I love Google's April Fool's day pranks. They're so techy and shiny.

That regfiter one, however hits a little too close to one of my worst paranoid fears; the squicky monkey part of my brain that is sure someone in the white House is actually thinking along these lines. So i give it a nervous chuckle and move along.

Posted April 1, 2006 9:57 AM by Keith Kisser

Register, not regfiter. Need more coffee...

Posted April 1, 2006 9:58 AM by Keith Kisser

NPR's traditional April Fool's item, this morning was the i-Bod.

Posted April 1, 2006 10:10 AM by Fragano Ledgister

Thank you for finding all of these! Woohoo! I plan to share them with all of my favorite people.

Steven List
Co-Founder, Back Of The Room

Posted April 1, 2006 10:58 AM by Steven List

The BBC link is to last year's list: I can't find this year's list of true stories, but here's their roundup of fakes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4867512.stm

Posted April 1, 2006 11:24 AM by Dan MacQueen

http://www.sfsite.com has actually run an April Fool's piece this year...

Posted April 1, 2006 11:50 AM by Evil Monkey

The Bush-third-term story is in the best tradition of April Fools, because you believe it at first - it's only too probable - and then the penny drops.

A while ago the (London) Times ran a very realistic story that Belgium was to split along the language line (Wallonia joining France and Flanders joining the Netherlands), with lots of circumstantial detail, so that you didn't get it until nearly the end of the story.

Posted April 1, 2006 1:09 PM by John Stanning

The Cool Tools mailing list (Charles Platt & Kevin Kelly) has a great list of products in today's mailing. I was totally falling for the initial product; it wasn't until I got to the Eastern European sneakers with the semiconductor "gravity shielding device" in the heels (which only work properly if you top them off with liquid nitrogen) that I went "wait a minute..."

Unfortunately it's not on their website so I don't have an URL to post. First product writeup follows..

Turn Yourself into a Flashlight
Firefly Liquid

This weird product is being marketed as a "spooky" toy for kids but I find it useful where I live out in the sticks, far from any urban lighting. The liquid is almost colorless but when you spread it on your skin it reacts with the air to form the same kind of chemical that enables fireflies to glow. The label notes that although the liquid is based on the firefly compound, it is made in a laboratory and is not made by killing millions of fireflies! Either way it is much brighter than luminous paint. It emits a pale yellow glow that is about as bright as a keychain flashlight.
I like to put it on the palms of my hands, so that on moonless nights I can find my way through the land around my home in the wilderness just by holding my hands up and turning them from side to side. I have also experimented putting it on my cheeks so that the landscape is illuminated wherever I turn my head.

Firefly Liquid
$39

...

Posted April 1, 2006 1:23 PM by Clifton Royston

Here's Fermilab Today, our daily newsletter. I suppose of the gags are funnier if you work here.

Although I was left wondering if it really is National Theory Appreciation Day.

Posted April 1, 2006 1:34 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

I am not 100% sure this one is an April Fools story, but I suspect it should be on the BBC list of stories that looks like jokes but aren't:

Condi Rice: Don't take Iraq errors 'literally'
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/04/01/uk.rice.straw/

BLACKBURN, England (CNN) -- One day after Condoleezza Rice said the United States made possibly "thousands" of tactical mistakes in the war against Iraq, the secretary of state says she was speaking "figuratively, not literally."
...

Riiggghhhtt... The war was just meant to be a metaphor. No, not a metaphor, a pun.

Posted April 1, 2006 1:44 PM by Clifton Royston

Since it's not just AFD, but the 30th anniversary of the incorporation of Apple, Chuq explains what he does over there.

Posted April 1, 2006 3:37 PM by Bill Humphries

Snrrrrkk!!! Very geeky April fools:

FreeBSD 2.2.9 release announcement

It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 2.2.9-RELEASE. This release is the culmination of SEVENTY-SEVEN months of tireless work by the FreeBSD developers, users, their children, and their pets. Significant features in this release:

- - XFree86 3.3.3, the industry leader in support for cutting edge PCI graphics adapters and 2D acceleration.
- - The 8GB barrier in IDE drive sizes has finally been broken. The wd(4) driver now supports unimaginable sizes of 137GB on a single drive!
- - Support for all of the latest high-speed FAST-WIDE (20MB/s) SCSI-2 controllers.
- - The Linux emulator is now able to run Quake2 out-of-the-box.

A full description of the release can be found here:
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/2.2.9-RELEASE/README.TXT
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/2.2.9-RELEASE/RELNOTES.TXT

...

