A roundup of some posts featuring April Fools Day—from Australia and Tang China to Venice and London:

• The classic kangaroo story—posted On This Day in 2017, and apparently true!
• Re the French pieces of the Tang dynasty, a colophon dated 1st April 895 (lunar calendar)
• A genuine 2016 letter to the TLS about the cry of the Venetian gondolier
• A reply from the Complaints Department to Mick Jagger.

Surely the most celebrated of all April Fools is the elaborate BBC Panorama spoof from 1957—like an aperitivo for the Monty Python travelogue, or Molvania:

One of the perpetrators recollected:

As a bonus to the excellent Pomodoro!, here’s the discussion of the topic in the chapter there on the “tomato conquest”:

In both Britain and the United States, Italian food already was synonymous with spaghetti and tomato sauce. In 1950s Britain, it was still mysterious and exotic enough that in 1957, BBC television could get away with broadcasting a short documentary on that year’s bumper “spaghetti harvest”. Amid scenes of “spaghetti trees”, it referred to “spaghetti plantations in the Po valley”, the fortunate disappearnce of the nasty “spaghetti weevil”, and the achievements of plant breeders in developing new varieties with equal-length strands, which facilitated harvesting. The date of the broadcast, April 1, ought to have given the game away, but many viewers still were fooled.

See also The shagbut, minikin, and Flemish clacket.