1 April 2008
My Favorite April Fools Day.
Posted by Toner under: Nerd Culture .
A few years ago I wrote some freelance articles for a Web site called Charged.com. It was a content site that described itself as being dedicated to the coverage of “Extreme Leisure.”
To give you an example of what, exactly, that is it had articles about such varied topics as “building your own catapult” and “keeping camels as pets” as well as features on all the usual extreme sports such as mountain biking, surfing etc.
In this particular instance I was assigned to write an article on Tree Climbing. It was actually kind of interesting, I found out there was this whole subculture of people who are REALLY into tree climbing. There’s loads of special gear, you can even sleep in a tree tent.
Who knew?
My article had gone out March 31st 19-sometime before the dot com crash. On April 1st, the site decided to pull an April Fools joke and pretended that it had turned into a Porn site. There really wasn’t any porn, it was just things like “Kitty Porn” (with pictures of kittens rolling in string, etc.). However the design was really dead-on as to what Porn sites looked like back then, complete with pop-ups and animated gifs.
Well, one of my sources for the article, a super nice granola-type from out West who apparently did a lot of climbing with his son and their friends from church, went to check out the article and didn’t really read the headlines close enough to tell it was a joke. I’m sure there’s some saying about how “there’s nothing like a Christian scorned” (or if there’s not there should be), but this guy unloaded on me with both barrels. I mean, the cursing was truly epic. Quentin Tarantino could not have written better dialogue.
I felt really awful, the guy had been super helpful, but, also, ya know, this was really a non-issue, so I sent him an e-mail like “hey, did you really READ what was there… It’s all pictures of kittens and stuff…”
No reply…
Maybe you had to be there… But, it still makes me chuckle a little. In a really uncomfortable, icky way…
Technorati Tags: Charged.com, Extreme Leisure, Tree Climbing, April Fools
