Another year, another April Fool’s Day. And, as usual, the intertubes are clogged with various people’s notions of clever pranks, most of them involving Rick Astley. Gmail’s Custom Time gag isn’t half bad, and you can see a round-up of other pranks here. A good April Fool’s prank, of course, has to be plausible enough to suck a few readers in, while remaining ridiculous enough to let everyone else mock the gullible yokels who believed it. But the BBC took a different approach this year, finding a whole series of ridiculous but true stories. For example:

• Pay-per-view funerals for friends and relatives who just can’t find time to pay their respects in person. If that’s still too much bother, maybe you can just TiVo the whole ceremony.
• A smoking turtle in Jilin province, China. The turtle is a pet, of course. Reptiles in the wild are far more health conscious.
• Surgical G-spot augmentation, already available in the US (somehow I missed this one), and now available in the UK. It’s an outpatient procedure, performed under local anesthetic. Lots and lots of local anesthetic.
• Thanks to UK Minister of Women and Equalities Harriet Harman, whose G-spot is radically unaugmented, British pub patrons can no longer call barmaids “luv.” Sure, there’ll always be an England, but that’s starting to sound more like a threat than a promise.

The article has more stories, but it wouldn’t be fair to lift all of them. Besides, it turned out to be surprisingly hard to find confirming links for some of those stories. Almost as if they were completely made up