April Fool's Wrap Up

[UPDATED BELOW]
So it turns out that the Conficker virus didn't have much of an effect after all, although this story out of San Francisco suggests that the infected machines are still out there and may show themselves at some point in the future. If it was some sort of an April Fools' prank, it sort of fell flat.

But were there other decent April Fools' activities this year? A lot of them certainly seemed heavy handed to me, nothing especially nimble enough to trick us into falling for them, but some clever nonetheless. A very nice joke came from Trent Reznor, announcing the new Timbaland-produced Nine Inch Nails album, giving a little (or a big) tweak to Chris Cornell. The Guardian had an interesting idea, transferring all their archives into Twitter tweets. Not believable, particularly, but some of their examples were funny:

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "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?"

National Public Radio usually goes for something today, but I have to say I wasn't overly impressed--their efforts in previous years have slipped past my guard. Morning Edition went for a story of Econoland, a new theme park run by The Economist. All Things Considered tried a bit of an end run, hiding its April Fools joke inside listener comments on a story yesterday about an Illinois whale farm that was too over the top for my money.

The funniest joke I heard came from a very unexpected source. Glenn Beck made himself the butt of the joke today by going back on his frequent warnings that Obama and the Democrats are leading us to socialism. No, he's just discovered that the road is one to fascism, instead. He says that it's a course we've been headed to since the days of Teddy Roosevelt more than 100 years ago. If this isn't a joke and Beck is correct, at least we can take heart in the fact that, if we've been moving toward fascism for more than 100 years and this is as far as we've got, at least we're not very good at it. On the other hand, if Beck has identified an actual threat to our society, well, there can only be one response.

UPDATE--The best April Fool's joke was one I didn't see until April 2. Steven Grant described how Rupert Murdoch is in the process of buying DC Comics out from under Time Warner. He set it up in a way that left me going, "I don't think that's true." Well done!