My least favorite day
Not to dwell on my own gullibility over the Naomi Campbell thing, but I have to say that given the people involved, that story seems more believable than the idea of a sitting U.S. congressman earnestly asking a Navy Admiral whether he’s worried that the island of Guam might "tip over": Then again, maybe that ...
Not to dwell on my own gullibility over the Naomi Campbell thing, but I have to say that given the people involved, that story seems more believable than the idea of a sitting U.S. congressman earnestly asking a Navy Admiral whether he's worried that the island of Guam might "tip over":
Not to dwell on my own gullibility over the Naomi Campbell thing, but I have to say that given the people involved, that story seems more believable than the idea of a sitting U.S. congressman earnestly asking a Navy Admiral whether he’s worried that the island of Guam might "tip over":
Then again, maybe that one’s not real either. Sure, there’s video and it’s been on loads of other blogs, but I’m getting paranoid today. Jack Shafer’s efforts notwithstanding, this can be a distressing day for those of us who traffic in somewhat obscure world news stories. After all, maybe Congressman Johnson happened to read that story from last week about the disputed island sinking in the Indian Ocean and just got the particulars turned around a little bit. If you had to walk past these people on your way to work in the morning, you might lose your grip on reality too.
In the mythical long-ago era when I’ve been told that people really believed what they read in the newspapers to be cold hard facts, April Fools day pranks were probably really funny. But in an Internet-driven news culture where British tabloids are earnestly reporting unsubstantiated rumors about who started the unsubstantiated rumors about the Sarkozy marriage, the idea that there’s a day when you read stories that the authors know aren’t true just seems kind of unnerving.
I mean, CNET’s joke article about a man from the future coming back to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider is funny, but only because it’s based on a far-out theory that was previously reported as a "legitimate" news story. Just ask people in Georgia how much they enjoy these little pranks.
If you, like me, are a lover of bizarre news and need some reassurance that it does actually happen sometimes, I highly recommend checking out my colleague Kayvan Farzaneh’s new list of five stories that seem like April Fools pranks, but actually aren’t. It will restore your faith in the honest-to-goodness weirdness of the world.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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