April Fools’ Day is typically a heyday for the Internet jokesters. This year was no different with companies like Google getting in on the fun. Surprisingly, this year also proved to be the year of the prankster politicians. Here are the best pranks from yesterday.
Rahm FOIA’d himself. Mayor Emanuel announced on Sunday that he was very interested in learning more about himself and had filed for several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about himself. His administration fueled the joke’s flame by claiming this was the biggest self-FOIA in Chicago history and that the mayor expected to receive emails, phone records, pictures, text messages, holiday cards, lunch receipts and even discarded chewing gum as a result of the requests. Rahm claimed, “It’s a new me. The only four-letter F-word I use now is ‘FOIA.'” I think that’s the real joke here…
Mitt gets miffed. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s staff played an April Fools’ Day prank on him at a campaign event in Wisconsin. The candidate’s staff led him to a room that Romney thought was full of supporters. After his introduction, he walked into a completely empty room. Some turnout. He was eventually led to the real room in which the event was being held…where there were significantly more people present. Luckily the false entrance was caught on video.
The Legend of Google. Google released Quest on April Fools’ Day which transforms Google Maps into an 8-bit imagery a la 1980s video games. If Chicago was on the map in the original “Legend of Zelda” game it would look like this.
View Larger Map
People love cats. AdBlock—a company whose software blocks ads on Web browsers—announced a new product, CatBlock, on April 1. Instead of blocking Internet ads, AdBlock claimed the new software would just replace them with pictures of cats. What started as a prank though now has some reality to it. The response to CatBlock was apparently so overwhelming that AdBlock’s creator is now offering to create a real version of the phony software in exchange for donations to his company.
Conanable. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Conan O’Brien took advantage of the comedic holiday. In a video announcement yesterday, O’Brien claimed that he had purchased social media news site Mashable and bumped CEO Pete Cashmore from the company. Conan claimed the whole buyout cost a mere 3,500 “smackaroos.”
Hipster Buyout. Etsy, an online market for vintage fashion, posted a fake but highly entertaining news release to its site yesterday claiming Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company had purchased the city of Portland, Oregon. According to Etsy the purchase was a means of saying “thank you” to a city full of customers who “literally helped put us on the map by making feather hair-clips and steampunk goggles socially acceptable articles of clothing.” The city buyout will allow Etsy to bring work to the “young, creative and often unemployable hipsters” living in Portland with jobs like “making our famous knit iPod cozies.”
White on blue. Though not necessarily a prank, Jack White found an especially creative way to release his new single on April Fools’ Day. The musician tied flexi discs with the new track, “Freedom at 21” from his upcoming album Blunderbuss (out April 24), to 1,000 blue helium-filled balloons and released them into the sky. The launch took place at White’s Third Man Records’ headquarters in Nashville.
