April Fools Chuckle Mania!

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mojo-photo-laughter.jpgWow, it turns out that the ease of typing stuff and posting it on a web page and a day dedicated to hoaxes combine perfectly to produce a veritable maelstrom of comedy good times. Here’s some of the April Fools yuk-yuks speeding through everyone’s favorite series of tubes today:

• This via Idolator: Rock FM in New Zealand thought it would be hi-lar-ious to spend the day advertising a fake Foo Fighters concert in Auckland. The DJs, who have apparently been living under rocks, expected “around 50 listeners” to turn up to the venue, where they would be treated to a Foo Fighters album being played on a tape deck. Instead, throngs of alt-rock-deprived Kiwis left their jobs and homes to get to the show, forcing the station to come clean.

• Kevin Shields will play all of Loveless at the Pitchfork festival! Meg White topless! A band with a naughty word in their name won’t be let into the UK! Oh wait, is that last one a joke? Go, Paper Thin Walls, go!

NME posted an actually rather amusing (if somewhat geeky) story about Amy Winehouse being scheduled as a guest star on British sci-fi TV series Dr. Who, portraying “an evil scientific genius rogue timelord” who “enslaves entire planets.” Not much of a stretch, wocka wocka. Gigwise piled on with a story about Winehouse licensing her hairdo to a wig company who would dub the hairpiece “The Wino.” Leave… Amy… alone!!!

• And finally, the Brown University Daily Herald reports a campus bookstore will be renovated to make it “a little less gay.” Ha?

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Edward B.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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