The harps had a good one: http://www.harpyness.com/2009/04/01/one-harpy-flies-away/

When I was in Middle School I put tons catnip in my parents bed - under the sheets and everything. They couldn't figure out why the cats were behaving so strangely until I told them the next morning.

I have never been a fan of the whole 'call your momma and tell her your pregnant' fool, but I do love this day. Some classics are covering the toilet with cling film so that when your unsuspecting friend goes to the loo, their business falls onto the floor or stays put instead of the normal "plunk" in the toilet. Gets messy though.
Another messy prank with less of an ewwww factor is to string a mentos under the cap of a coke bottle (just use a sewing needle to puncture a whole in the mentos and put string through the candy) screw the top of the bottle back on and cut the sides of the string that are still showing. When your friend opens the coke the mentos will fall into the pop and WAWZA!!!!! For some reason this chemical reaction is more explosive than the whole vinegar and baking soda eruption you typically see coming out of 7th grade science projects. This prank comes highly recommended as long as you don't mind having soda on the top of your ceiling.

My great-aunt is a practical joke genius. She use to play them on my great uncle. Some of her good ones...

-carefully load his clothes into his dresser-- with the drawers upside down and the handles unscrewed and flipped around to look normal, so he pulls it out and his clothes go everywhere
-carefully and beautifully frost a cake for him-- but have the actual cake be a big wooden block, so he can't cut into it
-have his friend, a police officer, call him and let him know that she had been arrested for something (I think it was indecent exposure) and he should come down to the station to bail her out. He knew better that time, and ignored it. So she got a bunch of her other friends to call him and mention how everyone was talking about it, and then after the 6:00 news call him to tell him how it was on the news, since he didn't have a TV at his work. Finally he came down to the station, all frantic, and she was there laughing at him.

Those are all I remember, I will have to ask for more from her. He was always really on edge all day, expecting it, so one year she purposefully DIDN'T do a prank and he basically spent three weeks convinced he had eaten something horrible or he was going to discover something terrible he forgot, before she finally let him in on it.

My favorite has been "The L Word, The Musical." It smelled fishy to begin with, but you never know. Here is the link: http://www.afterellen.com/Movies/2009/4/l-word-musical

http://stuffqueerpeopleneedtoknow.wordpress.com/

NPR got me hard this morning. They played a ridiculous, yet plausible, story. It was about a fella in Detroit who was frustrated with the Detroit Lions. He felt that the magnificent lion was too good for them and got his state senator to introduce a bill in the legislature that would dissassociate the proud beast with bad football. The story continued to involve PETA backing him and speaking out against the use of animals as mascots.

This totally seemed like it could happen to me, especially with the PETA involvement. As I was saying aloud to the radio, "What the fuck?" the reporter said, "April Fool's". Good job, NPR. I wouldn't have thought you had it in you.

I switched my parent's underwear drawers around one time while they were sleeping... my mom tells me my dad, having just woken up in the morning, stood there for a full thirty seconds holding up one of her panties and staring at it in sleep-fogged confusion.

When I was a kid, we had a black plastic sprayer nozzle on the kitchen sink (next to the regular faucet for cleaning dishes, like most kitchen sinks have). I aimed that at where you'd be standing if you turned on the water, and taped the handle down with black electrical tape.

My favorite was a joke my Mom played on my sister, who was (and is) a notoriously hard and late sleeper. Nothing woke her up--she will sleep though an earthquake. So one April Fool's morning my Mom and two of my nieces made a lavish breakfast, set the table, seated themselves nicely around the table, and then set off the smoke detector alarm, which happened to be right outside my sister's door and was extremely loud and jarring. Of course, she woke up hysterical, ran out into the living room, saw all of them sitting calmly and nicely at the table, at which point they all sang out "April Fools!" It was awesome.

My sister went to visit her boyfriend's family for the first time and he told her they are very formal and they dress for breakfast. So she gets up early and gets showered and dressed up all nice and goes downstairs and there's her boyfriend's dad in his pajamas and a tie.

This one's and oldie but a goodie.

