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Lina Saigol recalls this April Fool’s gem, courtesy of the Museum of Hoaxes:
On March 30, 1998 the Guinness brewery issued a press release announcing that it had reached an agreement with the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England to be the official beer sponsor of the Observatory’s millennium celebration.
According to this agreement, Greenwich Mean Time would be renamed Guinness Mean Time until the end of 1999. In addition, the famous observatory would refer to seconds as “pint drips.”
The Financial Times, not realizing that the release was a joke, broke the news in an article in which it discussed how some companies were exploiting the millennium excitement in order to promote their own brand names. It declared that Guinness, with its Greenwich tie-in, was setting a “brash tone for the millennium.”
When the Financial Times learned that it had fallen for a joke, it printed a curt retraction, stating that the news it had disclosed “was apparently intended as part of an April 1 spoof”.
Larger-than-life Sheila Black becomes the FT’s first female writer after suggesting to editor Gordon Newton in 1958 that the FT pay more attention to consumers. She lightens up the paper with innovations including the first incarnation in 1967 of How to Spend It as a page in the newspaper.
In the game of eurozone, you win or you die
- Joseph Cotterill: Mario Draghi is the Grand Maester
- Joseph Cotterill: I see Merkel as Cersei Lannister
- Joseph Cotterill: Hollande is one of the Baratheons
- David Keohane: <<< I see Merkel as Cersei Lannister >>> No! Just no!
- David Keohane: The visuals are too painful
- David Keohane: Hollande as Stannis
- David Keohane: Principled and in thrall to the red god
- Joseph Cotterill: OK then. Merkel as Tyrion.
- David Keohane: hahaha
- Joseph Cotterill: Not sure who Jaime would be...
- Joseph Cotterill: Sarko!
- Joseph Cotterill: No that's all wrong
- ...
- Izabella Kaminska: Can I just say that IMO
- Izabella Kaminska: Lannisters have to be Germany
- Izabella Kaminska: because of the debt thing
- ...
- David Keohane: Are we saying the Targaryens are China?
- Izabella Kaminska: Yes
- Izabella Kaminska: dragon
- Izabella Kaminska: WHERE ARE MY DRAGONS!!
- ____________________
- This is the ugly truth of how the FTAV virtual newsroom spends major market meltdown days. Trying to translate the eurozone crisis into the Game of Thrones.
i’d donate to the Gary Silverman superPAC
Failed presidential hopefuls from Democrat Hillary Clinton to Republican Herman Cain have “suspended” campaigns in the past, but when I read Mr Santorum’s words I felt like one of those cartoon characters who has a light go on in his head. I realised I had been guided for too long by the notion that the only way I could make more money was to do more work – a consequence, I suspect, of having spent nearly three decades in the earnest little corner of the private sector from which publications like this one spring.
Here was a better way. Mr Santorum had the guts and the gumption to do less and ask for more – to explicitly link a reduction in his effort to a continuation of his cash flow – and that has encouraged me to make my own announcement.
I, too, am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States. In doing so, I realise that I am being somewhat presumptuous, inasmuch as I have never got around to announcing my candidacy, filing any of the proper papers or forming any of the necessary arms-length relationships with sympathetic political action committees.
But I feel that this is simply the right thing to do for my family (and our mortgage lender). I wish I could say I have discussed my decision with my wife and kids over our kitchen table, the way proper candidates like Mr Santorum do. But since we don’t actually have room in our kitchen for a table, I made a unilateral decision to proceed directly to a suspension of my campaign and the concomitant fundraising activities.
pretty proud of the pullquote they stuck in our mayoral mansions piece.
