Eight Rejected April Fool's Tricks

By Glenn and Jake

Around these parts, April Fool's Day tricks are about as popular as executives at AIG. While these "tricks" may not be legalized theft from our public treasury, they still cost our economy millions of dollars each year. Even worse, they cause us to be fooled into thinking fake things are real. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said, "You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power--he's free again." April's Fools Day robs us of our ability to trust the internet. With this hostility in mind (ours and yours), we wanted to present to you some of the absolute worst April Fool's Day tricks. These were tricks so mean, so misleading and/or so downright stupid that they never even made it onto the internet today We found them hosted on a bit.torrent and committed an illegal download for your reading pleasure.

1. Popular news site CNN reported that President Obama was assassinated by a man trying to impress Jody Foster, similar to John Hinkley. While the joke itself would have caused mass hysteria, and mass hysterical laughter, the main problem is that no man would ever kill over Jody Foster in 2009. Rather than pull this farcical joke, they just went about reporting their liberal news as usual.
2. Ask Jeeves answered all questions by displaying your IP and GPS location to within 10 miles. Then Jeeves assures you that someone from the Ask Jeeves team has been dispatched to your location to "right what God made wrong." Ultimately this would have probably pushed web visitors away faster than Google, by virtue of being a better search engine that rarely threatens murder, already has.
3. The National Optical Astronomy Observatory announced that they've discovered a planet in our galaxy previously unseen. They announce that it indeed is the planet Alderaan from the Star Wars films, which was not destroyed by the Death Star after all. This one wasn't particularly mean, but stupid because if Alderaan wasn't destroyed the Alderaan expatriots wouldn't have joined the Rebel alliance in such large numbers and fought so hard on their behalf. Plus, where would warrior Tycho Celchu's body have been sent if not the graveyard of where the mighty Alderaan once stood?
4. Peta.org planned on listing the names of all the animals they rescued and didn't kill. Instead they decided to release a picture of a naked woman who was against fur. That's PETA for you!
5. Digging a site by using Digg would instead dugg the infamous picture "Tubgirl" (which is a picture of a girl in a bathtub with her ass in the air spraying feces like a fountain). They, of course, thought better since their site is popular and they wouldn't want to alienate the small percentage of the population that is disgusted by feces and pornography, especially pornography that features feces.
6. Madonna sent an exclusive email to her fan club telling them that tickets will be priced at an affordable range of $15-$30 for her next tour so that all income levels will be able to attend. I think in some ways this is the cruelest April Fool's trick because there are so many poor people out there who want to see Madonna's music and are waiting until she either has an offer like this for real, or is imprisoned by the US government and ordered to perform to help raiase money to pay off our national debt.
7. The Internet Movie Database considered moving the movie Parent Trap (the orignal Haley Mills version) to number 3 on the IMDB top 250 movies list, but thought nobody would buy it since it has a lesser rating than Shawshank Redemption and the Godfather. They also considered making every clickable link go to Patrick Duffy's IMDB profile, but they didn't want to promote the TV show Step-by-Step.
8. Spark Notes announced that their Catcher in the Rye page - long used by college students to avoid reading actual books - would now feature video commentary of every chapter by J.D. Salinger himself. Bibliophiles everywhere would have been had minor heart attacks and TMZ would have started stalking Salinger again and offering up witty quips about his weight gain, such as "Nine Stories? Looks more like Nine Pizzas!"