Good Job, Brain! - 104: Fooled Ya

Episode Date: April 1, 2014

The left-handed burger? Trees that grow spaghetti? Celebrate April Fools' Day with us by learning some of the redonkulous trivia behind pranks and hoaxes. Colin regales us with the history behind iconic novelty gags like the Whoopee Cushion, Joy Buzzer, and the Snake Nut Can. Dana impresses us with the Mechanical Turk hoax, and Chris sets off to find out about the origin of April Fools. Karen emits some facts about fart humor (and an accompanying fart quiz), and are you up for the celebrity death hoax challenge? ALSO: Colin's Takedown, Our Patreon Debut! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Welcome, Welcome, welcome, every day-two-two-two-day-wind-dha, in-shun, guise, grand-b show. I'm this show-man, and then on my right-suff-bend is... I'm Colin. I'm Dana.

I'm Chris. Just kidding. April fools. It's not in Chinese. The whole show isn't in Chinese. That would have been really difficult. Even for me, I couldn't even find the Chinese word or the Mandarin Chinese word for podcasts. They just say, they just call podcast podcast.

Just a lone word. So I don't even know how you translate that. Anyways. But here's the real intro. Here we go. Welcome, spiffy, speculative, springy, sprightly speedsters. You are listening to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and Offi Trivia podcast. This is episode 104.

And of course, I am your humble host, Karen, and we are your dog-gone, dog-trodding, dog-tired, dog-y-dogs. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. Well, sure, Chris. Now you know something. Yeah. Now I know something. Your original intro, what did you say?

Welcome. Welcome, everybody you're listening to Good Job Brain, which is Jayao, Naldai Gua. Tuesday's trivia quiz show audio program. Okay. Because there's no podcast. Not quite a snappy, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm your host, and then to my right is Colin and blah, blah, blah.

Wow. All right, I want to share a headline with you guys, and a lot of you guys probably saw this. It was a big headline. It was on CNN, I believe. 14-year-old figured out a way to save government a lot of money. Did you guys say that? Yeah. I did.

Pittsburgh teenager, 14-year-old severe merchandani. He's trying to think of ways to cut waste and save money at his middle school, and it kind of became a science fair project. And he realized that if simply the government changed their font, they would save a lot of money because ink is expensive. He said ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume, right? Chanel number five, the perfume, costs $30 per ounce, whereas an HP printer ink, you know, of the same amount can cost up to $75. Right. But I wouldn't want to dab it underneath my earlobs.

No. Ew. So he proposed that, oh, if the government changed a font that uses less ink, then that would save the money. Correct? That sounds good. What a remarkable idea. I definitely saw that story repeated all over the place. It was on Facebook. People were emailing it. I think it made all the major news broadcasts. And not to be a downer, but I'm going to be a downer. All right. Here we go. This is a new segment called Collins Takedown. That's right. So I was browsing one of my... My brides are gears. I was browsing one of my typography and font websites.

One of them. One of. Yeah. And somebody on there was making the point like, you know, I'm really happy people are thinking about typography and fonts. But this is just one of those examples of a story where it's so oversimplified that it was kind of like, um, actually. There were a lot of sort of oversimplified or erroneous parts of this story.

And so like the one thing that the font site pointed out is, yeah, If you had switched to Garamond, in fact, was the font that the kid had suggested, it does use less ink because the letters are smaller. I mean, you could make the same change by just making all of your types smaller, you know? It's not the change to a new font. It's that that font actually has smaller letters at the same point size. So, like, if you, Ariel or Comic Sans at 12 point and you compare it to Garamond at 12 point, Garamond looks like a smaller font. That's right.

It looks like you scaled it down. That's right. That's right. So that's part of it. And then they got into some more technical areas. And I'll just summarize very quickly. But what? You're breaking down for the lay people, Colin.

Well, so they pointed out that a lot of the government printing, the major printing offices, they don't use HP ink jets in the office. They do offset printing on machines that use radically different kinds of inks than the kind of ink that you would use, or even laser toner or inkjet ink. So he's calculating HP ink volumes if you go to staples and buy HP ink, but that's not what they're actually... Right, right, right. And then finally, the last point that the author made...

The last nail and the spike in the coffin of... Was that... The knife twisting. Was that most government offices, like many large private companies, they have printing contracts with printer companies. They're not paying for the ink. They're not paying for the toner. If anything, they're paying on the number of pages printed.

So if you print 1,000 pages, that's your cost. It doesn't matter what's on those pages It's going to be full black with ink Generally, the toner or the ink is part of the service contract So, you know, it is sort of one of those like feel-good stories Because it involves kids, it involves government waste potentially But it was a little oversimplified He was looking at his school though

And I wonder if they use HP Well, so a lot of the experts say that this is a He did come up with a remarkable idea Probably not for the scale of the government But great for households Sure You know if you're at home and you're like Oh, okay, well, I'll change my, I'll change my default aerial or calibry to Garamond.

