April 1, 2022
April Fools’ Day is an annual custom on consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting “April Fools!” at the recipient. Mass media can be involved in these pranks, which may be revealed as such the following day. April 1 is not a public holiday in any country except Cyprus which is a national holiday (though not for April Fools’ Day but instead for a holiday called “Cyprus National Day“), Odessa, Ukraine and the first of April is an official city holiday.[1] The custom of setting aside a day for playing harmless pranks upon one’s neighbor has been relatively common in the world historically. Source: Wikipedia (Note: I send Wikipedia a check every month.)
It was not broadcast on April 1st , but perhaps one of the biggest pranks ever was “The War of the Worlds” . It was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells‘s novel The War of the Worlds (1898). It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode became famous for causing panic among its listening audience, although the scale of panic is disputed as the program had relatively few listeners.[1]
The show opens with an introductory monologue based on the beginning of the original novel, after which the program takes on the format of an evening of typical radio programming being periodically interrupted by news bulletins. The first few bulletins interrupt a program of live music and are relatively calm reports of unusual explosions on Mars followed by a seemingly unrelated report of an object falling on a farm in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. The crisis escalates dramatically when a correspondent reporting live from Grover’s Mill describes creatures emerging from an alien craft and incinerating police and onlookers with a heat ray until his audio feed abruptly goes dead. This is followed by a rapid series of news updates detailing the beginning of a devastating alien invasion and the military’s futile efforts to stop it. The first portion of the show climaxes with another live report from the rooftop of a Manhattan radio station. The correspondent describes crowds fleeing clouds of poison smoke released by giant Martian “war machines” and “dropping like flies” as the gas inexorably approaches his location. Eventually he coughs and falls silent, and a lone ham radio operator is heard mournfully calling “Is there anyone on the air? Isn’t there… anyone?” with no response. Only then did the program take its first break, over thirty minutes after Welles’s introduction. Source: Wikipedia
My mother-in-law Irene Rudie told me that their next door neighbors came over that night so that they wouldn’t have to die alone.
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes, art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams
Category : General 