April Fools Day in the age of the Internet

It’s become an annual tradition: websites playing increasingly elaborate pranks for April Fools Day. The only downside is that it’s now so common that the pranks rarely fool anybody anymore. But they’re still pretty occasionally funny.

I’m not planning to compile an exhaustive list, but I will update this post throughout the day as I come across them.

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink
The nearly two-centuries-old UK newspaper will begin the process of converting all of its archives to tweets. A couple of samples: “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?”
Brand New: Verizon Turns to the Clouds
The country’s largest wireless carrier unveils a rebranding that, frankly, doesn’t hold water. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
No Lions and Orioles and Bears? Oh, my!
I heard this on NPR this morning, but since it’s online as well, I figured it counts.
Amazon MP3 Daily Deal: William Shatner’s The Transformed Man for 99 cents
OK, this isn’t technically a prank — you really can buy the album for 99 cents today. But I think the date is no coincidence.
Amazing: The Swiss even clean their mountains
Not quite sure if this video is an April Fools joke or just a regular old joke, but it’s a good one regardless.
Alpine Legend
Coming soon (or not) to the XBOX 360. This joke was already done much better back in 2007
Slashdot
Just about everything on Slashdot today is an April Fools joke, which is diminishing my enthusiasm for this whole enterprise. Also, Gizmodo was apparently hit by the Conficker virus. Or was it? Yawn.

Found a gem of your own? Share it in the Comments section!

Introducing a new blog: 52 Coffees

Coffee is a fruit.Today, with some help from SLP, I hatched a new scheme (can schemes be hatched?). OK, not really a scheme. A new blog. 52 Coffees.

We were sitting at Caribou in Highland Park, discussing the merits of working from a coffee house (at least, one with free WiFi). I idly suggested I should do it once a week, visiting every Caribou in the metro area. She upped the ante and lowered the lameness quotient by suggesting that I only visit independent coffee houses (at least, ones with free WiFi). And blog about it.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Starting next week. I may seek some assistance from Google Maps to locate all of the coffee houses in Minneapolis and St. Paul and visit them sequentially in an radiating pattern from our home. Or I might just randomly visit them. Or a mix of both. I’m not sure, and I’m even less sure you care. But the point is, I’m starting next week, with Minnehaha Coffee. Be sure to follow the blog. And I’ll try to get rid of the default WordPress theme soon, I promise.

I believe the look is one of incredulity

Or in other words, “Do I really have to take this person I’m talking to seriously?”

Observe Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (to whom my reaction has been tepid at best, but I’m warming up to him after this) listening to, and attempting to answer, a question posed to him today by Rep. Michele Bachmann, regrettably of Minnesota’s regrettable 6th District:

Pay particular attention at 1:14. That is precisely the moment where Secretary Geithner realizes he’s dealing with a crazy person. Priceless.

Soon the look of incredulity may become known simply as the Bachmann Effect.

Regrettably, I also bothered to visit Earth2Obama.org, the site that apparently posted this C-SPAN clip on YouTube (as evidenced by the omnipresence of their URL in the clip), and I have to guess from that site’s stance that they actually think Michele Bachmann is right in all of this. Sheesh. Where were all of these right wing constitutional literalists during the Bush presidency?

One last comment on the general matter of how this person got elected to Congress, and what that says about her district, the caption in the still from this clip says it all: MN-6 is a prime example of gerrymandering at its worst. There is no logical reason that Woodbury (an eastern suburb of St. Paul) and Waite Park (one of the cluster of communities that makes up the St. Cloud micropolitan area, 92 miles away) should be in the same congressional district. The 6th district wraps around the northern ring of Twin Cities suburbs and extends awkwardly to the northwest, appearing like some blocky beast preparing to devour the metro area in its gaping, Limbaugh-esque maw. More specifically, it’s the most politically conservative area (if it can even be called an “area”) of the state, sitting on top of the geographically smaller, more densely populated, most liberal area of the state — the 5th (Minneapolis) and 4th (St. Paul) districts. The district is contorted in its southeastern-most corner to absorb the population of the conservative eastern suburbs instead of extending into more moderate, less populous (but more geographically contiguous) areas around St. Cloud.

Minnesota's 6th congressional district

I’m not sure who was responsible for the gerrymandering of the current Minnesota congressional district map — whether it was Democrats looking to sequester hardcore conservatives in a single district, or Republicans hoping to expand their influence over a generally “blue” (or at least “indigo”) state. But in the end, all that matters is that it produced an environment that would not only elect Michele Bachmann, but even re-elect her after she had already become a national laughingstock last fall.

(Thanks to Dusty Trice for this one.)

Why we should resign ourselves to acceptance of the Geithner plan

I was underwhelmed from the beginning with President Obama’s choices of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, and the events of the last couple of weeks have shored up a lot of public opinion that Geithner, in particular, may not have the right vision to shepherd the economy into a genuine recovery. But, for the moment, his plan is all we’ve got.

It doesn’t help that economic heavyweights like Paul Krugman are down on Geithner’s plan, but for now I will take limited solace in the words of economist Brad DeLong:

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money?

A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

In other words, there may be a better plan out there; this plan we have may not work; but if it doesn’t, the reason it won’t is because things are so fundamentally screwed up that probably nothing would have saved us.

Yeah… that, uh, makes me feel… better?

(Found, as usual, on Daring Fireball.)