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aneye4detail
 Post subject: April Fool's
PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2003 1:33 pm 
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Joined: Thu Feb 06, 2003 1:01 am
Posts: 43
Location: Sacramento
Thought you might like this:
In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement in honor of the tenth anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that then gripped the British tabloids in the following decades.
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gullyj
 Post subject: Re: April Fool's
PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2003 4:27 pm 
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Joined: Fri Jun 21, 2002 12:01 am
Posts: 145
Location: Toronto
My personal favourite was in the seventies when the London Free Press, in southwestern Ontario's snowbelt (it gets hit by the storms coming off the upper Great Lakes before they get to Buffalo) published a full-page April 1 feature on a municipal government plan to enclose the entire city in a transparent dome. The only clue in the article was the architect's surname: Canard<p>This year Toronto newspapers were taken in by a television production company (a real one) that staged a press conference announcing that an old Canadian sitcom -- The Trouble With Tracey -- was being revived. You have to know Canadian television programming to appreciate it. Homegrown sitcoms are worse than anything that could be produced by state television in the nation of Sans Seriffe. The Trouble With Tracey was the absolute worst of a really bad group.
They managed to get the original Tracey to hook up to hug the supposed "new star of the show" for photographers. It was a hoax. Toronto Star published a half-page story and photo. The others fell for it as well.
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