And this is fun? Funny? Sometimes. More often, it leaves us confused and excited/really upset for the amount of time it takes to send the link to a friend, whereupon we immediately realize that we have fallen for more April 1st tomfoolery.

This year, there were three "pranks" that really took the cake for their humorous/not humorous lies and misinformation.

1. HBOWatch Announces Peter Dinklage Replacement on Game of Thrones.

Okay, you got us. For a second, we were terrified and outraged. Now we're just mildly annoyed.

Ah, we could never stay mad at you, P-Dink!

2. Seamless Web's Deluxe Delivery Service
Upgrading your meal by having a supermodel, "Adonis," or what looks like a future Bravolebrity was a funny concept for a Fools' joke. The problem is when we click on an offer from Seamless Web, our Pavlovian response is to start counting quarters for a cheaper meal. Finding out the meals are normal price is a total buzz kill.

3. Netflix's Somewhat Plausible, Overly-Specific Categories
The fact is, we have a category on Netflix dubbed "Dark, Independent Road Trip Films." So when we logged in and found this:

It wasn't even that far off from the believable.

Well now, Shell's getting it, too.

An "Arctic Ready" site of "Shell" is currently making the rounds on the Internet. It looks like it's by Shell, it's written in corporate rhetoric, and it has all of the features of a corporate attempt at social media (like a 'make your own postcard' section, and a game for kids).

Except, a closer look reveals something else: In the "game" for kids, you defend an oil rig from icebergs. On a page where "Shell" touts an arctic drilling platform, they explain:

On the slight chance that something does go wrong, Shell's spill cleanup plan is second to none. No one has yet fully determined how to clean up an oil spill in pack ice or broken ice—but that too is exactly the sort of challenge we love.

But best of all are the social media "postcards" that they created and that people are spreading around the web.

For example:

Or:

Or:

On a first look, they appear like something Shell put out, but an actual read would make you question if a company like Shell would have the gall to actually put out something like that.

Which gets you clicking. And so goes a canny awareness campaign like this. If successful activism takes more than just a message, now, these activists appear to most certainly have whatever that "extra something" is (which in this case, looks like astute and brilliant impersonation skills).

Check out what Shell's actual homepage looks like:

And the Arctic Ready homepage:

The real Shell site "help" page:

And the Arctic Ready "Shell" help page:

The entire thing is immaculately executed, and fairly hilarious, too. It's clearly some environmental group doing this, though the web registry only points to a privacy-proxy for a domain:

c/o ARCTICREADY.COM
P.O. Box 821650
Vancouver, WA 98682
US

Whoever it is, they're already fooling more than a few people, and are bound to upset the corporate PR brass at Shell. Something like this is bound to spread quickly, and fuel a little (misinformed) populist outrage along the way. So far, Shell's only issued this terse statement, hidden on their Alaska page:

Last week groups that oppose Shell’s plans in offshore Alaska posted a video that purports to show Shell employees at an event at the Seattle Space Needle. Shell did not host, nor participate in an event at the Space Needle and the video does not involve Shell or any of its employees. A fake press release claiming that Shell is considering legal action following the launch of the video was also distributed to the media. Most recently the group sponsored a contest on a website asking people to create fake advertisements which appear to be from Shell. The ads, and a contest to create more of the ads, are not associated with Shell. We continue to focus on a safe exploration season in 2012.

New York City has entire armies of so-called social media are marketing consultancies that likely can't yield results like this after years of trying everything in their playbooks. Maybe they could take a page from these guys', whoever they are.

UPDATE: It looks like it's the work of Greenpeace, in conjunction with activist group The Yes Men.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

You got served! (Wikipedia)

The Observer was sitting at Hooters, in one of the establishment's "finest booths" (our request), daintily sipping a Banana-Rama piña colata, and watching Vice's notorious co-founder Gavin McInnes imploding. "Why would I have gone all the way upstate to eat piss-covered cornflakes??" he screamed into our cell phone, drawing stares from the lunch crowd of really sad-looking single men. Beneath his dirty blonde beard, Mr. McInnes was turning beet red. "Why wouldn't I have ate the piss cornflakes in my house? Or in the office???"

