if you see a story or a photo in the newspaper or the internet that seems a little strange and the date is april 1st, there is a good chance it is an April Fool's joke.
that was the certainly the case in Great Britain yesterday where the daily Mirror ran a picture of Queen Elizabeth apparently taking a flight with the budget airline easyJet.
in Australia, public broadcaster ABCput out a spoof interview with an injured david Beckham in which the former England soccer captain said he was set to join the Australian national team, the socceroos, as assistant manager and lead them to world cup glory in south Africa.
Back in Great Britain, the sun proudly Declared it had succeeded in creating “the world’s first flavoured PAGE” , next to a blank, white square which contained the instruction: “lick here” .
The paper invited readers to “test out page hereand guess the taste”
staying in Britain, perhaps the prize for the best trick story of the day should go the the daily mail which reported that the Automobile Association (AA), which deals with emergency callouts to car breakdowns, had equipped its staff with jet-packs to fly over gridlocked traffic to reach stranded motor-ists faster.
“the AA patrol van parks within a mile [ 1.6km ] of the stricken member and the jet-pack pilot launches from the back of the van,” according to AA future Technologies strategist, Dr Raif lopol – an anagram of “april Fool”
The internet search engine Google is a well known April Fool’s joker and yesterday it created a big buzz on the web when it announced it was changing its name to tooeka (as in Topeka, Kansas).
It didn’t take long for people to flood the google site with queries like “is google really changing its name?” (303 words)
Adapted from agency stories published in the Bangkok post.