Your weekly household scheduling printout. That's why I was saying. I was like, what do I even print out? Nobody prints anything anymore. Boarding pass. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You could just show it on your phone, though, no.

That's true. Yeah, it is a feel good story. You want it to be right. And then the next thing you know, you're being a jerk to a 14-year-old on a podcast. I think even among nerds, font nerds, or looked at in their own little area. Yeah. It's so specific color.

It's very specific. And we have very exciting news. We actually get a lot of mail asking us how they can help support us, you know, because we had Kickstarter before and that's over. So a lot of people are like, oh, I wish I knew about this. So I would have kickstarted and added some money. And so now we've debuted something called Patreon. Patreon is a service where you can donate money as low as $1 a month for good job,

brain. after, you know, our fan meet up in Vegas, which was fantastic, like, we just sort of have this wish list of stuff that we want to do now. Like, we want to do more meetups and maybe live events or pub trivia contests and things like that. Scavenger hunts. Right, right. It's like, yeah, video stuff.

Right. And depending on, you know, if we can get some money in our budget, we will definitely, you know, try to do some of that stuff. So that's kind of what we're going for here. And can check that out at patreon.com. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash good job, brain. and check it out. Yeah, a dollar a month.

And we might come to your city. Oh. That sounds like a threat. It does. A nice little city you got there. The shame of good job brain was to come to it. All right, time for our first general trivia segment. Pop quiz, hot shot.

I have a random trivia pursuit card here. You guys have your barnyard buzzers. All right, here we go. Blue Wedge for Geography. The Pope is guarded by soldiers. from what country? Chris? Switzerland.

Whoa. Yeah. The Swiss Guard. Read some angels and demons. Oh, yeah. On your Dan Brown. That's Dan Brown. Switzerland, the Swiss Guard, has served the Pope since 1506.

Yeah. All right. Pink Wedge for pop culture. Oh, it's kind of a spoiler. All right. All right. Do it. As long as it's not for Game of Thrones season four, I'm fine with that.

In the 1973 sci-fi movie of the same name, what are Soylent Green Wafers made of? Everybody. People! Soilet Green is People. Charlton Heston's character discovers that Obefer population has led to corporate-sponsored cannibalism. Spoiler alert for a 40-year-old movie. 41. 41.

Wow. All right. Yellow Edge. Who was the first elected leader of post-Sovieter? Russia. Colin. Was that Yeltsin? What's his first name?

Oh, Boris. Yes, okay, okay. Purple Wedge, according to the nursery rhyme, how many blackbirds were baked in a pie? Uh, Chris. 24. Yeah, 4 and 20 blackbirds. Yeah, I'm just, I'm switching it up on it. Because it's 24.

It technically says 4 and 20. Greenwich for science, what is the common term for the force that pulls water away from the lettuce in your salad spinner. Oh, darn it. Uh, Dana. I didn't even buzz in it. Oh, but I do know what it is. Centipital force?

Incorrect. Centric. Uh, Colin. Centrifugal force. Oh, I wish I was centrifugal. Well, centrifugal, but yeah. Okay, last question, orange wedge. The clarified butter used in Indian cuisine is called what?

Dana. Gee. Gee. It's a good scrabble word. How do you spell G-H-E-E? G-H-E-E. All right, good job, Brains. And, of course, we have our lobe-trotter segment.

Lobe-Trotters are our fan club members who bought a fan club pack last year. And this one is from Leland Red from Salt Lake City. And he says, Dear G-J-B, my wife and I went to Iceland. And now I am obsessed with all things Iceland. Oh. Did you know that the first printed reference, to a geyser was the Icelandic geyser named geyser. No.

Really? That's the etymology of geysl is Icelandic for geysa or geysa or geisa. That's a really good one. Meaning to gush. So it's a gusher. I like that. And thank you, Leland, for this fun fact. So this week, in honor of April fools, we're going to talk about pranks, jokes, hoaxes.

Foolja. Foolja. Foolja. Boom So when I was really into like I love I love I love going to Spencer's gifts

Yeah All that kind of stuff What did you have The little practical jokes Yeah I don't know why I thought I was such a joker But I would buy stuff out of ads that I would see in the back of, like, comic books or magazines. Wait, really? I had the gum with the spring on it, though.

It was the gum with the spring on it. It was really my dad's. It was really my dad's joke. The gum that, like, slaps your finger with you take it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, classic. Gum that turned your mouth black or, yeah. I bought a lot of these things from ads I would see for the Johnson Smith catalog, which they're still around.

You may know that name. They're kind of the name and novelties and party tricks and just dumb little pranks, especially going back of ways. I had what I consider kind of the big three of the classic novelty pranks, which are, you guys could probably guess them if I gave you enough time. Wuppie cushion. Whoopi cushion, yep. Joy buzzer, yep.

