{"id":8918,"date":"2010-04-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/04\/01\/rupert-murdoch-acquisition-of-hinduism-today-an-april-fool-s-prank\/"},"modified":"2010-04-01T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T12:00:00","slug":"rupert-murdoch-acquisition-of-hinduism-today-an-april-fool-s-prank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/04\/01\/rupert-murdoch-acquisition-of-hinduism-today-an-april-fool-s-prank\/","title":{"rendered":"Rupert Murdoch Acquisition of Hinduism Today an April Fool&#8217;s Prank"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: HPI<\/p>\n<p>KAPAA, HI, USA, April 2, 2010: Around the world on April 1st each year, friends, businesses and armies of pranksters enjoy the tradition of creating implausible, if not unbelievable, news. <\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, news were that Google changed its name to Topeka, a town in Kansas, which last week really did change its name to Google in order to be more famous. &#8220;The Sun&#8221; newspaper in the UK announced its creation of the first flavored newsprint encouraging readers to lick each page to &#8220;discover hidden tastes (warning, may contain nuts)&#8221;. Google offered storage of real world objects on its vast servers, &#8220;up to a metric ton per customer.&#8221; Google UK released its Google Translate for Animals app (complete with video) which bridges the communications hiatus between man and beast. Apple introduced a cheap device that docks an iPhone, making it a fully-functioning iPad. Starbucks proudly announced two new sizes for its famed coffee blends: a bucket-sized 128 oz called <em>plenta<\/em> and a 2 oz size called <em>micra<\/em>. YouTube revealed a &#8220;text-only option for our online videos,&#8221; and Gmail, having run out of vowels, sent out e-mails with only consonants. Even the sober BBC editorial staff joins in the April Foolery each year. You can see their clever work (flying penguins?) and a history of this day of follies <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/theguardian\/blog\/2010\/mar\/31\/april-fool-round-up-hoaxes\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>None of this, of course, actually happened. And none of yesterday&#8217;s five HPI stories had more than a glimmer of truth in it (though a few HPI readers fell for them.) Not to worry, it was all tongue-in-cheek. <b>Rupert Murdoch will never get his acquisitive hands on Hinduism Today, or anyone else, for any amount of money <\/b> (and we will never build that 9-story office in our lush tropical jungle); the value of pi will never be rounded to 3.0 (not even in Texas); hundi money will never be used entirely to do nothing but count money and polish hundis; elephants will not be giving out change in Hindu temples and bacteria will never listen to even the most convincing ad-men soliciting their help to devour indigestible fast food waste (food expert Michael Pollan does suggest in &#8220;Food Rules&#8221; not to eat things that never rot). <\/p>\n<p>Read them all again and have fun this time. You might then notice that their first lines read &#8220;April 1, 2010&#8221; in bold letters all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: HPI KAPAA, HI, USA, April 2, 2010: Around the world on April 1st each year, friends, businesses and armies,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}