Kaldun is not going to Eurovision, but Pamela Anderson is to visit Minsk

On April Fool’s Day Aliaksandar Tsihanovich managed to play a joke on Philippe Kirkorov. He phoned him and said that Zmitser Kaldun would not be able to go to Eurovision. On hearing it the singer almost had a heart attack. He said it was the first time he had believed an April Fool’s Day joke.
Belarusian mass media did not forget about April Fool’s Day this year. In spite of the fact that it was Sunday mass media managed to find their victims.

A nice joke was invented by the “Interfax” information agency. Two articles appeared there on April 1. One was them informed about a coming visit of Pamela Anderson to Belarus. But nobody believed it in spite of the “serious” reputation of “Interfax”…

But the second joke caused a sensation… The agency informed that a Chinese company Briillianse was going to start producing limousines in Belarus. Many Belarusian information web sites believed it. Even the main portal TUT.BY did not notice it was a joke.

The site of “Salidarnast” was also good at joking. They posted an article “Lukashenka – to NHL!” It contained an interview with the head of the Belarusian Hockey Federation Uladzimir Navumau. The main idea of the interview was promotion of the national club into the national Hockey League.

By the way, according to the article, this announcement was made at the National Library on April 1. The deputy editor-in-chief Alena Yakzhyk says:

“We had a similar joke about the National Library in 2005. We wrote that there would be restaurants, a gymnasium and a swimming pool and even a hockey pitch. When readers phoned us they said it was a joke but that many a true word is spoken in jest.

Half a year later we saw that many things we described in that article turned out to be true. There is a gymnasium, a restaurant and a sauna in the library. So, I cannot predict what the reaction to our article will be like. Why did I recall that article? It’s because many a true word is spoken in jest”.

An interesting joke appeared in the interactive daily “Narodnyya navіny Vіtsebska”. It contained information about the intention to install cameras in the pavements to find out what kind of underwear was popular with Vitsebsk fashionable women. The author of the article Syarzhuk Serabro says:

“I think some 30 per cent of people believed it. Vitsebsk is a city with the greatest amount of cameras installed. So Vitsebsk dwellers did not find it surprising that cameras were to be installed in the pavement. Many people started visiting out web site after we published that article.

Some person wrote in Live Journal that the main reason for it was not marketing research but the idea to sell those photos on the Internet. Thus he advertised our article even more”.

Kuwaiti journalists haven’t been that lucky. It turned out that humour was improper there… An administrative case is to be started against them. The Ministry of Information did not like the joke in the programme “Your home”.

Journalists claimed that “the Emirates’ authorities were going to write down people credit debts”. Even an official refutation did not help.