INANE (ih-NAYN)
Lacking
intelligent thought – complacently foolish
Common
clues: Vacuous; Silly; Absurd; Pointless; Nonsensical;
Cockamamie; Foolish; Fatuous; Ludicrous
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
5 times a year
Frequency
in English language:
36766 / 86800
News:
April
Fool's Day: Dodge pranksters or they will dodge you
Video:
Hollywood
Squares April Fools 2003
April
Fools' Day, or All Fools' Day, though not a holiday in its own
right, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1.
The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical
jokes of varying sophistication on friends, enemies and
neighbors, or sending them on fools' errands, the aim of which is
to embarrass the gullible. In some countries, April Fools' jokes
(also called April Fools) are only made before noon on 1 April.
"Whenever
I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I
can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but
not with all those flies and death and stuff."
--Mariah
Carey
Though
the 1st of April appears to have been observed as a general
festival in Great Britain in antiquity, it was apparently not
until the beginning of the 18th century that the making of
April-fools was a common custom. In Scotland the custom was known
as "hunting the gowk," i.e. the cuckoo, and April-fools
were "April-gowks," the cuckoo being a term of
contempt, as it is in many countries.
Well-known
pranks
Alabama
Changes the Value of Pi: The
April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason
contained an article written by physicist Mark Boslough claiming
that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the
mathematical constant pi to the "Biblical value" of
3.0. This claim originally appeared as a news story in the 1961
science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A.
Heinlein.
Spaghetti
trees: The BBC television programme Panorama ran a famous
hoax in 1957, showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees.
They had claimed that the despised pest the spaghetti weevil had
been eradicated. A large number of people contacted the BBC
wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees. It
was in fact filmed in St Albans.
Left
Handed Whoppers: In 1998, Burger King ran an ad in USA Today,
saying that people could get a Whopper for left-handed people
whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side. Not
only did customers order the new burgers, but some specifically
requested the "old", right-handed burger.
Taco
Liberty Bell:
In 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in The New
York Times announcing that they had purchased the Liberty Bell to
"reduce the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco
Liberty Bell." When asked about the sale, White House press
secretary Mike McCurry replied tongue-in-cheek that the Lincoln
Memorial had also been sold and would henceforth be known as the
Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
San
Serriffe:
The Guardian printed a supplement in 1977 praising this fictional
resort, its two main islands (Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse), its
capital (Bodoni), and its leader (General Pica). Intrigued
readers were later disappointed to learn that San Serriffe (sans
serif) did not exist except as references to typeface
terminology. (This comes from a Jorge Luis Borges story.)
Metric
time:
Repeated several times in various countries, this hoax involves
claiming that the time system will be changed to one in which
units of time are based on powers of 10.
Smell-o-vision:
In 1965, the BBC purported to conduct a trial of a new technology
allowing the transmission of odor over the airwaves to all
viewers. Many viewers reportedly contacted the BBC to report the
trial's success. This hoax was also conducted by the Seven
Network in Australia in 2005. In 2007, the BBC website repeated
an online version of the hoax.
Tower
of Pisa:
The Dutch television news reported once in the 1950s that the
Tower of Pisa had fallen over. Many shocked people contacted the
station.
Write
Only Memory:
Signetics advertised Write Only Memory IC databooks in 1972
through the late 1970s.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "April
Fools’ Day.”
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