A Good Laugh?

I remember once when I was in elementary school, my friend and I played a joke on my Mom.

We would always climb trees in the park across the street from my house. So that day after school, we met in the park as usual. My friend brought the ketchup bottle. (you can guess what happened next)...

I climbed a little way up the tree, pretended to fall (I don't know why I bothered...it's not like she was watching), and then squirted the red stuff all over my leg. My friend giggled, then proceeded to run to my house screaming at the top of her lungs. Of course, my dear mother ran outside as fast as she could. At first glance, (with my fake crying and ketchup leg), she thought I had been seriously hurt. I'm sure her mother-heart skipped a beat.

But then she came closer. I'm not sure which happened first. Either she saw the culprit (the bottle we had haphazardly hidden near the swing-set)...OR my "crying" turned into laughing.

Needless to say, she was angry.
And then I felt horrible.


The point is... I'm not very good at this. Ketchup leg is as good as it gets. So I went to someone smarter than me:

Check out these two crazy stories from the
Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

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. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity

1976: The British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.