Squirting flour. Exploding cigar. Dribble glass. Oh, you guys are all It's, it's... Why an ice cube? Can of snakes. A third testicle. Oh, okay. A can of snakes. Peanut brittle. Yes. It was often a can of quote, fancy salted nuts. The one I though was peanut brittle. Yeah. I don't know why that that became. Well, because it's more, it's more delicious. Yeah. It's actual candy. So you guys probably know the Whoopi Cush and Joy Buzzery. If you've never seen the can of snakes, it's a fake, it's a real can, but you open up the lid and there's a fake spring snake that pops out and supposed to scare whoever's opening the can. I should have known, like, as a kid that I wasn't going to fool a lot of people when like these things would come in the mail and my dad's like, oh, I had that one as a kid.

Right. Right. Oh, man. I mean, as a child, it must have been so transparent. Like, whenever a child was like, Hey, do you want some peanut riddle? Like, out of nowhere, like a child who's never gone to an adult ever and said, oh, you want some of that? And he's like laughing and turning red while we offer it. Right, right, right. You want a kind of poop? Yeah. What eight-year-old has a can of peanut riddle, you know?

They're just going around. And they really want you to eat it. They don't want to show it to you. Totally. No, you should have some. Yeah, you should have some. And, like, again, like, what eight-year-old kid is like just constantly wants to. to shake hands. You know, like, like, friends my parents would come over and like, oh, can I shake your

hand? It's like, what? Why? What a nice ring you're wearing there. Hey, hey, do you, do you want to sit on the couch? Oh, no, I think you should sit on that cushion. That's like four inches taller than the rest of the cushions. Oh, for no reason. Just sit on that cushion. Nothing happens either. You sit on it. You have to sit really hard on the whooping cushion and make it work. Anyway. So, uh, I want to share with you guys the rich history. behind these three particular items and how they can be traced back to the legacies of two men largely, SS Adams and Alfred Johnson Smith of the aforementioned Johnson Smith catalog. I always saw SS Adams on all of the stuff that I bought.

So I was more of a Johnson Smith kid. You were more of an SS Adams kid. Oh, so they're right. They were rivals. They were two separate companies. And they forged just the American industry of cheap, crappy things. practical gags. And they are both examples of the American dream. Both immigrants came to the land of opportunity with dreams of making their fortunes selling fart noise makers and bad pranks.

So let's begin with Soren, Sorensen Adams, S.S. Adams. Oh, I bet he's Danish. He was from Denmark. Yes, indeed. His family came here in late 1800s. And as a young man in the early 1900s, he was a salesman for a dye company, and he noticed that one of the products they sold had a tendency to make people sneeze. Like, like clothes dye or dice? Yeah, dyes, like D-Y-E. Right, mm-hmm. Like any good practical joker, he immediately saw the opportunity here of selling something

that makes people sneeze. Sounds kind of dangerous. Yeah. Well, you know, this was the 1900s. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, it's carcinogenic, I'm sure, right. There was a lot of stuff that was going to kill you in the 1990s before, yeah. He founded the Cotchew Sneezing Powder Company.

Single serving? The whole company? Just dedicated to selling Cotchew sneezing powder. And it was a fat. It swept the nation. In marketing. And he made enough money and was successful enough at it that he realized I can make my living selling novelties and gags and little things like sneezing powder. Oh, and expanding.

So he renamed the Cutsu Sneasing Powder Company to S.S. Adams. And the rest was history. And bless him, S.S. Adams did. dedicated his life to novelties and pranks. He invented hundreds of these little devices. So he invented them? He invented many and many of them. In 1915, S.S. Adams devised the snake nut can. He invented it himself, came up with the idea. To this day, it's one of their bestsellers. The story goes, you know, who knows how true this is, the story goes that his wife had been complaining at home about a particular jar of jam that was really tough to open.

And she's like, I can't get this jar open. So he's like, oh, I know what I'm going to do. So he himself made a fake snake, which is basically just a coil spring wrapped in fabric, stuffed it in the jam jar, and then just like kind of waited for her to open it so he could laugh at her. What? Yeah, I'm sure he was an absolute joy to have her on the couch that night. Oh, my God. In 1928, Adams invented the design for what we now know is the joy buzzer.

He came up with it himself. It was sort of an improvement on earlier ideas, but the classic design. of the little round disc with the button in the middle. He came up with it. He took it to a machinist, had him make it. It was patented in 1932. Huge, huge, huge hit. And it wasn't, I mean, in the packaging, it's always,

they always have little lightning bolts, and it's like, you think it's electric. Right, right. You're right. You're right. You're right. But no, but you, when you're not expecting it and you feel vibration and hear the sound, yeah, you get, you get, ah, and you're going to pull your hand away because I don't know what it is.

