Good. I am tired of it, and I studiously avoided all the nonsense on the web yesterday. With one exception. I thought this one bit of humor was nice. I’ll allow it.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Although drawn that way, I don’t think the passengers were visible from the outside. Looking through the floor of the plane while at altitude would freak me out though.
Originally, the Amazons were depicted as having advanced technology (they developed on their own) far beyond ours, and I believe the plane was one of their creations.
Later versions de-emphasized this aspect of Amazon culture and created other origins for it.
Too bad, you missed XKCD’s audience participation joke.
On Twitch TV, there is an emote “Kappa” which produces a monochrome, smirking face. It’s generally used to denote sarcasm. There’s a meme around Twitch: when people ask how to make the face, you respond with “Gray Face (no space)”. Yesterday, typing “Kappa” produced a blank outline of the face with a question mark in the middle, and Gray/GreyFace actually produced the Kappa face. THE DREAM!!!
A couple of us had a broadcaster I often watch believing that “Kappa” had just been randomized to sometimes not work. We had him going for a good 30 minutes. Laughed my ass off. Not sure I’ve ever had that much fun with April Fools Day.
“Homestar, everybody knows the Internet already ruined April Fools’ Day. …On February 7, 2008, ironically enough.”
WW’s original prop-driven plane is at the Bradley Air Museum in Windsor Locks, CT. I’ve been there many times and have never missed it.
I thought the Nature article on dragons was pretty funny but then I didn’t mistake it for actual science.
You know “gullible” is not in the dictionary?
I know, too old, I just brought that up ’cause that question actually fooled a coworker a few years ago. She brought us a dictionary to show us we were wrong, “the word gullible, is right here”, pointing at the word in the dictionary. We all just smirked and said, “Okay, that backfired. Sorry, we were wrong. You got us.” We walked away, wondering if she even read the definition, she definitely did not get the joke.
That was the only April Fool’s prank I ever pulled, that actually worked. Really. Not joking.
The best part was the guy on the scissor lift dusting the invisible plane. If you’re gonna do a joke, do ALL the joke.
Yay for both museums, whether you can see the plane there or not. (I used to be able to ride a city bus to the Seattle museum, and another time could walk to the DC one, and got to tag on as a guest on a guided tour of the Udvar-Hazey branch – all very memorable.)
I volunteered at the Pima Air Museum in Tucson for a summer, which also runs tours of the Air Force’s aircraft storage center next door. There are thousands of planes there, so empty spots of desert are rare. When the bus passes one, the docent announces, “And here is where they keep the stealth aircraft.” It always gets a laugh.
To plunge back into the past for a hoary April Fool’s joke that I remember fondly, in its April 1968 (IIRC) issue, Scientific American described the Flower-faced Snouters that lived only on the Hi-Yi-Yi Archipelago.
A few minutes research today revealed that this was not original with SciAm, but first appeared in a book published in Germany in 1957.
See: http://www.sivatherium.narod.ru/library/Stumpke/book_en.htm