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There are literally thousands of April Fool’s Day hoaxes around the Internet today. It would feel Grinch-ish (if that is the right term) to out any of these so early in the day, so I won’t do that.
But I will point you to a great piece about an expert hoaxer at our own Sandia Labs. Sue Vorenberg from the Santa Fe New Mexican looks at a 1998 hoax that ranked seventh all-time, according to Museumofhoaxes.com.
The trickster? Mark Boslough.
Boslough just couldn’t help himself with that one, which he let loose on cyberspace back in 1998 — he said he just had to spread the word about Alabama legislators trying to change pi, an infinite number that begins with 3.14159, to the more “biblical value” of 3.0.
The e-mail was disguised as a news story, written by “April Holiday” of “The Associalized Press.”
In it, a fictitious lawmaker argued that because pi can’t be calculated exactly, it could “harm students’ self-esteem.”
What began as an e-mail prank to his co-workers went viral, as e-mail hoaxes commonly do.
The prank got so big that it had to eventually be debunked by Snopes, a popular Web site that checks out rumors and urban legends.
But Boslough wasn’t done. He had several other memorable pranks, as highlighted by the New Mexican.
And he had some advice for all you would-be hoaxers:
I do have some rules for hoaxes,” Boslough said. “Don’t be mean, don’t humiliate people — you want them to laugh. Remember that the best jokes have lots of clues in them, and also, on the Internet, you want about half the people to get the joke and half to not get it.”
