stevensfo wrote:I seem to remember a very old April Fool's joke about the spaghetti harvest in Italy. It was in B/W so a bit old. They showed spaghetti growing on trees and the Italians trying to harvest the spaghetti.
You mean this one? It's still out there. Swiss, but what the hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dUAaah, 1957. When Britons were first venturing abroad in coach trips, and Italian wine always came in straw or raffia bottles which would soon be bedecked with romantic candles. And my primary school insisted that we should all write exclusively in so-called "italic script". (Ever so stylish, it was, but so slow and angular that we all had to abandon it when we got to big school and needed to take notes at speed. My illegible handwriting still bears witness to the panicky transition that ensued.)
Love the joke about needing wellies to talk on the phone. Speaking of Switzerland, I used to have to read the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (a bastion of stodgy right-wing cynicism) every day in the course of my job. And on one occasion the NZZ broke the mould by attempting an April Fool's Day gag. Shock horror!
Great news, the paper said. All those awkward hippy-trippy opponents of nuclear power could now choose to have 100% nuke-free electricity in their homes! Scientists had discovered that nuclear power produced electrical particles that rotated in an anti-clockwise direction, whereas good old-fashioned power went clockwise. So all that the anti-nuclear types needed to do was to buy a power socket that could filter out the offending particles, leaving only the clockwise power that any right-thinking person might want for his family.
It was the first time the NZZ had ever attempted a joke, and for all I know it might well have been the last. Nobody understood it, and thousands of people wrote in to try and order the adapters.
BJ