Chris has it absolutely right. It was supposed to, like, simulate a sense of shock. But you're right. You'll see it in cartoons or comics. They'll depict it as if it's electrified, but it's not really electrified. He came up with the original fly in the ice cube that we were talking about. He came up with dribble glasses. What are dribble glasses?

They have kind of a hole at the part where you drink. So you're drinking, and then it's just filling out of the cups, like below that. Yeah, I'm sure he got invited to a lot of parties in his day. Probably did. Like, this guy really had an inherent gift. He did. He did. He really was...

He had his finger on the pulse of what pranksters wanted, on and on and on, just dozens and dozens and dozens of hits, many of which he invented himself. In fact, one of his only misses seems to have been turning down a proposal from the JEM Rubber Company of Canada. In the late 1920s, some employees there, they were playing around with scrap sheets of rubber and kind of sealing them together. And they noticed, hey, you can fill this up with air and it makes a farting sound. So this was... That's crass. Yeah. No.

That's what happened. That's what happened. They took their idea for the inflatable farting sound cushion. They took it to Adams and said, hey, we want you to sell this. This seems right up your alley. And he wouldn't sell it. He said he thought it was vulgar. And he didn't think there was going to be a market for it.

Wow. But that guy invented something when you open it, it hits you in the face. Yeah, but that's not vulgar. But that's not vulgar. It might poke your eye out, but it's not vulgar. So the JEM rubber company, they took their idea to the other major name in Novelties and Pranks, the Johnson Smith Company. They're not afraid of plastic poop. They were not afraid to go.

In fact, it's true. Among their biggest sellers were fake vomit. The lower valid one. And I'll tell you, fake vomit, fake vomit is the long game. Kids, the fake vomit is not about leaving it on the floor and somebody who's the fake fake because they're going to be able to tell it's fake vomit. It's about six months later when there's real vomit on the floor. And then your mom is like, oh, it's that fake vomit again. And she just jams her hand right inside it to get it off the floor.

It's like the joke that pays off twice, basically. So yeah, Alfred Johnson Smith, he was Australian. And the ruse of the company went back to Australia. But it really took off after he moved to the U.S. and started his business in the early 1900s. And he was maybe a little more lowbrow, I guess. He sold a lot of rubber chickens, and as I said, like fake vomit, fake poo over the years. Same sort of type of things.

And when the J.M. Rubber Company came to him and said, sir, we want you to sell our fart noise maker. He said, yes, I will sell your fart noise maker. This is what I've been looking for in years. It's brilliant. A bolt from on high. And they called it the Whoopie Cushion, went on to become an enormous hit, helped Johnson Smith become a household name. And that iconic picture that's on every whoopee cushion of the woman sitting on the whoopee cushion, it's never changed. Yeah, yeah, I think it's probably dates to 1930.

Little speech bubbles that say poo, poo. Yeah. Coming out of. Yep. You're right. You're right. And you buy it today. It's essentially the same device.

Why change it? Why change it? In recent years, they've started putting foam inside so that it refills itself a little bit more easily. No, it refills itself. Yeah, but that's true. You're right. It's the self-refilling whoopie cushion because the foam pushes up and expands and it sucks air back in. So you don't have to like blow and inflated. You don't have to put your mouth for somebody's butt once once.

Right, or your brothers or sister's mouth ten times before that. It seems like a fair price. Oh, yeah. I'll pay the upcharge for that. You got to keep moving the technology forward. It's state of the art. You really do. Yeah. So now, of course, after seeing the wild success of the Johnson's,

Whopi Cushion, S.S. Adams realized, okay, you know what, this thing is going to sell. We need our own version. So they introduced the raspberry cushion. It functions exactly the same way that a whoopee cushion functions. But, well, they didn't, certainly the name didn't catch on. Whoopi cushion was first to market and they owned it. Tell me there was a lawsuit. I don't think there was a lawsuit. This is kind of just back in the early days of, ah, you're going to rip me off. I'm going to rip you off. We'll see who does better. Today, both SS Adams and Johnson Smith are still around. They saw a lot of stuff online, still going strong. You can still buy the snake nut can, still buy the Joy

buzzer. And I just, I love that they've been around for decades and decades and decades. So you said the SS Adams Company also released a whoopee cushion was called? The raspberry cushion. Do you guys know why a raspberry cushion is called a raspberry cushion? I mean, I know the like the, the sound is called a raspberry. Yes. Yes. But I don't know where that illusion is to. Correct. So when, you know, you do something and you make a farting noise or you're like, and you put your tongue between your lips and you exhale, I guess. I don't want to spit on that. It's called a raspberry.

Why is that action called a raspberry? All right. Here's a theory. All right. Oh, is there no definitive? You know, they have recorded first use in 1890. Whoa. Oh, okay.

