You know you are getting old when:

[Matt Crunk]

-
Are you mad? . . . The winkle is a snail, a tiny little thing, so doused in vinegar that you couldn't taste it.
I give you: The Whelk. And you're welcome to it.
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I had sea snail in Mexico once. Not bad. I'm not talking about conch (though I've eaten conch many times and love it) but a proper snail about like the one in your photo. Sea-snail cocktail in fact. Like a shrimp cocktail but with slugs.

 

[GHT]

I have never been a fan of practical jokes - not when played on me, but I don't even like seeing them played on others.

When the joke targets somebody it's neither funny nor clever, but here in the UK we have sort of separated that which is amusing, we refer to it as a wind up. Wind is pronounced like winding a clock, not wind as in weather.
The sort of thing that I mean is akin to April Fool jokes. One year, one of our national newspapers actually hoodwinked much of their readership with an April Fool gag by suggesting that over the millennia, all the putting forward and putting back the clocks to gain extra daylight, had actually resulted in the loss of 48 hours. To compensate, the government planned to remove the last two days of July. The gag went on for about half a page with lots of plausible sounding reasons about getting the calendar back into kilter. This happened pre-email and the result was mail by the sack full, all complaining. People who had plans for those two days of July; weddings; holidays; house removal, the list was endless.
It doesn't seem so funny now, but the joke was just how gullible people can be to believe everything at face value.

 

[vitanola]

Your nation has a long and glorious history of such jokes. Remember BBC Television's "Spaghetti Harvest at Ticino"?

 

[LizzieMaine]

We had a tradition in our local paper of such stories on April Fools Day, the best being the one that announced the impending construction of a bridge to Vinalhaven, an island town about fifteen miles off the coast from here. It was convincing enough that people started writing in fusty letters to the editor complaining about another "money-wasting boondoggle" coming from the State House.

On a mailing list for 78rpm record collectors many years ago I once pulled an April Fools joke of my own announcing the discovery of a long-lost cache of radio broadcast recordings from the early 1930s, containing legendary broadcasts by the late and highly-fetishized Bix Beiderbecke. It was an extremely elaborate joke, based on lines in old trade journal articles which could be looked up and verified, and I know record collectors well enough to know that many of them are obsessive enough to actually do that. But the substance of the story was completely made up.

When I acknowledged that I was -- appropriate to record collectors -- "winding them up," all hell broke loose, and I actually got a death threat from one particularly aggrieved Bix fan. That cured me of my interest in April Fool jokes.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

And to think that this radio broadcast in 1938 had people panicking, believing the earth was under attack from martians.........could it happen today ?

 

[MisterCairo]

This way to the egress...

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

There was a 1983 made-for-TV movie called Special Bulletin which was about terrorists threatening to blow up Charleston, SC with a nuclear device. In the tradition of Orson Welle's War of the Worlds, the movie was done in the form of news broadcasts. I remember when it aired and many thought that it was the real thing.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The thing with the Welles incident is that it was blown way out of actual proportion by the press, which was still stinging from the fact that radio had scooped print in reporting the Munich crisis the previous month. Most of the incidents reported in the various news accounts were later found to be either wild exaggerations of small incidents or complete fictionalizations.

A Princeton University study of the broadcast and its aftermath found that only about a million people -- out of a population exceeding 160 million -- "reacted" to the Welles program, and most of those "reactions" were inconsequential -- and subsequent research suggests that even the Princeton study exaggerated the impact. Welles, of course, rode the story for all it was worth, because he understood more than anyone the value of free publicity.

 

[Fading Fast]

Earlier this year I read "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles' War of the World and the Art of Fake News" by A. Brad Schwartz which does a very good job going into detail on the points Lizzie makes above and more. I though it was a good read if you are interested in what really happened at the time of the Broadcast and how it was manipulated in the press versus the narrative that's become "fact" over the years.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

" When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

 

[vitanola]

On a mailing list for 78rpm record collectors many years ago I once pulled an April Fools joke of my own announcing the discovery of a long-lost cache of radio broadcast recordings from the early 1930s, containing legendary broadcasts by the late and highly-fetishized Bix Beiderbecke. It was an extremely elaborate joke, based on lines in old trade journal articles which could be looked up and verified, and I know record collectors well enough to know that many of them are obsessive enough to actually do that. But the substance of the story was completely made up.

