April Fool's Day Roundup

I really don't like posting on April Fool's Day; people never know whether to take you seriously or not. And I don't like posting jokes anyway. So anyway. Here on the day after April Fool's is a nice roundup of many of the April Fool's day jokes out there complete with links so you can enjoy and chuckle or whatever.

Google -- Google Gulp ( http://www.google.com/googlegulp/ ), a smart drink for smarter searchers. The FAQ is the best part. "The short version is, our brains process data by sending electrical impulses called neurotransmitters between billions of neurons via axons running between synapses, much the way buses travel between stations, or MP3 files travel between felonious suburban teenagers."

Yahoo -- The announcement of "Yahoo Slacker", which you can see at http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000096.html . Hmm, I think I would use this.

Ask Jeeves -- Jeeves announced the Jeeves9000 (beta) complete with movie clips. They get the award for best multimedia: see the announcement with clips at http://blog.ask.com/2005/04/the_future_of_s.html .

MSN -- MSN offers the MSN search spoof at http://www.msnsearchspoof.com/index.aspx . It's a cute idea, but when I look at it I think of a nerd staring at me and saying, "Do-you-want-to-be-funny? I-have-just-read-this-book-called- HOW-TO-BE-FUNNY-and-I-want-to-tell-you-a-joke." Maybe you'll like it better than me.

Of course search engines weren't the only spoofers out there on April 1. NASA did a very cute one of water on Mars ( http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050401.html ), and Wikipedia did a story about their takeover by Britannica. That's at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Britannica_takeover_of_Wikimedia ; my favorite quote is: "A stunned Cats, star of the smash-hit video game Zero Wing, simply shouted, "What you say?!" when he learned of the merger." I'm such a geek.

UC Berkeley had a good roundup of summaries at http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/fool.html , but didn't go all the way and write news stories for each of them. Too bad; I wanted to read about the cats who can open Tupperware containers. You can get a more extensive list of April Fools at http://urgo.org/aprilfools.html .

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