And the popular theory is that this was part of Cockney rhyming sleigh. Okay. So Cockney rhyming slang, a little bit hard to, I don't know how to really explain it that well. Cockney, being a part of English. They would say the word they intended to, but they would make a rhyme. Right. So, for example, you want to say, I'm going up the stairs. And they would make up, well, stairs sounds like pairs.

And a popular phrase would be apple and pairs. Right, right. So then you would just say Apple. Right. So it's like three steps removed. Another example would be a lot of people refer to their wives as trouble, not because they are trouble, because it rhymes with trouble and strife, which rhymes with wife.

Everybody watched at Ocean's 11, we're in Barney. Barney, Rubble. Barney Rubble. Trouble. So that's kind of what cock and wrangling. It's like two steps removed. Or it can be. Sometimes it's just the, yeah.

Yep. So Raspberry, why is Raspberry related to the noise? Okay, all right. What? What? You think you got it? Raspberry tart. Yes!

Raspberry tart rhymes with fart. So when you say I farted or, you know, I let out a fart, I let out a raspberry. Oh, that's great. Wow. A theory of why we call Raspberry Raspberry. That's a cool coded language. It is. It is.

Yeah. Yeah, we should do a future section on Cockney Rhymes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, like, also diner lingo. Yeah, yeah, yep, purple cow. I don't know what that is. Purple cow is a grape soda with ice cream. All right, yeah, sure.

I bet it is, but I literally never heard that. She's like, you know, grape soda with ice cream. I was like, why would you do that? I was like a lemma pig, which is, you know, pork and spright. Sprite with bacon. Spite with bacon. Give me a lemon pig, Earl. So I'm sprite with bacon.

I'm coming up Back to Raspberry So I have some Some facts about fart humor Okay I think of whoopie cushions And raspberry tarts I don't know if you came across this

But there is a belief that Even back in the Roman days They actually had some sort of prototype Or whoopie cushions We don't know what it was But even back then It was funny It was just a servant

That said underneath your chair Like, you know, it's a hard job. Yeah, I imagine it was maybe like an animal bladder or something like that. Right. Yeah. Okay, sure. I didn't think about that. Or someone who just sat next to you and made a farting noise. Yeah. You know, the ancient Romans, they knew good humor with us. Yeah. Yeah. So, in honor of farts, I'm sure when you guys were kids, you had a lot of comebacks when someone farted. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So here I have a quiz. American culture, I'm sure other cultures, too.

There's kind of a joke format where if someone's farted and you're like, who farted? And someone will be like, he who smelt it, delton. Right. And it's that kind of a format where he who blank and then rhymes with blank. Right. He who denied it supplied. Yeah, that was the follow-up. All right.

So I have a whole list of here. You guys don't need to buzz it. Just complete the sentence. Okay. All right. All right. And I'm sorry that I'm saying he. We're just going to go with Ki-Hoo.

That doesn't mean... Girls can fart, too, basically is what we're trying to say. They can, but they don't. Yeah. I was going to say. We called them powder puffs. All right. Here we go.

He who declared it. Oh. He aired it? Yeah. Aired it not bad. There's another one, too. He who declared it. Blared it.

Yes. Oh, yeah. Bared it and blared it. Acceptable answers. Flaired it. He who. He who observed it. Deserved it?

He who observed it? Oh, served it? Served it. Oh, okay. It's the act of... Act of emitting. Right, yeah. He who detected it.

Ejected it. Yes. He who's poking fun. Is the smoking gun? Yes. Nice. He who refuted it. Whoed it?

Tooted it. Distributed it. Distributed it. Putted it. I'll say toot it. Tooted it. I'm going to go. But I, you know, I think extruded it.

Extruted it. Extruted it. Extruted it. It's like diarrhea. Yeah. That's not good. That's something coming out. Or just regular.

He who deduced it. Produced it. It's produced. I had no idea there was such a rich, rich. Rich, rich, set of saying. It's quite rich. Yeah. Words why, man.

And fork humor. All right. He who spoke it. Broke it? Yep. Broke it. Oh, yeah. Broke it.

Yes. He who explained it. Sustained it. Not bad. Yes, that works. Claimed? Maintained. He who what?

He who, he who. Explained. He who. explained it. Amed it. Ordained it. Really? Wow.

That's quite a big word. That's what you say. That's what you say when the Pope first. When the Swiss guard are like, hey, man, do you smell that? I was like, he who ordained it. He who thunk it. Stunk it. Stunk it.

He who resented it. Presented it. This goes on. Two more. Two more. He who accused it. Diffused it. Diffused it.

And my favorite one. Oh, right. He who articulated it. Particulated it. Particulated it. Particulated it. It has a little science angle. That one I remember from Futurama.

