April Fool's!
Well, turns out some people can still be tricked. I figured it wasn't possible, until I posted yesterday that we weren't getting any more Lost, assuming everyone would see right through it, and then came back to an inbox full of panic (sorry). Meanwhile, my husband, a golf writer and the "inside guy" on a lot of golf breaking news, saw a story on a golf blog yesterday morning, and began scrambling calling sources to confirm the report, only to discover it was a hoax. (In the end, those sources ended up fielding calls all day to diffuse the situation... that blogger was GOOD.)
But I just discovered my favourite of yesterday's hoaxes. A news site reported that Intellipedia, the internal "wikipedia" for the White House, had been hacked by none other than Dick Cheney, who began entering false data about Knight Rider and Buffy. For the latter, he was cataloguing everyone's favourite episodes, and said his personal favourite was "Once More With Feeling": "The juxtaposition of Buffy's emotional dependence on her mentor and the interpretive dance number was deeply moving," Cheney said. "Plus there was some serious blood and gore toward the end."Brilliant. You can see the entire hoaxy goodness here. What was your favourite (or least favourite) online hoax yesterday?
The Polaris convention newsletter reported that they had booked a Doctor Hu guest. A dentist named Doctor Hu.
ReplyDeleteYours was good too.
I played one on the students of my Literary Theory class ... I handed out the rubric for the final exam, which contained all the potential essay questions. All the questions were INSANELY hard -- things I wouldn't ask a grad student to deal with, let alone a second-year English class -- and as we went through them, I could see faces going ashen in panic.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I let them off the hook with an "April fool!" and then distributed the real exam rubric. Cruel? Perhaps. But I was amused. :-)