Pop Smart - April Fools’ Eve (and the LaserCritic)

Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day, so be on guard. The current issue of Slate has “recycled” a story from 2007 called “The April Fools’ Day defense kit,” which offers smart tips for spotting media hoaxes and offers links to past pranks that make for amusing reading. Here’s an example:

Beware strange animals. If a story whiffs even remotely of the hotheaded naked ice borer, it’s likely to be a hoax. Technology Review hoaxed its readers with an April Fools’ story in 1985 titled “Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth.” In 1984, the Orlando Sentinel did the same with a piece about the cockroach-devouring Tasmanian mock walrus. In 1994, London’s Daily Star sports pages reported that invading superworms might destroy the Wimbledon green.

PopSmart can’t speak for any of its sister blogs or publications, but rather than take part in tomorrow’s pranking, PopSmart instead plans to keep an eye out for the hoaxes in other media, and inform the reader when we find them. Alert readers who spot other pranks should let us know, too.

That’s not to say, of course, that we haven’t been above a little pranking in the past.