A Roughly-Categorized April Fool's Day Joke Roundup

Nothing better than jokes placed in a taxonomy

We know, we know. You're jonesing for some April Fool's Day jokes. Instead of devising a lame introduction to delay you, we'll send you straight to our lengthy, roughly categorized, and far-from-definitive list of the day's tomfoolery.

General

• The National Republican Senatorial Committee has a pretty funny video (below) about Obama's accomplishments. Liberals and conservatives alike can enjoy the first half. The second, not so much.
  
• Lick your screen! Ben & Jerry's offers virtual ice cream.
• Funny or Die is renamed Bieber or Die. As the teen pop icon himself puts it in a video on the site, "this is Bieber's world, you're just living in it."
• Starbucks offers new tiny Micra and gigantic Plenta sizes for its customers' various disturbing coffee needs.
• In one of the riskier April Fool's jokes, Reddit.com, the social news Web site, made all users administrators enabling anyone to wreak havoc by banning others, repeatedly voting on items, etc.
• Qualcomm posted a video of a press conference in which the company confronts news that a stolen prototype has led to vicious butterfly attacks.
• Watch any Hulu video and you'll see a 3D option. Click on it and a window pops up with this 10-minute, Alec Baldwin-narrated, confidential video explanation that Hulu and Hollywood are run by brain-hungry aliens.
• Popular geek comic XKCD dweebs out with an old-school, command-line Unix version of the site. Did your eyes just glaze over? It's okay, check out the site, you don't have to be a nerd to enjoy the comics (usually).

Fake News Reports

• CNet UK's Crave blog reports on the arrest of a man who was trying to destroy the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He claims he's from the future and that the collider sets off a series of events that turn the world into a "communist chocolate hellhole."
• The British Labour Party embraces voter intimidation with posters of all-around bad-ass Gordon Brown above the slogan "Vote Labour. Or Else."
  
• Wikipedia's featured article of the day is on wife selling (it's easier than divorce) and there's a bizarre, but true, story on a Japanese company investigating how its product sent some customers back to 1999.
• The Economist analyzes how Russia stands to gain from the pending olive-oil crisis 
• The Conservative Daily Caller confirms that Joe Biden's got a big f#%king chance at a flawless NCAA bracket.
• Tech news site Ars Technica eschews fake articles for a choose-your-own-adventure series starring Cthulhu, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's alien entity.
• "Specially trained ferrets are being used to deliver broadband to rural areas."
• Grist has a story about McDonald's giving up on its composting program since their food won't decompose anyway.
• Obama says the federal budget is "an accounting swindle little different from Enron," at least according to Reuters' Gregg Easterbrook.
  
• Speaking of budgets, the Queen of England knows how to save money: fly coach.
  

iPad Jokes:

• ThinkGeek reports on the iCade, an iPad arcade cabinet. Just slide your iPad in and relive your Donkey Kong, barrel-tossing youth.
• There's the Pad-Dock, which turns your iPhone into an iPad.
• Be sure you're making the perfect cup of tea with this iPad thermometer addon.
• Oh, and, just kidding! CNet reports that the iPad is actually just a big joke.

Google's Jokes

• The search giant changed its name to Topeka, in reference to the Kansas city which renamed itself Google last month in its bid to be selected for a pilot program from the search giant that would hook a community up with high-speed, fiber-optic Internet access. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is not a fan, writing that "the problem is the whole joke is really just a way to promote Google’s experimental fiber network."
• The Gmail homepage was disemvowelled.
• YouTube introduced a new feature to convert videos to a Matrix-like array of text.
• You can now be notified that you have a new Google Wave by an actual human waving at you.
• Upload anything (seriously, "keys, remotes, rail passes, and other objects") to Google Docs.
• Google Maps offers a 3D street view. And Google Books offers a 3D view, too.
• Google UK provides an animal translation service.

Not enough for you? Check out TechCrunch's very long, graded list of jokes from around the Web.