And no Etch a Sketch pranks?
Photo: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/2012 AFP
Another April Fools’ Day has come and (mostly) gone and, as usual, more people participated in the ritual than you’d expect: Mitt Romney was introduced by congressman Paul Ryan to a Wisconsin “rally” that turned out to be an empty basement ballroom. (“We didn’t get much of a turnout this morning,” his aides had joked.) Keith Olbermann was named CEO of hip hop website GlobalGrind for all of, oh, zero seconds. (“We dream, we dream…” sighed the post’s author.) Below, a roundup of some additional — somehow even nerdier — pranks:
- Conan O’Brien “bought” Mashable and, in a YouTube video, described firing its founder: “Several hours ago, I called Pete Cashmore and I told him, ’You’re out! Get out! You’re through Cashmore! Through! Get out!’”
- Occupy Wall Street citizen journalist @OccupySteve tweeted “#MayDay just canceled,” prompting a flurry of comments.
- Sony unveiled the VAIO Q laptop, so named because it’s the size of a quarter.
- Google introduced a Morse code keyboard, with just a dot and a dash key, as well as Chrome Multitask Mode, where you can use as many cursors as there are mice hooked up to your computer — you could, for instance, send two Morse code e-mails at once. Game changer! It also brought Google Maps into the early years of Nintendo, with an 8-bit makeover that included, as some Reddit users found, “an 8-bit rendition of the Parthenon in Greece and Area 51, complete with a UFO abducting a cow.”
- YouTube announced it would offer the “complete YouTube experience offline.” Apparently, it would take 175 trucks to hold the DVD equivalent of every video uploaded to the site since its 2005 launch, which sounds like a pretty low number to us.