He who articulated it, particulate it. It was young little Huber. He who articulated it, particulated it. That's a very Futurama joke. That's so cute. Thank you everybody. There you go. And let's take our quick ad break, a word from our sponsor. Did archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture coming as soon as the Euphrates River dries up? Does the Bible condemn abortion? Don't you wish you had a trustworthy academic resource to help make sense of all of this?

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Welcome back. You're listening to Good Job Brain, and this week we're talking about pranks, fooling, jokes, and fart noises. Well, actually, we talked about fart noises. We don't have any more fart noises coming up. Well, there might be. We don't know. I started doing some research on April Fool's Day. And it took me down a really weird rabbit hole that I want to share with you guys first. It's a little bit of a digression, but it's... Actually, I have no idea why, like, how April Fool's came to be. So it is, it is relevant to this discussion. Now, we get things wrong on this show sometimes, but I'm pretty sure I'm correct about this next fact that I'm going to say right now.

Okay. There were no trivia podcasts in 1708. Not a one. Actually. However, there was a publication in Britain called the British... Apollo or curious amusements for the ingenious, which sounded like a nice, yeah, we can maybe borrow their tagline because they've been out of print for the last few centuries. And so basically, one of the things that they would do in this publication, the British Apollo,

people would be able to write in questions to them, to the editors, and they would answer your questions. Like, you know, if you're wondering about things about the world and, like, they'll tell you. And so question that was asked is, whence precedes the custom. of making April Fools. Ah. So back in, this was a 1708 issue of this publication. So that already exists, April Fools. It was already existed, and there were already people asking, like, it was so long

before that, there were already people going, why do we do this? What is the deal, you know, 1708, what is the deal with, you know, making all these jokes on April 1? As it turns out, even now, the custom is so old that you will not find a good answer. What you will hear a lot from people is this idea that in France, they had the calendar, and their calendar started on April 1st, and then when they decreed that the year was going to start on January 1st, like, that would be the beginning of a year. It was like the people who still honored April. Exactly. People who were like on the old calendar, the April Fool. That was the story I always heard as a kid.

It sounds so mean. Like, what's the point of making fun of them? People were mean back then. There's lots of things passing doubt. on that because the switchover and well first of all the lot of the switchovers and calendars were it was not so abrupt you know it took like a century for people to totally switch over to the calendar so yeah that's probably not it however so the museum of hoaxes which has a extensive body of research on aprilful's day talks about the flemish writer edward de dene or edward de dane he apparently um published a poem in 1560s About a guy who sends one of his servants out on a bunch of wild goose chases and the servant finally realizes like, oh, whoops, it's April 1st. He's fooling me. So 1561, that is the first written reference and it is totally like April 1st, you play practical jokes on people. On your service.

So this is old, old. So this is old, old. A lot of people point out that there is the Roman festival. of Hilaria, which had taken place around the spring equinox, and you actually see kind of all around the world where there's, where winter turns to spring, you see festivals of renewal, like, we're not dead, you know, like, party. One of the things that they point out about the Roman festival is that, like, only on this day it was everybody allowed to just go out and just, like, play games and play tricks on people

or dress up like someone above your station, you know what I mean? Like that sort of thing. Like a suspension of like some of the social niceties and the rules. Yeah, and people would refer to it as like temporarily suspending the social order by way of pointing out that there is a social order. Right. You know, the exception proving the rule. Like, this is the day where you get to go out and do everything and they have 364 days of the year. You know, you keep your mouth shut.

Know your place. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, there's a thought that like that's, that's too close to April 1st. There must be a connection, you know, of all that stuff. But what I remember from high school is taking French class and learning about April Fool's in France, Italy, Belgium. They say Poisson d'Areal or April Fish, and they cut out a fish, a paper fish, and you try to, you try to slap it onto your friend's back. You've been puasant. You just got poissons.

Having basically run into that wall at my worded April Fool's come from research, I have brought to you now some of the funniest, or I think that they're the funniest, some of the best. Big-time April Fool's pranks that have ever been pulled. Okay. And this was Museum of Hoaxes lists this as number one. I totally agree. In 1957, the venerated British television news show, still in the days of black and white TV and, you know, the UK, the news show called Panorama. Total, total down the middle, straightforward news show. You know, the anchor was incredibly famous in Britain, and everybody totally trusted this guy.

they did a report on April 1st about Swedish spaghetti farmers and how basically they have all this footage of like Swedish people in traditional dress like pulling spaghetti off of spaghetti trees and just talking about how like this year had a bumper harvest because the spaghetti weevil has not been seen in as great numbers and just there's nothing like fresh homegrown spaghetti say the Swedes Now, the best part is just like, of course, this is more of a family run operation. All of you will, of course, remember seeing footage of the vast spaghetti plantations in Italy. Now, the thing is, at this point, people in the UK ate spaghetti.

