Britain: And Next Year, Killer Pasta

Readers of London’s Daily Mail were appalled last week to read that a goldfish nicknamed George had leaped out of his bowl and taken a bite out of 12-year- old Amanda Baker’s hand. A photograph showed the shaken girl holding up her bandaged limb. The killer goldfish, the paper explained, was the result of an attempt to breed a male piranha with a female goldfish. The same day the , Guardian reported that the world’s first photograph, some 200 years old, had been located in a Japanese cave.

Signs and portents? No, just the usual April Fools’ Day fare from Fleet Street. It was not a bad year. But old-timers agreed that this year’s fodder for the gullible did not measure up to the 1957 classic, when BBC TV had viewers believing they were watching footage of peasants busily harvesting pasta from spaghetti trees in an orchard on a Swiss-Italian farm.