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April Fools’ Day or All Fools’ Day, although not a holiday in its own right, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbors, or sending them on fool’s errand, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible. Traditionally, in some countries, the jokes only last until noon: someone who plays a trick after noon is called an “April Fool”. Elsewhere, such as in Ireland, France, and the USA, the jokes last all day. Another origin is that April 1 was counted the first day of the year in France. When King Charles IX changed that to January 1, some people stayed with April 1. Those who did were called “April Fools” and were taunted by their neighbors.

Origins

The origin of April Fools’ Day is obscure. One likely theory is that the modern holiday was first celebrated soon after the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; the term referred to someone still adhering to the Julian Calendar which it replaced. In many pre-Christian cultures May Day (May 1) was celebrated as the first day of summer, and signalled the start of the spring planting season. An April Fool was someone who did this prematurely. In the eighteenth century the festival was often posited as going back to the times of Noah. An English newspaper article published on April 13th, 1789 said that the day had its origins when he sent the raven off too early, before the waters had receded. He did this on the first day of the Hebrew month that corresponds with April. A possible reference to April Fools’ Day can be seen in the Canterbury Tales (ca 1400) in the Nun’s Priest’s tale, a tale of two fools: Chanticleer and the fox, which took place on March 32nd

Well-known pranks

• Alabama Changes the Value of Pi: The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article written by physicist Mark Boslough claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to the “Biblical value” of 3.0. This claim originally appeared as a news story in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.
• Spaghetti trees: The BBC television programme Panorama ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. They had claimed that the despised pest, the spaghetti weevil, had been eradicated. A large number of people contacted the BBC wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees. It was, in fact filmed in St Albans.
• Left Handed Whoppers: In 1998, Burger King ran an ad in USA Today, saying that people could get a Whopper for left-handed people whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side.^[7] Not only did customers order the new burgers, but some specifically requested the “old”, right-handed burger.

Real news on April Fools’ Day

• The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Island earthquake tsunami that killed 165 people in Hawaii and Alaska resulted in the creation of a tsunami warning system (specifically the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre), established in 1949 for Pacific Ocean countries. The tsunami in question is known in Hawaii as the “April Fools’ Day Tsunami” due to people drowning because of the assumptions that the warnings were an April Fools’ prank.

• The death of King George II of Greece on April 1, 1947.

• The AMC Gremlin was first introduced on April 1, 1970.

• On April 1, 1993, NASCAR Winston Cup Series Champion Alan Kulwicki was killed in a plane crash involving Hooters of America executives in Blountville, Tennessee near the Tri-Cities Airport. The party was traveling to the Food City 500 qualifying scheduled for the next day.

• The 2005 death of comedian Mitch Hedberg was originally dismissed as an April Fools’ joke. The comedian’s March 29, 2005 death was announced on March 31, but many newspapers didn’t carry the story until April 1, 2005.

• Gmail’s April 2004 launch was widely believed to be a prank, as Google traditionally perpetrates April Fools’ Day hoaxes each April 1 (see Google’s hoaxes.) Another Google-related event that turned out not to be a hoax occurred on April 1, 2007, when employees at Google’s New York City office were alerted that a ball python kept in an engineer’s cubicle had escaped and was on the loose. An internal e-mail acknowledged that “the timing…could not be more awkward” but that the snake’s escape was in fact an actual occurrence and not a prank.

• The merger of Square and its rival company, Enix, took place on April 1, 2003, and was originally thought to be a joke.

• The announcement of the anime version of the Powerpuff Girls, Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z, was on April Fools’ Day causing many to think it was a joke.

• The game Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games was announced only a couple days before April Fools’ Day. Forums were flooded because so many thought that the two rivals since the 90’s, Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, appearing together in a video game as an official 2008 Olympics game was a joke.

• British sprinter Dwain Chambers joined English rugby league team Castleford Tigers shortly before 1st April 2008. The athlete was attempting a return to top flight athletics at the time following a high profile drugs ban, and his apparent unfamiliarity with rugby led many people to assume this was an April Fools’ Day prank.

• On April 1st, 2008, it was reported that UEFA would require the Swedish fast food chain Max to close their restaurant at the Borås Arena during the European Under-21 Football Championship due to a conflict with official sponsor McDonalds and a requirement that only official sponsors may operate around the arena. The arena was later replaced as a tournament site.

• On April 1, 1984, singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father. Originally, people assumed that it was a fake news story, especially considering the bizarre aspect of the father being the murderer.

• On April 1, 2008, Christian Persch announced that the GNOME desktop web browser Epiphany would be switched from Mozilla’s Gecko engine to the WebKit engine used by Safari and KDE’s equivalent application Konqueror

April Fools’ Day in media

• The 1986 horror film April Fool’s Day is themed around the holiday (akin to Halloween).
• In the film The French Connection, the opening scenes take place on April 1 and show children in Marseille running around pinning poissons d’Avril (April fish) on each other.
• The birthday of the mischievous twins, Fred and George Weasley from the Harry Potter series is April 1st.
• In the anime series Fushigi Yūgi, the character Takiko Okuda was murdered by her father on April 1st.
• O. Stock, C. Strapparava & A. Nijholt (eds.) The April Fools’ Day Workshop on Computational Humour. Proc. Twente Workshop on Language Technology 20 (TWLT20), ISSN 0929-0672, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy, April 2002, 146 pp
• In calendars published by Mad Magazine, April 1 is given as the birthday of Alfred E. Neuman.