With one day to go to April 1st, April Fool's Day, you might be surprised if you listened to some of us in the Kyrenia Estate office discussing and dreaming up some very novel ideas for pranks we can play on our friends in the morning.  Yes, we celebrate Aprils Fool's Day in Northern Cyprus too.

With these discussions going on Gilly our office manager who is based in the Catalkoy branch came up with a great idea to write a blog about Aprils Fool's Day.  Well done Gilly, what a great idea, your blogs had me giggling all afternoon.  I just can’t get the vision of my TV wearing stockings out of my mind.

So now onto the blog from Gilly about  April Fool's Day

APRIL FOOL’S TRADITIONS

It is unsure how April got its name but possibly from the Latin word ‘aperire’ which means “to open”. 

“Eostre monath or Eastremonath was the Anglo-Saxon name for the month.  The name of the Christian Festival of Easter comes from this Anglo Saxon word.

April traditionally begins with a day of fun and jokes – now known as: April Fool’s Day.  No one really knows when this custom began but it has been kept for hundreds of years.

April fooling became popular in England and Scotland during the 1700s.

April Fool jokes usually involve persuading someone to do something silly, like telephoning, unbeknown to them, the local zoo and asking for Mr. G. Raff, Mr. C. Lion etc.,  or getting a tin of striped paint - or some other such non-existent thing. 

However, you can only play April fools on unsuspecting people before midday – at midday the fun must stop or the trickster is told:

‘April Fool’s Day is past and gone,

You’re the fool and I am none”.

Some great April Fools jokes included:

In 1957 the popular and respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

In its April 1985 edition, Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the "art of the pitch" in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa." Mets fans celebrated their teams' amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. But in reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article!

In 1962 there was only one television channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. The station's technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that, thanks to a new technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to display colour reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their television screen. Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of people were taken in. Fumingly enough, regular colour broadcasts only commenced in Sweden some 8 years later on 1st April!

In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."

In its April 1995 issue Discover Magazine announced that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These amazing creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at incredible speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.

In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation.

and, my personal favourite:

In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology.

Gilly

Office Manager

Donaghy and Beyler

Property Agents & Lettings

www.donaghyandbeyler.com