My Geek Notes

Could it be that Joey Skaggs, prankster extrordinaire, is at it again? The media tease, responsible for fooling reporters each year with fake press releases touting New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade (now in its 22nd year) has outdone himself.

This week, Skaggs announced the launch of a new Web site, The Art of the Prank.

The site will reportedly feature “submissions from many known and not so known pranksters, artists, performers, activists and writers,” and is scheduled to launch on April 1, 2007.

If the site, located at www.pranks.com, is legitimate, it will “provide one stop shopping for anyone interested in mounting an insurrection, over-throwing a government, crashing a stock market, creating global chaos, growing hair, losing weight or keeping their horny dog satisfied. It will provide a sure way to get the federal government to tap your phone line . . .” Skaggs said in a PRWeb press release earlier this week.

The brilliance of the whole thing is that Skaggs has repeatedly lied to the media in the past. It will be impossible for respectable editors to take him seriously about such an undertaking.

Could this one be legitimate? Personally, I’d love to see something like this online, but my guess is that it’s not a real claim. I hope I’m wrong, though, because if I am, he’ll launch what would be destined to be a top-5,000 Internet destination and the media will have missed it.

It would be, without a doubt, the biggest reverse-marketing hoax of all time.