Things To Do List Satire: Calling the Baltimore Sun

It's a Sunday night here in Roanoke, Va., and that only means one thing: Listening to music from the '30s and '40s on our local NPR radio station (to the folks at WVTF, just kidding, we love what you do for us and I am actually listening to '30s and '40s music........even though Steely Dan and Supertramp are really my speed)......

Oh, about our last entry, yeah, that was an April Fool's Joke, but we did watch the Final 4 games on tv. And, we didn't tape them, so there was no avoiding the annoying Southwest Airlines ads.

So, since there is not too much going on tonight until "Mad Men" comes on, we thought we would do a satirical things to do list for this coming week:

1. Get the current issue of "Writer's Digest"

2. Actually write something, even a haiku.

3. Drive to Winchester, Va., to find the late country singer Patsy Cline's grave (pict. center)

4. Call "The Baltimore Sun" and ask them to send today's Sunday edition of their newspaper to my address even though I live six hours away from them (the Baltimore Orioles start their season tomorrow....we think)....

5. Mapquest directions to Portland, Maine, so you can see a Portland Sea Dogs minor league baseball team, even though Maine is pretty freaking far from Virginia.

6. Play Ms. Pac-Mac for 6.5 hours

7. Watch the entire first two seasons of the '70s BBC comedy series "Are You Being Served?" (pictured bottom......I think my friend Chris Knight is the only person my age who actually watches this show regularly....)

8. Laundry

9. Carwash

10. Dishes

http://wvtf.org/

http://www.writersdigest.com/

http://www.visitwinchesterva.com/

http://www.baltimoresun.com/

https://www.facebook.com/portlandseadogs

http://www.aybscentral.com/

http://www.theknightshift.com/

Tilly Gokbudak is NOT Moving to Bulgaria (It was an April Fool's Prank)

For those of you in El Salvador, Dubai and Sri Lanka who read this blog on a daily basis, it is time to fully fess up. Though the American College of Sofia in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia is a real place, I have not accepted a job as an English teacher there. In fact, I have not been to Bulgaria since our family traveled through there en route from Belgrade, Serbia (it was the capital of Yugoslavia then) to Istanbul, Turkey, when I was a child in the 1970s.


We also need to add a correction to yesterday's piece as the national airlines of Bulgaria is actually called Balkan Bulgarian Airlines; perhaps they can find you a flight from JFK or Dulles to Sofia or Varna (another Bulgarian city).

Approximately 11-14 people fell for my prank yesterday, but it is nothing compared to what my good friend and fellow blogger Chris Knight of Reidsville, NC, did for April Fool's Day of 2009.

For that prank, Knight convinced people all over the globe that a radical minister named the Rev. Johnny Robertson from the Church of Christ in Martinsville, Va., created an unholy scene in Vatican City, of all places!

Here is a sample of that entry (we will post a link bellow):

"Johnny Robertson has been arrested in Vatican City following what is being called a 'coordinated and persistent' attempt to threaten Pope Benedict XVI within the very Papal Apartments of the Apostolic Palace."

Knight said in a April 9, 2009, entry that he received messages from both the State Department and Vatican City expressing concern about the 'incident.'

http://theknightshift.blogspot.com/2009/04/breaking-hard-johnny-robertson-arrested.html

http://www.theknightshift.blogspot.com


http://www.air.bg/en (Balkan Bulgarian Airlines)

http://www.acs.bg (American College of Sofia)

http://www.bulgaria_embassy.org (Bulgarian Embassy in Washington, DC)

http://www.allaboutclowns.com

No Turkish Bride_It Was an April Fool's Joke

It is time to come clean and admit that I am NOT marrying a woman I met on the Internet named Sibel Turkan Atasoy who lives in Afyon, Turkey. She is a fictional name, and if any woman, living in Afyon, Turkey, or elsewhere actually has that name we will be floored.

I took the middle name from the great Turkish actress Turkan Soray.

I must also profess that I was April Fooled myself as University of Utah Utes gymnastics coach proclaimed that his team had landed the top gymnast in the world on collegegymnasts.com.

Interestingly enough, we asked Bing who was the top-ranke gymnast in the world and they said Sharaya Musser. She happens to be a highly-accomplished gymnast at Penn State, but we are 99-percent sure that she is not actually the 'best in the world.'

I guess this means so much for the power of search engines!

No April Fools Joke This Year

For several weeks, I had contemplated saying that my screenplay for "My Dinner with Andre 2" which was also co-written by Dennis Alexander (my alias) and Nishan Shakashi (the Turkish word for April Fools) was green-lighted by IFC Films. I was going to add that it had full approval from the original stars and screenwriters Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. And, that this 'sequel' to the 1981 film about two men in a a restaurant talking was going to be directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Ultimately, since both Shawn and Gregory are alive and well, and we really need to get out of Graham, NC* for a weekend getaway, that this was not in our best interest.

I was in sueded version of "My Dinner with Andre" which we made for the Shadowbox Cinema in Roanoke, Va. The cinema's manager, my friend Jason Garnett, announced that they will host a screening of the doc "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," complete with a Donkey Kong competition.

The real version of "Andre" is available from Criterion classics.

*-We are not really in Graham, NC, but a town similar to it.

PS- We goofed in yesterday's entry as the UNH Wildcats lost to Notre Dame in the men's college quarterfinals. Yale was the team that lost to Minn-Duluth.

Zing! Zing! Zing!

Well, in case you were wondering, there was no wild water rafting trip to West Virginia this weekend as I had posted an April Fool's Day prank as I did last year when I said I was sky-diving. But, no one seemed to fall for the joke this year, which is a bit of a bummer.

As it was, I got really sick over the weekend, so even if I had planned to go to West Virginia, the trip would have been scrapped. And, the Pakistani geology teacher from Wytheville Community College, Nishan Shakazi is really a play on the term Nishan Shakasi which means April Fool's Day in Turkish.

But, my friend Chris Knight of Reidsville, NC, played a slightly more effective prank as he told the world that George Lucas, the man behind "Star Wars" was remaking the late Bob Clark's teen sex hit "Porky's" (1982).

Knight said that "Geek Tyrant" broken the news and he added that Lucas was perhaps remaking Clark's film to return to his "American Graffitti" roots and show the dark side of the '50s.

But, since "Clash of the Titans" (1981) has been remade and is apparently the new box office champ then perhaps anything is indeed possible!

I Got Zinged!

I have to hand it to my sister Lale Lovell and her husband Matt. They got me this year for April Fool's Day. Not only did they NOT believe me when I told them I was going to go sky-diving, they pulled their own prank.

Lale informed me that her friend Denise and her husband needed someone to work the NRA booth at the Boulder's Farmer Market in Boulder, Col.

Since my sister voted for Barack Obama, and seems hardly inclined towards becoming a Second Amendment Sister, this was quite a shock though she did vote for Bob Dole in 1996 (My mother and I have since forgiven her).

I am still recovering though I take comfort in the fact that about seven folks 'fell' for my prank, including my friend Bahadir Acuner of Seattle who hurled an expletive my way.......!

For the record, I did not act that way towards my sister. I suppose next year she'll tell me that she went to a Gogol Bordello concert!

The group plays in her area at the Fox Theatre in Boulder on May 28.