April Fool Gags

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April Fool's Day is the opportunity to trick your friends or loved ones

and even strangers and play practical jokes on them.

Here are some out of the world ideas for you.

Rearrange somebody's drawers or file cabinets in a different order and see them baffled.
Hard boil an egg and place it in the regular egg carton the night before. In the morning, ask someone to help you make breakfast and beat the egg to make omelets. Hand them the hard-boiled egg and watch them trying to crack it!
On the other hand, you may just glue the eggs to the carton and ask someone to hand them to you in the morning. As the victims struggle to take the eggs out of the carton, they break.
There are lots of fantastic tricks for heavy sleepers. Some of the popular ones are:
- Placing someone's hand while they are asleep in a bowl of cold water is a sure way to make them wet their beds.
Go to office early by half an hour on April 1 and tape down the ball at the bottom of everybody's mouse. See everybody surprised to find out that nobody's mouse is working. Works only on scroll mouse.
This one is to play Dr Dolittle. Tape a little walky-talky on your pet or hide it somewhere near where it is laying. Walk off to a safe distance where you can keep yourself hidden from others with the other piece. As soon as another family member tries to pick up or pat on the back of your pet, say in a gruff voice, "I hate you doing this to me." See them jump with fright and shock.
Late at night, fill the hair-dryer with baby powder. Catch the expression of someone who has just washed his or her hair and turned it white by using the hair dryer.
This can be done in class, office or home. Ask your friends, colleagues and siblings to perform particular actions together at the same pre-planned time like dropping their pencils at the same time, to tie shoelaces, to reboot their computers, to drink water or any such innocent actions. These synchronized actions are sure to surprise anybody who will wonder about what is happening.
Good for teachers. Tell your students that you are just going to note the scores that they have got on their tests or exams and will hand out to them after an hour. Go to the room and them keep running out looking like very scared and tell them that the principal has just spilled coffee or ink on the test/examination papers and they will have to take them again. Note their reactions and exclamations. You can bet that the dullest of all students will loudly claim that they had done their best this time and it is not fair to them. Then you can tell them how much they have really scored.
Carve out cornbread in shape of a cake and put chocolate icing all around it. Serve the delicious-looking chocolate cake to the victim.
If you are good at graphic designing, this one is for you. Make fake parking tickets or buy them from the market and put it on the cruisers and bikes of the traffic police officers who take liberty and park their vehicles in no parking zones. Make sure that you or your vehicle are not watched or can be traced back.
Put an elastic band around the push button of the sprayer in the sink and make it face towards where the person stands. Similarly, you can turn the showerhead towards the spot where a person stands and. As soon as the next person turns them on, they will get all soaked. Be sure not to forget that you don't get soaked yourself.
An easy way to fool others is to tape down the click-button of the phone with a transparent tape so that whenever someone picks up the phone to receive an incoming call, it still keeps ringing. Works only on landlines.
Try it with your teenaged kids. Set the alarm clock for 3:00 a.m. and hide it under their beds. See them tearing down their room in a sleepy fit to shut it up.
Take an orange. Slit it at the bottom and use a needle to take its pulp out through the slit. Thinly slice an apple and insert it carefully inside, arranging it with the help of the needle. Offer the orange to the friends when they call at your home and peel it for them. See them gasp in surprise when they see the apple slices instead of orange pulp. Needs skill.
Squeeze a banana softly until it becomes very soft and using a needle make some holes in its black spots so that they cannot be seen easily. Ask someone to hand you the banana and watch them as the smashed pulp comes pouring out!
This is not the kind of food I would like to eat. Put 5 scoops of ice cream in a bowl and add 5 cooked chicken wings to it. Pour gravy on it and the chocolate syrup to cover it. Top it with a cherry and serve.
Put toothpaste/shaving cream/whipped cram or any such thing in the socks of your roommates. Make an escape before they try them on.
Rub liquid soap/Vaseline or baby oil onto the doorknobs of your victim's room or the door handles of their cars. You can also rub it off on their toilet seats. It makes them quite slippery and difficult to use.
Add yellow or beige food coloring to the milk to make it look like rotten milk. Works every time someone pours out the milk and is stunned to find it rotten.
Make a small hole just below the edge in the plastic disposable cups. Offer juice or some other drink to your guests in a way that they would pick it up with the hole facing them. As soon as they will try to drink, the liquid will spill on them through the hole.

Silly Rules & Decisions

Here are some weird and illogical rules and regulations and decisions imposed on the people in various regions. Thankfully, they were just April Fool hoaxes or they would have had drastic effects and might have resulted in rebellions, revolutions and mass movements to dethrone such stupid and eccentric authority.