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, aired by the BBC in 1957.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyUvNnmFtgI

NPR has had some really good ones. My favorite was Nixon For President (1992), but you can see the rest here:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/af_database/display/C466

"National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" program reported that former-President Richard Nixon had declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Accompanying the announcement were audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech and declaring "I never did anything wrong, and I won't do it again." Harvard professor Laurence Tribe and Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman then came on the air to offer their analysis of Nixon's decision and its possible impact on the 1992 presidential race. A clip from Torrie Clarke, press secretary of the Bush-Quayle campaign, was also played in which she said, "We are stunned and think it's an obvious attempt by Nixon to upstage our foreign policy announcement today." Listeners reacted very emotionally to the announcement, flooding NPR with calls expressing shock and outrage. During the second half of the program host John Hockenberry revealed that the announcement had been an April Fool's Day joke and explained that Nixon's voice had been impersonated by comedian Rich Little."

Our April Fool's tradition is to prank my Uncle Richard, who is the family practical joker. Classics include:

-removing not just all his clothes, but all fabric of any kind from his bedroom while he was in the shower, including bedspreads, towels, and curtains.

-taping toilet paper in long strings hanging down from the bathroom door while he was in there, so that when he opened the door towards himself the toilet paper was sucked up into his face

-when I was in college, I painstakingly created a jigsaw puzzle from a piece of cardboard with "Happy April Fool's" written on it. But I threw away the middle piece, and created a fake middle piece with the same decoration that didn't fit the hole.

-this year I had all of my friends, relatives, and coworkers send him a version of this message by email: "Hi Uncle Richard! I found a nice pair of shoes for you. I'll bring them by the next time I visit. You'll like them!" I'm hoping the more people send it, the more surreal the whole thing will become, until he finally figures it out.

The Guardian had me LOL:

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

-Switching the salt and pepper shakers.
-Switching the salt with the sugar.
-Unscrewing all the lightbulbs just enough to make it so that they don't turn on, but are still in their sockets.
-Switching the channel of any clock that uses a radio as an alarm to a radically different station.

I stopped liking April Fool's ever since I discovered the Internet. Everyone and their dog try some "clever" prank and they're invariably just irritating...

Has anyone seen what Google has up today? Just go to the Google homepage and there's a link at the bottom. It got me when I first signed in to my email. It's very well planned out and there are many links - it must have taken a lot of work!

Does anyone else see the ad the Truth.com people did on April fools a few years back. A Tobacco executive does commercial where he says that his and all other tobacco companies would be ceasing production and sale of all cigarettes because they've seen conclusive overwhelming proof that cigarettes kill people. Then the screen went blank and a creepy voiceover says "April fools" I only saw it once.

I played a pretty elaborate joke on my best guy friend my freshman year of high school. First I have to say, though, that I was very young and much more ignorant than I am now - so I hope this doesn't offend anyone!

My BF was the total opposite of me. We were bfs because we liked competing with each other & arguing. He was really uptight, close-minded, conservative mindset, etc, so I knew he would flip out if he found out I happened to be a lesbian - especially since we had "gone out" in middle school 3 times (which didn't mean we went anywhere; in fact, when we were 'going out' meaning, in a relationship, he would pretty much stop talking to me, lol. Middle school.) So, I actually started a rumor with his circle of guy friends that I was a lesbian. I even got one of my girl friends to help me out by pretending me and her were going to go on a date. I started this exactly a month before April 1. At first he didn't believe it, but eventually he totally did and it was hilarious seeing him try to look so OK with it when you could tell he wasn't. And he would talk to his guy friends about how he couldn't believe he 'went out' with me. On April 1 I gathered everyone who ended up being in on it - 40 people - and we all went to his lunch table and I told him all about it - and took 5 pictures of his face turning darker and darker shades of red by the second. It was all pretty funny at the time. He vowed to get me back - which he did 2 years later by telling me he was smoking weed, which to me was "omg, that's a drug!" before college. Ah, youth.

My trickster impulses have resulted in much mischief around the office today.

- I sent out phony news articles to my co-workers about giant mutant spiders overtaking the city.

- I wrapped one co-worker's chair in paper towels.

- I wrapped the chairs and personal affects of two other co-workers in aluminum foil.