Posted April 1, 2006 3:40 PM by Clifton Royston

Alas, it's not available outside the corporate firewall, but Intel put together an April Fool's corporate webcast (announced and scheduled just like other occasional executive briefings) about the Apple/Intel merger - the new logo to be "mactel". Among my favorite bits were the new dress code of black turtlenecks for everyone, including over the "bunny suits" that the fab workers wear, and the new corporate acquisition plans targeting other fruits - RIM, for the Blackberry, and the European telecom company Orange, to begin with.

Posted April 1, 2006 3:56 PM by oliviacw

That BBC one is from last year...

Posted April 1, 2006 4:08 PM by Kevin Marks

My favorite is the one I helped put together, but I feel safe in mentioning it because my contributions were just a few of the 300 pieces posted at http://www.teevee.org/

Teevee cranks out great AFD stuff year after year.

Posted April 1, 2006 4:17 PM by Laurel Krahn

Yay! Link-love from tnh! (I wrote the Lebanon story). My favorite April Fools day hoax came a few days early, when MEMRI got caught out by an Arabic station broadcasting a fake interview with Saddam Hussein.

Posted April 1, 2006 10:36 PM by Tom Scudder

The Star trek authors are getting a bit rowdy over here. With gratuitous shots at Tor for good measure.

Posted April 2, 2006 1:25 AM by Glenn Hauman

I have suspicions about that story from Locus.

Posted April 2, 2006 3:31 AM by Dave Bell

One of my favourites is that "MAKE" magazine is to be rebranded as "BUY".

Worth heading over to slashdot. They've removed their cute pink theme, unfortunately, but the posts are still there, along with links to a lot of other pranks.

Posted April 2, 2006 3:54 AM by Jules

The TeeVee folx turn out great AFD stuff, every year.

The 24 article is to die for.

Posted April 2, 2006 4:16 AM by cgeye

It isn't actually an April Fool thing -- except for the editorial -- but Eileen Gunn has broken radio silence with an unexpected 1 April update of The Infinite Matrix.

(Including a new instalment of my own Runcible column. Oh God! That makes me a comment spammer. Sorry about that ...)

Posted April 2, 2006 6:58 AM by Dave Langford

Bush preps historic Third Term - memo
It's war. It's a 'Continuity Presidency'

Why does this seem more like a dark prophecy than an AFD joke...
shudder

-=Jeff=-

Posted April 2, 2006 7:48 AM by JKRichard

Andrew Rilstone takes the piss (so to speak) out of C. S. Lewis scholarship.

Posted April 2, 2006 9:39 AM by Tom Scudder

My favorite was the expiration date on the green cheese moon. And by the way, I was briefly a published Tor author in an alternate reality.

Posted April 2, 2006 4:16 PM by Karen Funk Blocher

Damn ThinkGeek. I still want my Easy Bake Oven internal drive.

Posted April 2, 2006 7:40 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Oh, good, it's "good" again. Mysterious East and all that. And [bleep] the salt, I will have the cowboy leg.

Posted April 3, 2006 3:11 AM by John M. Ford observes ideographic spam on

That caffeine inhaler would sell!

Posted April 3, 2006 10:45 AM by P J Evans

The library blog community had a lovely one: http://machinereadable.blogspot.com/2006/04/cure-for-information-overload.html

Posted April 3, 2006 4:09 PM by Janet Croft

Janet: The cure is an infinite loop?

Posted April 3, 2006 4:38 PM by P J Evans

Well, actually -- the closed loop DOES limit the amount of information you have to deal with drastically! It sure cured MY post-meeting overload feeling.

Posted April 3, 2006 5:50 PM by Janet Croft

I want some of that firefly glow stuff. For Halloween. I'm going to rub it on my cats and watch the neighborhood kids freak.

Posted April 4, 2006 7:55 AM by bonniers

That desktop tanning center is hilarious. I especially like that it comes with "eyeball cover thingys" ha.

Posted April 4, 2006 11:21 AM by Dog tired

Hey, Teresa, congrats on getting quoted by the Washington Post this morning!!! An excellent quote to be repeated.

Posted April 4, 2006 12:27 PM by Laurie Mann

They'll still never top Give Piece a Chance.

Posted April 5, 2006 12:07 AM by mythago

I just happened upon a lovely hoax in the online version of Archaeology Magazine -- on the role of zombies in ancient history.

Posted April 5, 2006 11:57 AM by Faren Miller

A bit late, but:

April Fools Sushi.

Posted April 14, 2006 6:00 PM by Bruce Arthurs

spam, spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam

Posted May 1, 2006 2:54 AM by protected static sees comment spam