Remember, y’all. Tomorrow is April 1st, which–to quote Puddnhead Wilson–”is the day on which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.”

Prepare yourself for the salt-in-the-sugar trick tomorrow morning with The 100 Top April Fools’ Pranks of all time. My personal favorite would be the April 1998 issue of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. Now, we do not wish to criticize New Mexico, which we are sure includes many, many citizens who favor science and reason, but this journal has never had a terribly high subscription base.

And yet despite that small circulation, the journal became famous for publishing an article claiming that the legislature in my home state, Alabama, had changed the value of pi from 3.14… to its “Biblical value” of 3. The article spread on the Internet, was taken as gospel (so much for science and reason), and continues to get occasionally forwarded to this day.

Oh, and if you’re looking for April Fool’s pranks, consider taking a page from hilarious prankster Uday Hussein. Between 1998 and 2000, Uday’s newspaper published a different hilarious April Fools’ Day story each year, including one asserting that jokingly told the Iraqi people that their food ration would be increased to include bananas. The people were all like, “Oh thank God, I’m so hungry,” and then Uday was all like, “Just kidding,” and then the people were all like, “Oh, ha ha! That was a good one, Uday. It’s nice to know that you’re not too busy with your 1,200 luxury automobiles to share a joke with the commoners now and again.”

With this telecast spawning its own cottage industry and its own celebrity culture (complete with really sketchy MySpace friends), I’ve been thinking a lot about how unintentionally hilarious/kinda racist local news segments can be. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about leprechauns, our wee Irish friends who bring us, among other things, gold and artificially colored marshmallows in breakfast cereal. Did you know, for instance, that until the last 100 years, leprechauns were thought to wear red and not green? Blew my mind, too.

Anyway, it turns out that Mobile, Alabama, isn’t the only place to spot one: there’s a 24-hour webcam set up in a ‘fairy ring’ near the town of Thurles in Ireland. Recently, someone saw “a little leprechaun in the middle of the screen playing a flute!” (The exclamation point isn’t mine, although I share the anonymous poster’s enthusiasm.) The site claims that sightings come far more frequently in the springtime, so hop on now, while the getting’s good.

And I’m not talking about simply remembering to set your clock ahead an hr. Here’s your cheat sheet:

1. There’s no ’s’ at the end of Saving, so it’s Daylight Saving Time - not Savings Time.
2. This year will be the first time since the early 1970s that the state of Indiana has observed Daylight Saving Time. Some counties observed it in the past but most did not.
3. Ben Franklin was one of the first to suggest the idea but it wasn’t until WWI that Daylight Saving was actually put in place, to help save energy.
4. China has only one time zone, meaning light and dark hours are very different on the east and west sides of the country. Crazy.
5. Check out the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) site. Prepare to be hypnotized by the ticking clock.
6. As the site will tell you, GMT remains the same all year.

As I was scouring New Scientist for good ideas, I noticed that some cats at M.I.T. are working on a device to alert autistic kids when their audience is getting bored, irritated or confused. In fact, the catchy-titled “emotional social intelligence prosthetic” (clearly these guys are better at science than marketing) consists of a very tiny camera, and a handheld device that indicates whether the person you’re talking to is “agreeing, disagreeing, concentrating, thinking, unsure or uninterested.”

It sounds like it could have fantastic results. In fact, they’re even talking about modifying the concept for classrooms to help teachers know when kids aren’t grasping concepts. I’m thinking we should get our hands on one of these buggers and send it out with the magazine. (Or maybe I’ll just take it clubbing with me.) Anyway, you can read more about it here.

If only this were an April Fool’s joke: It seems Michael Eisner finally got a job–as host of his own CNBC show called (well what do you know), Conversations with Michael Eisner. So far, reviews and stats haven’t been too kind on the former Disney CEO.

The Orlando Sentinel says, “What exists now, judging by ‘Conversations,’ is someone who is part showman, part guy-with-time-on-his-hands…”

This struck me as apropos seeing as one of his first guests was Martha (ya-still-gotta-love-her) Stewart–a woman who, until recently, had even more time on her hands than Eisner did.

Makes you wonder if the C in CNBC doesn’t stand for CANCEL.

Anywho: curious Job-factoids about Martha –

Her real name is: Martha Helen Kostyra.

When she was growing up, she thought she’d be a chemist.
She used to be a model during her high school and college years.

Donald Trump once publicly blamed The Apprentice: Martha Stewart for a decline in ratings for his own show.

Ahhh, the job-related troubles of the wealthy-beyond-measure.