It was exotic foreign food. There were fights between husbands and wives over the wife saying that it was made with flour and water, and the husband saying, no, it grows on trees. It was all on TV. It wouldn't lie to me. and just tons of people fell for it. Wait, why Sweden, though? It's far away as well.

Yeah, right, right. It's far enough away you can't go fact-checked by looking outside. Yep. Some of the other better ones. This is actually... People really believe this. People believed it, yeah. It was on TV?

Eventually, they had to pull back and just were like, okay, we were joking. But, like, you know... People would ask, where could I get a spaghetti tree? I want to grow spaghetti. Yeah, yeah. And I said, oh, just get a can of tomato sauce. put a spaghetti stick in there and hope for the best. Well, in 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page newspaper ad

in six major papers saying that they had purchased the Liberty Bell and we're renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. People got so upset. In an effort to help pay down the national debt, we have purchased the Liberty Bell, and we're renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. And people were so angry. How dare you?

Well, because they do it to stadiums. It is completely believable. And it is believable that a corporation like Taco Bell would do that. You know, like they're almost poking fun at themselves in the golden age of sponsorships and name sponsorships. Nothing is sacred anymore. Yep, yep. In 1998, Burger King took out a full page ad in USA Today to announce the left-handed Whopper. What did it look like?

Well, it was like a whopper. That was a whopper with it said it's a wopper with all the condiments rotated 180 degrees. That's good. And they got a lot of responses. People coming in asking for, you know, the left-handed robbers, they were left-handed. Were you guys big pranksters growing up? Because I was. I tried to be.

No one ever opened my can of snakes. Yeah. Like, that's great, Colin. Like senior pranks? Do you guys do any of that stuff? I don't think I'm trying to think of any I needed lots of attention

Let me tell you guys Some of my tricks One of my favorite tricks Is I did this to my roommates in college You unscrew the head of a shower And then you take crushed up Candies like lifesavers Or Jolly Ranchers

The best is the clear ones Like I can find clear hard candy Oh okay Crush it up and you put it back on a shower head, and then you wait for someone to take a shower. The hot water will go through the shower, melt the candy. Yeah. And they're taking a shower, and they become sticky.

It's like hot sugar and sugar water. Yeah. So I have a question for you guys. Have you ever heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk? Yeah. You've heard of that service where you can basically pay people a really small amount of money to do kind of tedious thing for you. Like you want to look through pictures for something and you're like, hey, I'll pay somebody

two cents for an hour's worth of work. Wait, is this real? Yeah, it's like outsourcing work that you need to the internet, to the world. And it's Amazon. Yeah. Got it. And so when I first heard of it, I was like mechanical Turk. Like people from Turkey.

Like, why? That's weird. Oh, T-U-R-K. Yeah, it is. It is that. It seems a little. Racist? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, so it's based on a hoax that happened where there was a mechanical Turk. It was this robot that looked like a roughly like a Turk. person, as seen through the eyes of an European person in the 1770, wearing a turban and he was a chess master, robot. He'd sit at this big cabinet with a chess table on top and people could challenge the robot to chess matches and it would beat them. And it could also do like really elaborate chess tricks on the chess board. The only experts would know how to do. There was an inventor who debuted in 1770 for the Empress of Austria. People were

not baffled how it was made. They were like, it's a robot that plays chess. It's this ingenious. Marvel of the modern age. Marvel. And it was a hoax. It did turn out to be a hoax. But it took like over 80 years before the secret came out.

It toured all around Europe and the Americas, people like Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin played against it and lost. So here's the, here's the spoiler. Here's the secret of the mechanical turk. There would be a chess master inside of it. playing you've got a little chessmaster in that box that's right probably more than six world class chess masters that would go in there you had a team of chess masters you would take it on tour and so it would be like they did all sorts of variations depending on who the master was and how good they were they would do different sets of the rules like oh they'll play with one fewer piece that's how good

they were that they could beat you so they beat most people maybe a few people that beat the mechanical turk but it was just very impressive it wasn't the fact that it was good at chess it was the fact that it was actually a robot a robot play chess at all yeah yeah it was still impressive there was a little voice box inside of it there was say like the robotic um check but but in french oh yeah checkmate but in french i just thought it was amazing that they were able to pull this off for over 80 years yeah people would interact with it and not And also, it's like, you guys, do you have anything else in your world that has this level of intelligence? Right.

Right. Yeah. And if you tried to trick it and move a piece incorrectly, it would like move your piece back. It would dock you and then take a turn because it's a chess master. It's like, you know, whatever. But they were like, what? I tried to trick it. And they had like magnets all around.

You're playing against a person. I know. So that term is now a common phrase, mechanical Turk. Mechanical. Well, it depends on who you talk to, right? Right, right. Techy people, it comes up. It's a false automaton.

