shaped islands. The Guardian’s phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. (Sans seriffe is a reference to sans-serif, a family of typefaces.)

e In 1998, Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left handed Americans. Thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich (or the right-handed version if they were right-handed).

e —_ Readers of the Boston Morning Globe in 1915 could have purchased their papers for half the cost on April Fool’s Day if they had been alert. The price listed on the front page had been lowered from two cents per copy to one cent. But almost 60,000 copies of the paper were sold before anyone noticed the unannounced price change (which turned out _ to be the responsibility of a mischievous production worker who had surreptitiously inserted the lower value at the last minute as the paper went to print).

Sources-check out

hs. -//www.answers.com/topic/april fool s ae http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/P90/

for more April Fool’s Day hoaxes.

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