Speaking of Einstein, if you have any interest in putting words in his mouth, check out this new Internet plaything – you can take the famous photo of him at the chalkboard and quite literally rewrite history, changing his scribblings from R(subscript)IK = O2 to whatever fanciful text you desire. I know what my Christmas cards will look like this year…

This ought to interest the six people in the world who still find “dumb Polack” jokes funny – it turns out Poles are smarter than all the other Europeans, save the Germans and the Dutch. A British professor recently surveyed all the nations on the Continent and found that those three nations had the highest average IQs (107 for Germany and the Netherlands, 106 for Poland), while the poor Serbians clocked in last at 89.

I’m not sure the nutty professor’s work is all that solid – as the token girl on this blog, I take issue with his claim that men are smarter than women – and I’m also not sure I buy his explanation for the higher IQ scores in Northern countries. Early humans living in cold environments ate more protein-rich meat than their warm-weather counterparts, which may have caused them to evolve bigger brains. (The neurobiologist William Calvin wrote a fantastic book on this subject.) That theory is pretty well regarded, but Professor Lynn takes it further and says the cold weather and resulting bigger brains led to the higher IQs in his survey. The relationship between IQ and brain size is a touchy subject among psychologists; it’s by no means proven. I wonder what the professor would have to say about the brain of mental_floss patron saint Albert Einstein (that’s it in the photo), which was organized in a unique way but not especially huge. Clearly, at least in that case, size didn’t matter.

As Disney and Pixar continue to work out the details of their Monster deal, expected to be completed by the summer, I can’t help but wonder if the acquisition is the direct result of Michael Eisner losing control of his company. Eisner, if you recall, is at once credited with saving Disney in the 80s and destroying the company in the 90s. He and Steve Jobs, CEO of Pixar, got along about as well as Woody and Buzz from Toy Story. So, when, in 2004, Pixar and Disney couldn’t come to terms, Jobs announced Pixar would no longer use Disney to distribute Pixar’s hit films.

Cut to a couple years later, post-Eisner, and here comes Disney not only distributing the upcoming summer release, CARS, but also providing the pen-and-ink, as it were.

And now that Steve Jobs is the single largest shareholder of Disney stock, were Walt Disney’s right-hand animator, Ub Iwerks, still alive, I suppose he’d now own a t-shirt that read:

iWerks for Jobs

Anyway, CARS looks like a fast and furious addition to the Pixar/Disney family. Check out the preview here.

And check back later today for more on what Eisner has been up to these past weeks. According to the critics, ehhh, not nearly as interesting…

I have no doubt that NASCAR-flavored bacon will be a big hit with red-state folks, but what about those of us in the blue states who love a good cheeseburger – and also were moved by the “little tortured baby cow” episode of South Park? What are ethically-minded carnivores supposed to eat? If scientists have their way, we’ll soon be chowing down on test-tube hamburgers. Researchers have already been able to grow mouse and frog meat from stem cells in Petri dishes – the latter aimed at the French, I guess – as well as non-descript mystery meat that could be used in burgers and spaghetti sauce. Within five years they hope to have cultured beef, pork, and chicken on the market (insert “tastes like chicken” joke here).

The idea of lab-grown meat isn’t actually all that new. Cold War-era Soviet scientists managed to create protein-producing bacteria. Alas, they were more nutritious than delicious; they smelled so bad no one would eat them. NASA kicked off its own project in 2001 with the kind of haute cuisine only a cat could love: goldfish. The agency was trying to figure out if astronauts could grow their own poisson on long journeys, but it eventually dropped the project, and since then funding for this kind of stuff has been a little scarce. Test-tube chicken takes killing animals and fouling the environment out of the equation, but it’s still icky, which means there’s not a huge market. (Mangesh, you’re a vegetarian – would you eat this?) One researcher was approached by a group that offered him a big chunk of funding, with a caveat: they didn’t want him to grow frog, or mouse, or even beef muscle. They wanted their lab-grown meat served with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Yep – meat from human stem cells. Bon appetit!

After seeing the story this week on the new Guinness record for largest/longest buffett (510 different dishes on 500 feet of table), I stumbled into TheLongestListofTheLongestStuff AtTheLongestDomainNameAtLongLast.com. Because sometimes it’s good to return to your elementary school obsession with Guinness records. Check out the world’s longest nose (I really think I had a friend in college who the record keepers just haven’t seen), the longest beard (at 17.5 feet and now on display at the Smithsonian - for some reason there’s no picture) or the world’s longest beard on a woman (11 inches). The site also has a few facts we’ve covered in earlier issues of mental_floss, such as the world’s longest national anthem (Greece’s at 158 stanzas!). They also have the fact about mental_floss columnist Ken Jennings holding the record for longest Jeopardy win streak (74 games). So you may be wondering what the picture above is all about. It’s the world’s longest animal, the Ribbon Worm. It beat out the Blue Whale and the longest dinosaur for the record.