In 1959, the Kokomo Tribune of Indiana announced that to cut the costs, the city police would close each night from 6 pm to 6 am and one can leave their messages on an answering machine, which will be screened by an officer in the morning. It will also lessen the pressure of work as many of the calls would be old by that time and there would be no need to answer them. A spokesman for the police commented that in the case there is an emergency call in the night, they can go check the hospitals and the coroner in the morning and know if anything has happened or not!
In 1987, a Los Angeles disc jockey that Los Angeles Highway System would be closed for an entire month for repairs from April 8. The citizens were highly alarmed by the startling news for they could not avoid the use of the highway to navigate through the city and immediately the radio station and the California Highway Patrol were flooded with thousands of frantic calls. The intense public response stunned even the station, not to mention that the California Department of Transportation didn't find it 'very funny.'
In 1991, the London Times announced the cabinet's approval of the plan of Department of Transport to alleviate overcrowding on the M25, the circular highway surrounding London by making the traffic on both carriageways travel in the same direction. Thus, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays the traffic would travel clockwise while on Tuesdays and Thursdays it would travel anti-clockwise. On weekends, traffic can go on as usual.
Many people voiced their protest. A spokesman for Labor Transport warned that many people have 'trouble telling their left from their right.' A resident of Swanley, Kent said that the scheme was impractical because the villagers using the motorway to go for shopping to Orpington, would have to drive just for two miles on some days and 117 miles on others. Well, it was just a joke.
In 1993, the China Youth Daily, the official state newspaper of China had a government's decision as its first lead on the front page, where Ph.D. holders were exempted from the one child limit imposed by state to control population explosion. The story had a disclaimer in the end identifying it as a joke. Yet, Hong Kong's New Evening News and Agence France-Presse (an international news agency) were taken in and reported it as a fact.
Intellectuals of the country thought the idea to be prompted by the Singaporeans who encouraged their intellectuals to marry and have children to ensure better crop of citizens for the next generation. The Chinese government declared such hoaxes and April Fool's Day as a hazardous tradition of the West while the Guangming Daily, Beijing's main newspaper read mostly by the intellectuals, published an editorial stating April Fool's Day to be a Liar's Day and having bad influence.
In the same year, Westdeutsche Rundfunk, a German radio station, made an official announcement about a new city regulation for the citizens of Cologne where the joggers going through the park could not go faster than six mph to avoid disturbing the squirrels in the middle of their mating season.
The physicist Mark Boslough's article published in April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter state that the Alabama state legislature had passed a bill and voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi. It was to be put to the Biblical value of '3.0' instead of the actual value '3.14159'. The article reached the world over through the Internet and soon the Alabama legislature was stormed with calls protesting such an illogical move. The original article was actually a parody on the legislative attempts to confine the teaching of evolution.
In 1999, the Savings Bank of Rockville placed an ad in the Connecticut Journal-Inquirer on 31st March to announce that they would charge their customers $5 fee for the help of a live teller to ensure enhanced 'professional, caring and superior customer service.' Though, it was a joke, customers were highly agitated by it and it was reported that one woman even closed her account with the bank because of it. The bank ran a second ad revealing the first one to be just a joke with the comment of bank manager that it had actually committed the bank 'to not charging such fees.'

The Top 10 April Fools' Day Hoaxes

No one enjoys April Fools' Day as much as the media. The 10-year-old comes out in every reporter. Don't believe it? Check out this list of top 10 list of April Fools' hoaxes ranked as the best ever by "The Museum of Hoaxes: A History of Outrageous Pranks and Deceptions," by Alex Boese.

No. 1: The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest
In 1957, the BBC news show "Panorama" announced that the dreaded spaghetti weevil had been virtually eliminated by the very mild winter weather. That meant Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. Cue the film footage: Swiss peasants were shown pulling strands of spaghetti from trees. Many viewers fell for it, calling the BBC asking how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. The answer: Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

No. 2: Sidd Finch
Sports Illustrated published a story in April 1985 about Sidd Finch, a rookie pitcher for the Mets who could throw a baseball with startling, pinpoint accuracy at 168 mph. That's 65 mph faster than anyone else has ever been able to throw a ball. Finch had never before played baseball, having mastered his pitch in a Tibetan monastery. Too bad for Mets' fans that Sidd Finch existed only in the imagination of the article's writer, the great George Plimpton.

No. 3 Instant Color TV
In the black-and-white television days of 1962, the only TV network in Sweden announced that thanks to new technology, viewers could convert their existing black-and-white sets to color reception by pulling a nylon stocking over the screen. It was even demonstrated on air. Hundreds of thousands of people reportedly fell for it.

No. 4: The Taco Liberty Bell
Taco Bell Corp. announced in 1996 that it had bought the Liberty Bell from Uncle Sam and would be renaming it Taco Liberty Bell. Citizens called in outrage! Hours later, Taco Bell revealed it was all a joke. When then White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale, he quipped that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

No. 5: San Serriffe
Looking for the perfect vacation spot? Go to San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands, including Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. In 1977, the British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page supplement promoting San Serriffe. The newspaper's phones rang all day with calls from readers wanting more information. Few ever noticed that everything about the place was named after printer's terminology.

No. 6: Nixon for President
In 1992, National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for president again. His new campaign slogan was, "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again." Audio clips were aired of Nixon's speech announcing his candidacy. Host John Hockenberry, thanks to the voice of comedian Rich Little who impersonated Tricky Dick, kept the hoax up until the second half of his show.

No. 7: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the "Biblical value" of 3.0. It was a parody about legislative attempts to dictate the teaching of evolution, but once it was published on the Internet as if it were real legislation, the Alabama state legislature received hundreds of protest calls.

No. 8: The Left-Handed Whopper
Burger King published a full-page advertisement in USA Today in 1998 announcing the introduction of the "Left-Handed Whopper," especially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper, but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers.

No. 9: Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers
Discover Magazine announced in April 1995 that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins. Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads were responsible for the disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837.

No. 10: Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity
In 1976, British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 a.m. a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience at home. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. Hundreds of people claimed to have felt it. One woman even reported that she and her 11 friends floated around the room.

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