April Fool's Day wrap-up

April 1st usually brings a bevy of hoaxes, pranks, stunts, and gags to magazines, newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet. But this year seemed to be slim pickings. Maybe the coincidence of Palm Sunday and April Fool’s Day threw a few people off. Maybe people feel less like joking these days. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough. But from my collection of blog links I was able to glean these stories:

Gareth Suddes at Another Chance to See posted a BBC interview with a primate specialist and a talking gorilla named Gerald.

Todd in Hell’s Kitchen (formerly Mr. H.K.) posted a gag headline about Bush and Cheney resigning and Speaker Pelosi being sworn in as President. (I was hoping he would post a gag quote on his “And I Quote...” Blog along the lines of “Dammit, I hate being touched! Doesn’t anybody respect personal space?” [Leo Buscaglia] or “Wow, that tie really doesn’t go with that jack- oh, CRAP!” [Helen Keller] ...but funnier.)

Gort at Gort42 posted two YouTube videos in a post titled “Klaatu barada nikto or So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.” For the uninitiated, “Klaatu barada nikto” was a shutdown message for the giant robot Gort in the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, and “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” was the final message given by the dolphins to humanity just before they (the dolphins) abandoned Earth prior to the arrival of the Vogon Constructor Fleet in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Is this just an April Fool’s Day post exploiting the “Gort” and “42” from the blog’s title (42 is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, according to the Hitchhiker’s Guide books), or is Gort bidding adieu to the world of blogging? I sure hope it’s not the latter.

My own automatic blog-generating software experienced a major breakdown on April 1.* (If you can’t see and/or translate the Webdings** at the end, just highlight the two lines of invisible text underneath.) But then I had to go and spoil my own joke by actually posting something I thought was important!

In an act apparently unrelated to April Fool’s Day, Bill renamed his Industrial Blog to Bill’s Writer’s Notes and then re-renamed it to Bill’s Notes. The actual address remains the same, however.

* Adam Felber actually did this same sort of joke in his book Schrodinger’s Ball which was released last August, but I originally thought of doing this last April 2. Since Adam’s book had already been in the can for quite some time at that point, he really did think of it first!

** Dammit, Firefox doesn't recognize Webdings (WEBDINGS)! So anyone reading this in Firefox just has plain old English text at the end! Maybe I should have stuck with the invisible text only!