We couldn't hear what the person on the other end of the line is saying, but whatever it was, the author of the new memoir of How to Piss in Public (Scribner, March 20) started to foam at the mouth in response. "I just told you why I pissed in the cornflakes! It was for the DVD! It matched with the card up your ass trick in the movie!"

Another pause, and Mr. McInnes (pronounced, for the last time, like McGuinness but with no "G,") started to stress points at an incoherent, rambling speed.

"I don't lie, dude! You got duped by your own prank!" he yelled at one point.

"I had already done it two weeks before the Gawker thing!" he said at another. Before hanging up, he has been reduced to schoolyard insults:

"Whatever, you're stupid, bye."

He looked at us. "I'm not going to give you a check for $1,000."

Before his semi-meltdown, the inflammatory jokester who once referred to Jesus as a gay Jew on Bill Maher's show, had told me two things: He couldn't remember anytime someone had "got him" with a good prank, and that as he's grown older and raised a family, he's really mellowed out.

We were happy to prove him wrong on both points.

In order to explain  The Observer's long con on Mr. McInnes, you have to know a little bit about his personal history. The Canadian-born 42-year-old is probably best known for his Do's and Don'ts column in the early days of Vice magazine, which he started with Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith in 1994. If you know that, then you probably also know of his inglorious removal from the company after Viacom started funneling money into the site for a video content vertical, VBS.TV, in 2007.

This incident takes up only a small section of Mr. McInnes' memoir. He writes merely that "we negotiated a split and by the beginning of 2008 I had sold my shares for an obscene amount of money." He also compares his leaving Vice to a band that breaks up because "they don't like each other anymore, or more importantly, they don't respect what the other members do."

What Mr. McInnes did, essentially, was cause trouble. He got into fights (physical and verbal), took a ton of drugs, hung out with weirdos and freaks (and the occasional genius), and fucked with the media. He was a liability.

After his departure, Mr. McInnes founded the website StreetBonersandTVCarnage.com with his friend, Derrick "Pinky" Beckles. The site was a collection of Do's and Don'ts type photos (except now they were called Street Boners), video mashups from Pinky, and inflammatory columns by Mr. McInnes and his friends. (Full disclosure: The author is responsible for a short-lived column of terrible sex advice on the site.)

Even with the leash Vice kept him on, Mr. McInnes always liked to screw with other media outlets. In a chapter titled "Lying to the Press" he outlines his elaborate hoaxes, like dressing up as a Nazi skinhead for an interview with The New York Press, setting up a fake pitch meeting with MTV for the benefit of a journalist from Ottawa's Citizen, and convincing The Village Voice he had been knocked out by an MMA fighter he had randomly "chosen" after putting out a blog post offering to fly out on his own dime and fight anyone who was willing to go into the ring with him.

The strange part of that last prank, which The Voice ran in a 2009 feature called "Gavin McInnes Gets Knocked the Fuck Out" was that it was mostly true. Mr. McInnes had been destroyed in the ring by an MMA fighter, a member of an Oakland gang called the East Bay Rats that Mr. McInnes was trying to join for a Current TV series called The Immersionist. The "joke" was that the footage that The Voice saw was from the un-aired 2008 series...Mr. McInnes' call on his blog to fight anyone was made after he had already gotten "knocked the fuck out," and was an excuse to put the footage to some use.

Now, some may consider that a weird "gotcha" moment...either way, he was knocked out, right? It was much the same with a 2010 prank on Gawker, after the site failed to name him Hipster of the Decade. Posing as Street Carnage's editor Arvind Dilawar, he wrote in to Gawker's tips and concocted an elaborate scheme in which Gavin McInnes would be forced to eat piss-covered cornflakes should he win the contest.

