Yes, it was an April Fool's joke...but it was noticed!

Judging from the readership numbers today, a lot of you read this morning's post about the ersatz energy breakthrough. It has an interesting story behind it.

I got an e-mail from Bob McCarty about 10 days ago with his intention to pull the April Fool's prank and asking if I would help him spread it. I thought it was pretty humorous and agreed, so I set it to come up later this morning because I wanted it to be not as obvious as if I'd placed it at 12:02 a.m. as he suggested. Then I wrote the parts around the blockquote just to give it a little more local flavor and hopefully a bit more believability. I'm not sure how the other bloggers who also helped out did their take on it, but hopefully they had a bit of fun with the spoof too.

Bob's prank did get mentioned on the news.com website as part of a larger story about April Fool's pranks, so he was excited about it. And what the heck, it hopefully gave us all a laugh after all the serious news about things like this Baltimore Sun story by Andrea K. Walker about a grocery strike averted.

So tomorrow - or later today, since this will serve as an early midday post - I'll get back to other more weighty (perhaps a poor choice of words given my photoworthiness) topics. There's a bit of a backlog of interesting stuff on my plate I need to get to.