Each year, I try to participate in our local Saint Stupid's Day parade. It's relevant now more than ever, as it focuses on all of the ridiculousness of the financial system.

http://www.saintstupid.com

Thirty-one years ago, political prankster and ex-Navy seaman Ed Holmes, aka Bishop Joey, started The Saint Stupid's Day Parade in San Francisco. A military man turned actor and performance artist, Ed is a true renaissance man, a charmer, and a true California legend. Like John Law, Emperor Norton and the testees of all that electric Kool-Aid back in the 1960s, he uses his sharp political mind as a way to bring joy and insight into a world that doesn't always know what to do about its collective anger.

In 2005, I did a video interview with Ed Holmes as a part of a documentary I've been working on called Pranksters in Paradise. In the coming months, I'll be posting teasers of it on my personal blog.

A good friend of mine almost gave me a run for my money today.

She's a gay/lesbian erotica writer whose work I love, but she recently had to switch hosting locations, so her website has been down for about a month or so now.

Today she posted a link to her new web page, and on the web page she proclaimed a love for Twilight (yes, that Twilight) and she had been officially converted to abstinence and heterosexuality for Edward. She was now going to write ONLY Edward/Bella fanfiction. Furthermore, all of her previous "icky slash work" was going to be discarded.

Luckily, we all know her better, and she eventually promised that the website will return as scheduled (minus the sparkles) sometime in the next week.

We woke up to snow. Ha ha Mother Nature. You so funny, I cry. Actually, I almost did cry.

Posted on my Namibia blog:

I did not design the game. I did not name the stakes. I just happen to like apples. And I'm not afraid of snakes.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Here's a new one: School paralyzed on account of black mamba orgy. When I came to school this morning everyone was screaming as usual, but no one was running around outside. I went into the administration building and found the teachers, many learners, and my principal standing on their desks shrieking. Principal S, a very large man who is more than aware of his own dignity, shouted at me that I'm a fool (nothing new there) and that I should get up on the table (new). There was, and why not on a Wednesday, a black mamba spawning party taking place scattered all over the school, although not on the side I approach from (I assume because it's just sand). But in the grass, in the classrooms and the teacher building, and in the computer lab I only today found out existed because someone mentioned snakes there. So there I am, on a table wishing I had my camera, while infamous snakes schtupped and my colleagues hollered. Namibian men are very macho, but don't express it in the same way (huge Enrique Iglesias fans), so it was fun to watch them scream like children and then bluster about how in a minute they were going to kill the snakes with a shovel (we have a shovel?), then go back to screaming. Obviously the shouting and the underlying hissing were distracting, but I did get a fair amount of Tolkien's Silmarillion read while waiting for things to clear up. Colleagues repeatedly interrupted their screaming and my reading to inform me again that Namibians don't like to read, they're "allergic." On the downside, I didn't see the mambas other than an occasional tail. I have no idea how many there actually were. By the time I could come back with my camera, they were all gone, which was frustrating. No one got hurt, but I didn't get any teaching done today, and tomorrow's probably iffy.
Posted by Aleks at 6:04 AM
Labels: ani difranco, animals

So far no one's called me on it. Another volunteer teacher gave me the idea, she used an elephant attack.

Two years ago I convinced my two best friends that I had just had a "love child" with an overseas woman. The prank was complete with pictures of little "Samyl Quentin", a congratulatory e-mail from her family to mine, and lots of calls & emails from other friends corroborating the story. I kept it going for 6 weeks before I broke the news. Pity I don't think they were able to get a refund on those baby clothes they bought :-)

This is an easy one....

You have to have access to your victim's computer for this to work, and it's best if they're one of those folks with 8,345 icons scattered all over their desktop. (and bonus it works on both Macs and PC's)

Take a screen shot of their entire desktop, icons and all.

Make it the background image.

Gather all their icons into a folder discreetly set aside somewhere.

Wait for them to come to work/home and try to click on things.

I narrowly prevented my boss from reformatting his computer to fix his obviously broken desktop :-) He was totally bumfuzzled, because some icons

Last year my friend and her boyfriend had a huge fake fight in front of all their friends at lunch (in a crowded HS cafeteria). She screamed at him and finally punched him in the face (well, made it look like she did). She had a packet of fake blood hidden in her hand, so it looked like she had broken his nose. Everyone totally freaked. He sat there crying while she stormed off. They kept it up for almost ten minutes. That was how long it took for people to decide they should go tell somebody.