A Personal Blog
Archive for April, 2004
New Car!
Apr 1st
This is actually ‘older’ news, but since Ensight was down for a couple of days I couldn’t really post it… ;-)
Anyways, YES the car accident happened. YES we got a good settlement. And…
There she is. No, that’s not me driving.
It’s a 2004 Hyundai Sonata GLX
Very, very nice. The lease payment is only 50$ more than our Toyota Echo (it was used). We’re really enjoying this car. Leather seats, heated seats, power everything, climate control…
It feels like a million bucks. It’s nice!
Thanks to everyone for their support through the whole crisis, everything worked out great. And especially thank you to the people who donated, it helped incredibly. Really. I’ll leave the button up, but I’ll likely redirect the money to people I know that need it.
Other Great April Fools Jokes (ongoing)
Apr 1st
I’ll update this list throughout the day. Besides my genius game yesterday there were other great jokes and pranks played around the web.
Here is a sampling of the better ones:
Google offers 1GB of space for free email Google is interviewing candidates for positions on the moon Buy one of the web’s largest website development communities US Justice Department starting a book club Homestar Runner Domain Dispute New Star Trek Series / Videos Jeeves (of Ask Jeeves) Loses His Pants
Feel free to email or comment if you see others that you’ve enjoyed :)
And by far the web’s biggest joke: Wal-Mart will start selling Linux PC’s. This is so fake it’s not even funny. Nobody wants to buy Linux. It’s useless.
Plus, some of the better ones ever played in all of history (thanks to Museum of Hoaxes):
The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically replied that they should “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
The Taco Liberty Bell In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called up the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell is housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed that it was all a joke a few hours later. The best line inspired by the affair came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale, and he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold, though to a different corporation, and would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
Alabama Changes the Value of Pi The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the ‘Biblical value’ of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.
