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Meta Recursive April Fool's

Tuesday, April 01, 2008 | 08:51 PM

Okay, this is now getting downright silly. Let's clear this up, before it gets further out of hand:

Last night, I set to post my April Fool's gag -- about Google's new search engine that allows you to search one day into the future. It was cute, but tame, and as the comments reveal, caught a few people off guard.

Then this morning, I saw Doug Kass' April Fool's piece, announcing his conversion to the uber-bullish camp. It was obviously a joke, punctuated with an "I have decided to convert my dedicated short funds into long-only partnerships. April Fool's Day!"

Dougie's commentary was very cute, if perhaps obvious: A well know Bear flips Bullish.

After mulling it over for a few nano-seconds, and seeing the soaring futures, I decided to have a little fun with Doug: What if the market actually mistook his joke for real, and the market rallied on the faux news? Thus was born a meta April Fool's joke, about another April Fool's joke.

It was a parody about another parody, using the conceit that the first parody was to be treated as if it were believed by others as real.

A few people in the financial media got it right away -- especially those who were mentioned by name. Dave Callaway of Marketwatch, and David Gaffen of the WSJ knew they hadn't written any such articles. They swatted a way a few media calls about this.

Other sites were not so quick to dismiss the joke, and reported on it as if it were a straight piece of blogger induced news.

If there is any good news in this, the mainstream press were savvy/cynical enough to not buy into this goof; other sites were perhaps less grizzled.

~~~

For the record, this was a goof.

Doesn't anyone recognize an April fool's joke when they see one anymore ?

Sources:

deleted to protect the gullible, which is a word that surprisingly, is not in the dictionary. Look it up, you'll see...