Sure, Christmas may get all the ink, but April Fools' Day is the only holiday where you can set your roommate's underwear on fire without getting slugged or prosecuted. And while you'd love to let yourself go this time of year, the problem is, your favorite prank, "your shoes are untied," has lost the zing it had in first grade, and you find few takers when you ask if anyone's up to go snipe hunting. To ensure you don't let another good deed go unpunished this April 1, we at NetGuide offer you everything an aspiring April Fool will need, from prank ideas to gag gifts to a healthy dose of inspirational stories.

Playing Tricks On The Web

Being the undisputed King of All Things Deviant (at least according to the liberal media and conservative congressmen), it should come as no surprise that the Web is bursting with pranks, shenanigans and other pseudo-illegal activities to pull on those nearest and dearest to us. Pranksta's Paradise is a huge collection of pranks for work, home, or even car. From the benign (putting Vaseline on the person's windshield wiper) to the brutal (filling a roommate's shampoo bottle with baby oil), there are enough practical jokes here for another millennium of April Fools Days.

If those aren't awful enough, check out The Avenger's website. Although created with a view to revenge, there's plenty of good stuff here for those who like to take their practical jokes to pathological extremes, such as putting an ad in the paper advertising your victim's Saturday morning yard sale, with early birds especially welcome.

For your techno-geeky friends, how about programs designed to harmlessly screw with their most valuable possessions: their computers? At April Fools' Day Freebies you'll find a couple dozen freeware programs that do everything from pretend to format your target's hard drive to sporadically open his CD-ROM drive.

The incomparable Zug offers a full complement of pranks including, but not limited to, Zug Bugs, that is, free interactive pranks to spring on your friends. Also, don't leave without reading Outgoing Mail, an archive of prank e-mails to large corporations that we think is possibly the funniest thing ever.

But for simple, innocent fun, go no further than that veritable icon of wholesomeness, Disney. 13 Great April Fools' Pranks features shenanigans for the whole family, such as packing your kids' lunch with an apple with a gummy worm or dyeing your child's cereal milk green. Hilarity is certain to ensue.

Gag Gifts

Nothing says fun like letting someone think they've won $10,000 only to have their euphoric high crushed mercilessly thanks to these fake lottery tickets. Just pray that your target has a really good sense of humor.

Or you can choose to say it with flowers (that is, if you want to say "I curse the ground you walk on") with a lovely bouquet of dead roses or perhaps a box of melted chocolates, compliments of Revenge Unlimited. If, however, you find yourself the object of someone's unwanted devotion while you're out and about on April Fools', just show them your not-so-pearly whites from Dr. Bukk's Fake Teef, which come in customizable Eleanor Roosevelt to Deliverance-inspired chompers. But for all your gag gift needs, look no further than Archie McPhee's, where you can get everything from a rubber chicken (whose usefulness continues to elude us) to a TV Test Pattern Nightlight.

April Fools' Inspiration

The success of shows such as America's Funniest Videos and Candid Camera prove that we're not so much a nation of practical jokers so much as we are a country of people who revel in watching others squirm under a perpetrator's cruel pranks. For those who prefer to take a more passive role this April Fools', look to the alt.shenanigans Web page. This low-frills site has a huge collection of pranks actually carried out by others and posted to the Usenet site. Who knows, perhaps you'll be similarly inspired.

Sometimes, it's a wonder what people did for fun before the invention of the telephone (followed shortly by Prince Albert In A Can). And for those who shy from face-to-face confrontation but love crank calls, you're going to want to go to The Huge List of Prank Calls on the Web, which lists far more wonderful links than this article's bandwidth could possibly allow.

And what would April Fools' Day be without all those bogus Usenet postings and fake e-mails we see year after year? April Fools' on the Net is the ultimate collection of everything (or nearly everything) that's been posted on the Net or its predecessor since 1978(!). While few may find the humor in the 'TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option' gag (stop! you're killing me!), who can forget Microsoft's bid for the Catholic Church?