Yesterday
Yesterday, Dug IM’d me with a question: “Why are all the commenters so fervently kissing your butt?”
It was an excellent question, and it deserves an answer.
Yeserday was, of course, April Fools’ day. I love April Fools’ day. In fact, you will no doubt be totally unsurprised to learn that I think more about this holiday than all of the other holidays put together.
So, naturally, I wanted to have an April Fools’ joke for my blog. But that poses a problem. As you probably noticed yesterday, on April Fools’ day, other bike sites do stuff that I do every other day of the year.
So what does that leave for me to do? I didn’t want to post fake news — VeloNews did that. I didn’t want to do a fake product review; BikeRadar/CyclingNews did a good job with that.
So I did something a little more subtle, and can now claim that I have pulled off my favorite April Fools’ joke of all time (yes, even better than last year’s).
Specifically, I made a joke that wasn’t obviously a joke, with a huge, rolling punchline written by commenters.
Substandard
It is my fervent hope that you thought yesterday’s post was kind of lackluster. (In fact, my biggest concern when doing this joke was that nobody would be able to tell the difference between my normal writing and when I was trying to be lame on purpose.)
But then, if you read the comments of that section, the praise for the post is outrageously positive. Insanely positive and servile, in fact.
That’s because some people noticed the ads in the right column of my blog had changed, and tried clicking them.
For a guy who has very rudimentary Photoshop skills and no sense of design whatsoever, those ads were not easy. I’m leaving them up for one more day so if you missed them yesterday (likely), you can see them today.
Anyway, those ads all pointed to another page, that gave instructions to leave praise waaaaaay out of proportion to the quality of the post.
Thank You
The results went way beyond my expectations, with accolades so outrageous and overwrought that I laughed out loud more than a dozen times. If you haven’t looked at the comments for yesterday’s post, you must. They’re a thing of beauty.
In short, I got to be the straight man, with you readers delivering a terrific set of punchlines.
Thanks to everyone who played along!