Yes, today is April Fools Day. I suppose we could have done something to commemorate the day with style, but to be honest, I just wasn’t up to it. I briefly toyed with an early post welcoming our new guest blogger Keith Olbermann during Ed’s vacation, but immediately abandoned it because it would have been too transparent. Also, while prank posts can be fun, the people you invoke in them far too often wind up getting all litigious on you. (And without going into any details, let’s just say I’ve already gotten into enough trouble with the management here…)

Instead, if you’re feeling the need for some April 1st fun, let’s provide you all with the creative output of some other folks. First, Google can usually be relied on for some frivolous fun on holidays. I didn’t notice anything on their main search page this morning, but it turns out that if you go to Google Maps, you’ll find a bonus.

Miss your old Nintendo? The engineers at Google clearly do. As their April Fools Day prank, they have created a version of Goole Maps called Quest that sees the world through the lens (and limitations) of the venerable 8-bit, cartridge loading, dial-up gaming console.

Go to Google Maps and click the “quest” button in the upper right to see the earth transformed into low resolution trees, and grass and water. Apparently there are many easter eggs hidden in plain sight, each accompanied by a cute pair of propeller-beanied children. Type Google HQ in the search box, for instance and you will find a giant Android robot, a dinosaur and pink flamingos.

Oddly enough, the BBC has been the source of a number of April Fools jokes over the years. CBS dredged up a few of their classics. First up, the bumper crop Spaghetti Harvest.

Perhaps even better, one of my all time favorites. The penguins who can fly.

And last but not least, a true classic. The 1998 incident where “New Mexicans for Science and Reason” tricked the Associated Press into believing that the Alabama state legislature had passed a law changing Pi to a value of 3.0 in accordance with biblical scripture.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature narrowly passed a law yesterday [March 30, 1998] redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Guy Hunt says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.

The law took the state’s engineering community by surprise. “It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi,” said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi (p) is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories…

“The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon’s Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass,” Lawson said. He believed it was important to codify pi as a nice round number “to return to some absolutes in our society.”

Because one would assume the journalistic integrity of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter was beyond reproach, the story was picked up by the Associated Press and spread like locusts.

I’m sure there are better ones out there, all of which would be superior to anything I came up with while dealing with a Level Three hangover. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.