Sloof Lirpa

That Day Did you get caught out by anything today? I teetered on the edge during The Observer's Tony Blair treading the boards piece until about the second paragraph which says a lot about my mental state right now. I've always loved April Fools, although there does seem to be a regimentation to it, especially online, where ultimately it ends up being Google announcing some new product or two companies least likely to merging.

About the only time I successfully ran with an April Fool was at school when I cruelly managed to convince someone who was then a fellow Star Trek fan that all of The Next Generation sets had been burnt to the ground -- he was the kind of man who would start throwing off contingency ideas, his best being 'They could run a set of episodes set in the past whilst they get the bridge at least rebuilt', but secretly I could tell he was crushed. So I had to tell him - and he punched me in my BCG scar.

My favourite example is still probably the Harmony Cousins interview in The Guardian, which I managed to perpetuate and puzzle a few Americans with on Metafilter. As I later mentioned here, it seemed to perfectly capture exactly the kind of profile interviews that the paper published then and still does. There's only a hairs breath and a sheen of fact between that and this piece from Friday about Jennifer Lopez. The point being made was that in the end most of the people who appear in these things have had roughly the same lives except in a slightly different order.

Which sort of makes you wonder who the joke was on...