This list of the top 100 April Fool’s day hoaxes of all time is actually quite entertaining. What struck me while reading through it, though, is just how gullible some people (well, a lot of people actually) can be.

Well, there’s a lesson for anybody forwarding on all those Bill Gates will give you money emails, contemplating joining Cilla Black’s pyramid selling scheme, or sending me that piece from the Weekly World News about the time travelling wall street trader being busted for insider trading.

Oh, and I spotted a couple of good April Fool jokes myself yesterday. The Guardian hid theirs away in the Education section (something about Carole Caplin being appointed the education regulator: “to avoid picking someone with a conflict of interest, we picked someone with no experience or qualifications whatsoever… she’ll be bringing degrees in assisted showering and shopping to the traditional universities…”), and this RFC on setting the “evil bit” in IPv4 communications was doing the rounds at work yesterday. Ok, I admit it, I’m a geek…

Oh, and my favourite one out of the list of hoaxes is #69. It was apparently in The Times in 1991, and discussed a plan to double the capacity of the M25 by making it one way only during the week:

“On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays the traffic would travel clockwise; while on Tuesdays and Thursdays it would travel anti-clockwise.”

Fantastic. Many gullible people protested about this, but my favourite comment was this one: “A resident of Swanley, Kent was quoted as saying, ‘Villagers use the motorway to make shopping trips to Orpington. On some days this will be a journey of two miles, and on others a journey of 117 miles. The scheme is lunatic.'”