He lost, but "thinking" that he'd won thanks to Mr. Dilawar's supposed Photoshopping of the results (in fact Mr. McInnes had done the doctoring himself), he sent a video to Gawker showing him eating his own urine with breakfast cereal.

Now, the prank wasn't that the cornflakes were not soaked in urine. They were. The joke was that Mr. McInnes had filmed himself eating pee-flakes months before, for a 2009 Sundance film called Gavin McInnes Is an Asshole, but he'd ended up leaving the footage on the cutting-room floor because "it was too gross." Not wanting to waste a good video of piss consumption, he sent the clip to Gawker under Arv's name, letting the world believe for a short while that he had been fooled.

Again, shame on us for believing him, but the fact remains that Gavin McInnes ate his own piss. Only the dates and the motives were changed.

This is where we came in. Mr. McInnes likes to screw with people, but he does not want to be considered a liar, especially since some of his real-life stories are so extreme. So in his memoir, he offers a $1,000 reward "to anyone who proves that an event narrated in these pages didn't occur."

During lunch, he explained that he made that promise because "shitheads" like James Frey have ruined the memoir by lying in their non-fiction life accounts. "Now, nobody will trust that your stories are real," Mr. McInnes complained. And since How to Piss in Public recounts how the author had a threesome during an "Asian cocaine orgy," got his parents stoned, and spent his bachelor party out in the woods on a 72-hour bender with his friends dressed as Klan members (among other things), it's very important that people know that he's telling the truth about his crazy life. He might be a lot of things, but Gavin McInnes is not a liar.

Except when we prove that he is. During lunch, we produced several old emails between ourselves and Mr. Dilawar, wherein the former editor boasts that the he actually did fool his boss for the Gawker stunt. Mr. McInnes' first response was to shake his head. "That's impossible...Arv was totally in on the joke," he said. "I mean, he knew we had shot the footage earlier, up in my summer home upstate. You can see in the video that I'm in that house, not where I live in Brooklyn. So why would I drive up to my summer home to eat piss-covered cornflakes for losing a bet?"

"Let's call Arv," he suggested. We concurred, and soon the two old friends were screaming at each other over the factual discrepencies of time and place (again, not whether or not the cornflakes were consumed, because that was just a given). Mr. McInnes was sweating: he didn't want to have to cut a check to a journalist for a $1,000 for lying in his book...that would be bad press on so many levels.

"I have the footage," Mr. McInnes seethed after hanging up on Mr. Dilawar, "and I can get you the filmmakers to tell you when it was shot."

We mulled that over. "Well, that's just their word against his." We demanded our money.

"I don't know why I'm so angry...this is ridiculous," Mr. McInnes sputtered. "I shot that video before the Gawker contest, that's just the truth."

"Yes," The New York Observer agreed sweetly. "Arv said you'd be pissed when we came up with this."

It took a moment for the double-cross to sink in. "You mean...Arv was lying right now?" Yes, he was. In fact, he had helped us forge the old emails, providing helpful details to get under Mr. McInnes skin...like the fact that the date of the video would be hard to prove, since it didn't end up on the DVD.

We waited for Mr. McInnes' response to getting played as hard as he had played the Village Voice and Gawker. He stared at us for a moment, got up from his chair, and walked halfway across the room.

Then he started laughing hysterically. "That was so good!" he gasped, clapping. "That's the best prank anyone's ever played...because I literally just promised myself yesterday that I wasn't going to get myself upset like that anymore."

"And you taught me a lesson," Mr. McInnes said, clearly warming up to the subject. "It's not because they say they have different information...you can take it or leave it. But when someone is holding up a fork and saying 'This is a knife, this is a knife,' you start getting indignant. You get angry because you lay it all out there, you know the truth, and it seems so simple, and someone else is saying 'I don't see it.' You get so worked up you're just like 'Blah, what? Gah!' Then you sound like the person who doesn't know what they're talking about."

