April Foolishness

The Republican Party of Florida (RPOF)… announced that Clinton had won an Academy Award “for her portrayal of an honest candidate…” claiming that former President Bill Clinton would be endorsing Bernie Sanders instead of his wife “due to Hillary’s lack of transparency with voters” and another purporting to have a video showing Clinton actually “wiping her server clean” by physically wiping her Blackberry with a small cloth. …

…April Fools’ Day, i.e., the worst day of the entire year for anyone trying to cover news on the Internet. This year, as has happened before and will happen again, an overwhelming number of hoaxes, jokes and pranks escape onto the Web, using the cover of the terrible holiday to try to win a little bit of attention for their creators.… TVs still do not come in aerosol cans.…

…Donald Trump recently made a bombshell revelation that could make you question everything you know about the state of American politics.…

Aquinas College students play a prank on their hilarious Macroeconomics professor!…

…Hillary Clinton has decided to suspend her campaign for President of the United States.

We were able to sit down with a top member of the Clinton 2016 Campaign to discuss this explosive news. The staffer agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity.…

[I'm only halfway through reading the list, but there's so many great ones, I rush to post this. Here's a great one, considering today's "outrage industry":]

#42: Viewers Take Offense
In early 1960, a TV viewer complained to a network about seeing a black man kiss a white woman on one of their shows. The network, eager not to offend, flew an account executive down to meet with the viewer and explain to him that the actor was actually white, but that the local station had accidentally broadcast the show at a high contrast ratio, making him appear dark-skinned. When Paul Krassner (editor of the satirical underground magazine The Realist) heard about this he was outraged that a TV network would be so afraid of offending a racist. So he designed a prank to serve as payback. He asked his readers to write to the network after the April 1st airing of the celebrity panel show Masquerade Party (a completely unexceptionable show), and to complain that they had been offended by something on it, but not to specify what it was that had offended them. Hundreds of his readers obliged. The result was panic at the network. Reportedly the TV executives watched the tape of the show repeatedly, desperately trying to figure out what could have offended so many people.

A Norwegian man faces a heavy fine and a driving ban after police caught him having sex with his girlfriend while speeding on the motorway.... "It was veering from one side to the other because the woman was sitting on the man's lap while he was driving and doing the act, shall we say.... He couldn't see much because her back was in the way.... Why they did it on a highway with such a high risk we don't know."

After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal. The deal, worth over $13 billion (10 billion euros)

The Economist Group is delighted to announce the development of a public-entertainment facility that combines the magic of a theme park with the excitement of macroeconomics. [Note date]

The Economist Group is delighted to announce the development of a public-entertainment facility that combines the magic of a theme park with the excitement of macroeconomics. ... Other real-life tech companies are getting into the April Fools' act as well....