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Who dyed Lake Geneva red?
Submitted by Ellen Wallace on April 2, 2007 - 18:13.
There is an old tradition in Switzerland that newspapers, radio and TV play April Fools jokes. Like most jokes, they're pretty funny if you're not in the firing line.
WRG ran a nice lineup this morning of the stories the local media did Sunday, for 1 April. Among them were a story on Swiss milk being turned to laitenol (milking the climate change trend, I'd say) and Swiss wives being invited to "Desperate Housewives," who would probably have to clean up their act (oh, that old Swiss cleanliness routine!).
I wasn't aware of this media trickery my first year in Switzerland and I was convinced by colleagues at Time magazine that a story in one of the top newspapers about the Saleve in Geneva being destroyed, or something similar, was true. I was a little fuzzy on what and where that cliff was anyway - I lived in Etoy, down the lake. They conned me into phoning the staid, humorless Swiss editor to ask for details and a local contact. He's still around and I've never had the nerve to speak to the man since - he clearly thought I was a fool. He's strongly anti-American, so I probably confirmed his prejudices.
It's hard to get pranks and jokes just right. What one person finds funny upsets another and you have to gamble on the overall good nature of people. Since some people are grumps, you can't alwasy win.
Good pranks have two ingredients: they make people laugh, although maybe not at first, and they have to be creative.
Students at one of the local international high schools got an earful from the administration last week because someone's prank was in bad taste. Grafitti (not nice words) on walls, toilet paper strewn around the school. It was just messy, not funny, costs money and unpleasant labor to clean up. Worse, there is really nothing original about toilet paper strung up.
The incident is putting at risk the school's annual prank day, which some people (mostly teachers) loathe and others (many but not all students, and some teachers) love. Some of the most memorable high school days came out of those prank days over the years, although not surprisingly they sometimes got out of control. Maybe discovering that if you let a lot of rabbits or chickens loose in a room you'll have a serious post-prank poop problem is part of the learning process.
A memorable prank last year (I must own up to knowing the author of it) involved several tests with chemicals and researching the safety of using them before foam was added to school toilets. Think about it: it's not that easy to get the timing, the safety and the ahem, color right. Original, at least.
Elsewhere, a sofa was suspended between two highrises during the wee hours of Saturday to Sunday and ropes that were used were trimmed to make it virtually impossible to work out how the furniture got there. Pity for the couch owner, but a nice thing to mull over for the rest of the world.
As for the lake, some of us are still working on how to dye it red, safely, the whole thing. No damage to plants or animals or birds or even insects. Now there's a challenge.
Topics
There is an old tradition in Switzerland that newspapers, radio and TV play April Fools jokes. Like most jokes, they're pretty funny if you're not in the firing line.
WRG ran a nice lineup this morning of the stories the local media did Sunday, for 1 April. Among them were a story on Swiss milk being turned to laitenol (milking the climate change trend, I'd say) and Swiss wives being invited to "Desperate Housewives," who would probably have to clean up their act (oh, that old Swiss cleanliness routine!).
I wasn't aware of this media trickery my first year in Switzerland and I was convinced by colleagues at Time magazine that a story in one of the top newspapers about the Saleve in Geneva being destroyed, or something similar, was true. I was a little fuzzy on what and where that cliff was anyway - I lived in Etoy, down the lake. They conned me into phoning the staid, humorless Swiss editor to ask for details and a local contact. He's still around and I've never had the nerve to speak to the man since - he clearly thought I was a fool. He's strongly anti-American, so I probably confirmed his prejudices.
It's hard to get pranks and jokes just right. What one person finds funny upsets another and you have to gamble on the overall good nature of people. Since some people are grumps, you can't alwasy win.
Good pranks have two ingredients: they make people laugh, although maybe not at first, and they have to be creative.
Students at one of the local international high schools got an earful from the administration last week because someone's prank was in bad taste. Grafitti (not nice words) on walls, toilet paper strewn around the school. It was just messy, not funny, costs money and unpleasant labor to clean up. Worse, there is really nothing original about toilet paper strung up.
The incident is putting at risk the school's annual prank day, which some people (mostly teachers) loathe and others (many but not all students, and some teachers) love. Some of the most memorable high school days came out of those prank days over the years, although not surprisingly they sometimes got out of control. Maybe discovering that if you let a lot of rabbits or chickens loose in a room you'll have a serious post-prank poop problem is part of the learning process.
A memorable prank last year (I must own up to knowing the author of it) involved several tests with chemicals and researching the safety of using them before foam was added to school toilets. Think about it: it's not that easy to get the timing, the safety and the ahem, color right. Original, at least.
Elsewhere, a sofa was suspended between two highrises during the wee hours of Saturday to Sunday and ropes that were used were trimmed to make it virtually impossible to work out how the furniture got there. Pity for the couch owner, but a nice thing to mull over for the rest of the world.
As for the lake, some of us are still working on how to dye it red, safely, the whole thing. No damage to plants or animals or birds or even insects. Now there's a challenge.