We didn't get our $1,000 check, but we did have Mr. McInnes sign the back of our Hooters check with proof that The Observer had pulled one over on the ultimate media prankster. (The blue ink is Gavin's, the orange is just what our Hooters waitress wrote. A nice sentiment.)

Columbia’s football game against Cornell last Saturday has received a lot of attention lately. It’s not the team’s stellar play that has people interested—they are 0-9 on the season—but rather the school band. Perhaps they were simply fed up with the program’s disappointing performance, or maybe—and this seems more likely—they were just flat-out bored, but on Saturday when it came time for them to lead the crowd (or what was left of it) in the school’s age-old fight song, they took the liberty of making a few tweaks to the lyrics. They sang:

We always lose lose lose; by a lot and sometimes by a little; we all were winners at the start; but four years has taught us all the value of just giving up, cause we really suck; why are we even trying?; we always lose lose lose; but we take solace in our booze.

A funny prank, even if the lyrics are painfully uninspired. (Perhaps when accompanying a tune, they really come alive. Unfortunately we were unable to find a video of the event). But, nevertheless, the powers-that-be were less than amused, and the athletic director banned the band from playing in Saturday’s upcoming game against Brown, saying, "Our football players, coaches, alumni, parents are extremely hurt, disappointed and angry by the band's behavior at Cornell."

National media outlets, including ESPN, Deadspin, and The New York Times, quickly picked up the news of the stunt and the resulting ban. Reactions were polarized. Michael Samuels a Stanford senior who plays in his school’s band told the Times that he thinks the Columbia band should “have some pride in [their] school and respect for [their] players.”

“Also, if you are going to be ‘irreverent,’ at least be funny,” he said, before ridiculing the Lion’s flat prose.  “Our band would never come up with such profoundly obvious and uninspired lyrics like ‘We always lose, lose, lose; by a lot, and sometimes by a little.’”

(Band shots fired.)

On the other hand, according to The Columbia Spectator, many thought the sanctions were too harsh, especially considering that Saturday’s game is the last of the season, and thus the last hoorah for the seniors in the band. Some Columbia alums threatened to withhold donations if the ban was not lifted.

In the end, free speech won out. This is a college, after all. In the face of growing media attention, the athletic department announced last night that it would be lifting the ban:

We are proud of our talented and dedicated student-athletes,” said Dr. M. Dianne Murphy, director of intercollegiate athletics and physical education, “but as we have discussed this is issue over the past day, we come to the conclusion that the core free speech values of the University are best served by providing a forum both for speech that might sometimes offend—as well as for the kind of open discussion that ultimately leads to greater understanding and collegiality among all members of our community" [sic].

We contacted Jose Delgado, the band manager, to get his take on the victory, but it seems that the band members are either under strict orders not to comment, or fear potentially incurring the wrath of a recently appeased athletic department, which, after all, maintains the power to reban the unbanned band. After claiming that he was too busy with homework, Mr. Delgado explained that he’d rather not comment, as that might open the media floodgates leading to an utter inundation of interview requests. Georgia Squiyres, who is listed on the bands website a “Minister of Propaganda,” also declined to comment, referring us back to Mr. Delgado.

If you’d like to go see Columbia’s now-infamous marching band (we know you aren’t going for the football), they’ll be playing tomorrow at 12:30 at the Robert K. Kraft Field as Columbia takes on the 7-2 Brown Bears.

cclemans@observer.com

When I left my job as the deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy in 1993, I left a message on my office blackboard for my successor. I wrote, "Broaden the base, lower the rates" repeatedly until I filled the entire space. I then had it covered with wax so it could not be erased. (Yes, the government charged me for my bit of vandalism. But it was worth it.)

This choice quote comes from a larger discussion of the Bowles-Simpson tax plan and the Herculean task of remedying the federal deficit. How, The Observer would like to know, could the citizenry take seriously a known vandal who flagrantly abuses government resources. Compounding the matter, Hubbard shows no remorse!

One would think the dean of Columbia Business School would treat a chalkboard -- the taxpayer's chalkboard -- with greater respect.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor