In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced it had bought the Liberty Bell
and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens
called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell was housed
to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell
revealed, a few hours later, that it was all a practical joke.
White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale. Thinking
on his feet, he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold. It
would now be known, he said, as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
In 1974 residents of Sitka, Alaska were alarmed when the long-dormant
volcano neighboring them, Mount Edgecumbe, suddenly began to belch out
billows of black smoke. People spilled out of their homes onto the streets
to gaze up at the volcano, terrified that it was active again and might soon
erupt and engulf their town. Turned out that man, not nature, was
responsible for the smoke. A local practical joker named Porky Bickar had
flown hundreds of old tires into the volcano’s crater and then lit them on
fire, all in a (successful) attempt to fool the city dwellers into believing
that the volcano was stirring to life. According to local legend, when Mount
St. Helens erupted six years later, a Sitka resident wrote to Bickar to tell
him, “This time you’ve gone too far!”
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today
announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed
Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans.
According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same
ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty,
etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of
their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a
follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a
hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new
sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others
requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”
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Dr Bob Griffin
[email protected] www.grif.net
“Jesus Knows Me, This I Love!”