When I acknowledged that I was -- appropriate to record collectors -- "winding them up," all hell broke loose, and I actually got a death threat from one particularly aggrieved Bix fan. That cured me of my interest in April Fool jokes.

YOU!

You were responsible for that one? SHAME!

 

[Stearmen]

The thing with the Welles incident is that it was blown way out of actual proportion by the press, which was still stinging from the fact that radio had scooped print in reporting the Munich crisis the previous month. Most of the incidents reported in the various news accounts were later found to be either wild exaggerations of small incidents or complete fictionalizations.

A Princeton University study of the broadcast and its aftermath found that only about a million people -- out of a population exceeding 160 million -- "reacted" to the Welles program, and most of those "reactions" were inconsequential -- and subsequent research suggests that even the Princeton study exaggerated the impact. Welles, of course, rode the story for all it was worth, because he understood more than anyone the value of free publicity.

That also goes for the legend of stock brokers jumping out of the windows of the Wall Street Stock Exchange on Black Tuesday 1929. There is no evidence that any one did that! As you can imagine, most stock brokers made money from the massive sell off that day.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Think of all the crazy stories that circulated right after 9/11. Nothing new about it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That also goes for the legend of stock brokers jumping out of the windows of the Wall Street Stock Exchange on Black Tuesday 1929. There is no evidence that any one did that! As you can imagine, most stock brokers made money from the massive sell off that day.

Such stories were popularized in a little humorous book called "Caught Short," written by Eddie Cantor (with ghostwriter Dave Freeedman) in the weeks just after the crash as a way of making back some of the fortune he personally lost in the crash. It was Cantor who also popularized the big joke of the day -- "A broker goes into a hotel and asks to rent a room. The desk clerk asks "for sleeping or for jumping?"

Similar jokes made the rounds after the Crash of 1987: "What do you call a 28-year-old stockbroker?" "Waiter."

 

[HudsonHawk]

Pranks? There's nothing like a hotfoot to keep the boys on their toes:

 

[Edward]

I think that 10% might be accidental inhaling. I know a few chaps that 'smoke' the occasional cigar without actually inhaling the smoke, it's the gestures of cigar smoking that they like .....that & having something long & cylindrical between their fingers & lips......

A cigar, like a pipe, should never be inhaled. The only people who can inhale either form of smoke are *really* heavy cigarette users ime.

There are few foods I just won't touch. If I were in a place where the locals ate bugs, I'd eat bugs. Or rat. Or even cat. (I'd have to be next to death of starvation before I'd eat dog, though.)

I've eaten some intereting stuff in China. Turns out donkey tastes like really good roast beef. Would never eat a cat. Cats are people. Could never eat a dog either: bigot that I am, I can't imagine them being clean enough to be edible. Pure cultural cobditioning, of course, little logic to it. That said, I do mostly lean to the view that it's always best to avoid eating an animal that ate meat.

Rabbit can be nice, but it has zero nutritionsl value. I half remember a story about some stranded (military?) guys who died because they only ate rabit. If thry'd thought to colkect some vegetation and stew it, it's believed they might have lived.

Your nation has a long and glorious history of such jokes. Remember BBC Television's "Spaghetti Harvest at Ticino"?

That was Panorama, too: still one of the most respected BBC current affairs shows. The idea of them doing something like this even now is unthinkable, hence, of course, why it worked so well.

And to think that this radio broadcast in 1938 had people panicking, believing the earth was under attack from martians.........could it happen today ?

Switch the Martians for your contemporary bogeyman of choice, and it's quite likely.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Switch the Martians for your contemporary bogeyman of choice, and it's quite likely.

Indeed.....I thought sublety would be the best way to get a political point across.

 

[MisterCairo]

Rabbit can be nice, but it has zero nutritionsl value. I half remember a story about some stranded (military?) guys who died because they only ate rabit. If thry'd thought to colkect some vegetation and stew it, it's believed they might have lived.

 

[Bushman]

Stupid fat Hobbit, you ruins it!