Yodel videogame? Playboy mansion in NZ? It's April 1

By Belinda Goldsmith

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) - Video gamers with a yearning for yodeling now have a new XBox 360 game with songs such as "Whose spit is in my horn?"

Popular New Zealand tourist town Rotorua (www.rotoruanz.com) says a pervasive rotten egg smell is such a powerful aphrodisiac that Hugh Hefner wants to build a Playboy mansion there.

British newspaper The Guardian will only publish stories on social networking service Twitter, where messages are limited to 140 characters.

Can't be true? It isn't.

Wednesday is April 1 and media outlets, companies, politicians and other jokers have come up with a range of April Fools' hoaxes.

Tourism Minister Tim Holding from the Australian state of Victoria announced that Melbourne would bid to host the Running of the Bulls through the city's laneways, stealing the event from Pamplona in Spain that has held it since the 13th century.

"We are also in preliminary discussions with musical producers to rename the smash hit musical Bully Elliot for the week of the event," he said in a statement, dated April 1.

He wasn't the only Melburnian pulling pranks. Some people in the city awoke to find their cars wrapped in clingfilm, apparently a stunt by a local radio station.

Prank products offered on April 1 included a high-tech football with an inbuilt GPS and artificial intelligence so it can measure kicks to notify talent scouts, according to Google.

Diagrams on the Google website showed the gBall, which can be found using Google Maps, could be plugged into a computer and vibrates when a talent scout wants to speak with the owner.

The Economist put out an April 1 press release which says the magazine intends to launch an Econoland theme park, "matching the magic of a theme park with the excitement of macroeconomics."

The press release has a link to an interactive map at tinyurl.com/c57yfp where viewers can see such exciting attractions as the Dow Jones roller coaster which plummets from atop the Mountain of Debt, swim with the loan sharks through the Lagoon of Lost Liquidity or navigate past the Terror-Dactyl in the Magical Jungle of International Politics.

Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera apologized online to its readers after falling for a convincing Internet prank about the "Hotelicopter," a four-storey flying hotel based on a Soviet design for the largest helicopter ever built -- the Mil V-12.

Only two 1960s prototypes were ever built and the anonymous creators of a website -- www.hotelicopter.com -- announced this week they had bought one and converted it into a hovering paradise for weary travelers reluctant to wait at the airport.

Anonymous, until sharp-eyed Internet users noted a striking resemblance to the rooms offered by a recently founded British company called Yotel, which sells airport hotel accommodation.