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A roundup of a few choice April Fools Day pranks

Thousands believed the BBC Panorama documentary which claimed Swiss farmers were growing spaghetti on trees (BBC)

Theories on the origin of April Fools Day are still divided. Some postulate that the day we spend trying to trick everyone in the office into picking up a toonie we’ve glued to the floor originates from the arrival of spring, where Mother Nature, that ultimate prankster, fools everyone into thinking it’s going to get warm before June.

Others believe it can be linked to the Roman festival of Hilaria, a late March celebration tied into the vernal equinox where no one was allowed to show any signs of sorrow or grief. In other words: Be happy… or else!

But one thing most April Fools Day connoisseurs agree upon is the all-around superiority of certain pranks throughout history.

And coming in at the top on most “Best of” lists is the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest of 1957. As the Museum of Hoaxes notes, Charles de Jaeger, a cameraman for British news show, Panorama, came up with the idea to film and broadcast a segment detailing the “bumper spaghetti harvest” in Switzerland thanks to an unusually mild winter.

The spot featured lines like "For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti" and showed a family of spaghetti farmers plying their craft by pulling noodles off tree branches and placing it in baskets

Learning nothing from Orson Welles’ ultimate 1938 radio prank, excited viewers clogged up the BBC phone lines wanting to know how they could create their own field of spaghetti trees. Simple. You plant some pasta in the backyard, water it, and wait a few years.

Math fans had their moment in 1998 when the April issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason published an article that said Alabama had created state legislation to round down the value of pi from 3.14 to the much simpler and cleaner “Biblical value” of 3.0.

Turns out the move was a dig by physicist Mark Boslough, who used humour to express his concern over proposed legislation that tried to restrict the teaching of legislation in certain states. Point taken.

Since media appears to be the most effective way to proliferate choice April Fools pranks, here’s the 2011 Vancouver Courier story that ignited the hopes of a million cyclists when they announced the city was contemplating a $420 million underwater bike tunnel, a move that would give B.C. the two-wheeled equivalent to the London-to-France chunnel.

And who can forget the time that Canadians momentarily seized up in collective terror when National Newswatch ran an item saying Don Cherry would be our Canadian representative at the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton? The fashion potential, however, would have made his inevitable ejection from Westminster Abbey worth the national embarrassment.

Rounding out the top five is this inspired item from the corporate underworld. Back in ’96, Taco Bell took out a full-page ad in six of America’s top dailies to announce that they’d purchased the Liberty Bell in order to ease the national debt. The historic monument would now carry the name “Taco Liberty Bell” because this is what selling your soul looks like on paper, and furthermore, the company planned to divide their new acquisition’s time between Philadelphia and their Irvine, Calif. headquarters.

Before the angry masses went out in search of Chihuahuas to take their rage out on, the company announced they were just kidding and don’t forget to pick up a chalupa on the way home because all that energy spent getting angry probably worked up quite an appetite.

Of course, these are but a taste of the genius displayed by April Fools pranksters of yore. For a far more complete anthology, check out this excellent bit of online curating from Museum of Hoaxes or add your favourite April 1 prank in the comments below.