You can look up more false automaton. Yeah. There's, yeah, there have been other examples. There were various people who wanted to buy it and would offer, like, huge sums of money for it. Emperors or kings would ask for it. He told one of the emperors the secret. And then apparently the emperor was really sad after. Oh, poor emperor.

But they didn't tell anybody. Old time he hoaxes are weird. Remember I read about this old. tiny hoax were like a woman stuffed dead rabbits up her vagina and told the world that she gave birth to rabbits. Yeah.

A bunch of other kind of weird stuff. I don't know what the goal is. I mean, to be famous. I don't know. Yeah. To be famous. They made a lot of money to touring around with this thing. Yep.

But not the lady who gave birth to rabbits. Oh. She has to have a constant supply of dead rabbits. She might have been a little unstable, I think. Yeah. You might be right. Yeah. There's some people who need a lot of attention.

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They'll do anything to carve their peace out of this treacherous world and not just survive, but rule. Enemy of my dreams is available wherever books are sold. And we got one last quiz segment. Colin, what did you got? So, celebrity death hoaxes are,

they're not new. No. We've talked on the show before about like Paul is dead, you know, the theory that Paul McCartney was secretly replaced by a double in the 1960s, which was not true, by the way. But those predate the internet.

I think, you know, these days, Facebook and Twitter just have really brought new life to the speed with which a celebrity death hoax can just spread. Take over. Right. Everyone's heard about it. So I put together a quiz for you guys about some very notable celebrity death hoaxes over the last few years. So get your buzzers ready.

And when I'm done reading, buzz on in. In March of 2012, fake news reports attributed to CNN and Fox News claimed this diva had been killed in either a plane crash or a car accident, depending on which fake report you happen to see on Facebook. When? When, when? 2012. Oh, I was going to say Gloria Estefan, but I was like, she was really a little hint. At the time, she was in the middle of promotional tours for her new album, Love Me Back to Life. This was Celine Dion. Huh.

Yes. And it turns out that these Facebook posts all went back to basically some malicious, it was malicious software. And it was like harvesting users info. And the idea was get you to click on the Facebook post and then it could easel its way and attract your information. In June of 2009, the fake news site, Global Associated News, reported that this Academy Award-winning actress had fallen to her death off a cliff in New Zealand. Oh, I do kind of remember that. Anna Pac-win? No, not Anna Pac-Wan.

This was in 2009. She won her Academy Award in 2010. This was Natalie Portman. And just the week prior, the same false news report had been put out about Jeff Goldblum that he had fallen to his death off a cliff. In New Zealand. In New Zealand. I was like, somebody fell in New Zealand, but was it a woman? Yeah.

It was like it didn't take the first time with Jeff Goldblum, and we'll try it again. In May 2013, according to false reports on Facebook, this rapper had been nearly stabbed to death in New York City. There was a hit movie based on this rapper's life. Dana. Is this 50th? No, no. Chris. Is it M&M?

It is M&M. What did you say? M&M. MNM. MNM. Yeah, these fake posts were even accompanied by these really gruesome pictures of someone who had been. stabbed. The photos were real. It was not Eminem. He was not stabbed. He didn't die. His representative had to issue a report saying that he, quote, remains unstabbed. So far. I feel like this is a

statement on our friends, you know, like social media friends. Because I don't see it on there. Yeah. I haven't heard of any of it. See, a lot of these, though, will make the jump off of Facebook or Twitter and to news, like real legitimate news sources will sometimes pick these stories up in the rush to have it first, and then they'll have to issue retractions later. Dangerous game, man. It is. In June 2007, false reports circulated online that this celebrity had died after being shanked in a Los Angeles jail where she was serving 45 days for a probation violation.

Dana and Chris. Martha Stewart. Paris Hilton. It was Paris Hilton. Yes, Paris Hilton. And again, the reports. And again, the report's got so much traction that a representative for the jail had to come out and say, no, Ms. Hilton has not been shanked. She is fine. She's still in her. Remains unshanked.

Last one. In April 2013, some misunderstood Twitter hashtags related to the death of Margaret Thatcher apparently led to rumors that this singer and actress had died. Oh, yeah. It was. like the the hashtag was now thatcher's dead yeah chris now that shares dead yes you're right people are like oh share died now that shares dead oh that is unfortunate that is really unfortunate what was the hashtag again now thatcher's dead which also means now that shares dead yes all of these people were not in fact dead at the Yeah, that's right. Yes, take everything you see online with a grain of salt.

All right, and that is our show. Thank you guys for joining me. I thank you guys, listeners, for listening. I hope you learned a lot of stuff about novelty items. Farts. Farts, mechanical turks. And you can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and on our website, good job, brain.com.

And thanks for a sponsor, Squarespace, and we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye. Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast. I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous, and not so famous, and not so famous, adventures from throughout history. Go to Explorespodcast.com or just look us up on your

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