OxBlog

Friday, April 02, 2004

# Posted 4:35 AM by Patrick Belton  

MY LIFE AS AN INTERNET SPAMMER: After spending all my study breaks for the last two days writing high schools and colleges about our essay contest (including, incidentally, both David's and Josh's high school alma maters), I now feel that Miriam Abacha and her Nigerian hordes have got nothing on me. HIGH PO INT SO F@R OF MY NEW CAR EER: the Houston, Texas singing nuns from Incarnate Word.

I would like to note, though, as a follow-up to David's and Moderate Voice's list of historic April Fools pranks, my personal all-time favorite - the BBC's 1957 Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, which the news show Panorama broadcast drolly in a segment which showed rustic Swiss peasants harvesting that year's bumper spaghetti crop, brought on by a mild winter. (You can watch the original broadcast on the BBC's website.) Of course, the entire broadcast was just a joke. But soon after the broadcast ended, the BBC's offices began to receive hundreds of telephone calls from their puzzled viewers, who either wanted to ask whether spaghetti actually did grow on trees, or who were eager to learn how they might grow their own spaghetti tree. To this, the BBC is reported to have replied they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."
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