By Saeed Ahmed/CNN
"If you happen to browse upon a news story that's too odd to be true Wednesday, hold your outrage and check the calendar.
It's April Fools' Day -- when media outlets around the world take a break from the serious business of delivering news and play fast and furious with the facts.
No one quite knows when the practice began, but any journalist will point to what is undoubtedly the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled: A 1957 BBC report that said, thanks to a mild winter and the elimination of the spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop.
The segment was accompanied by pictures of farmers pulling strands of spaghetti from trees -- and prompted hundreds of viewers to call in, wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees.
Read the rest here.
While not as elaborate, the pranks that media outlets harvested this year have been quite rich:
The Guardian in London ran a story Wednesday announcing that, after 188 years as a print publication, it will become the first newspaper to deliver news exclusively via Twitter.
Twitter, a micro-blogging site, allows users to post updates that are 140 characters long. In keeping with the limitation, the newspaper said it had undertaken a mammoth project to retool the newspaper's entire archive.
A Lebanese newspaper ran a caricature last year (shown above) of two opposition leaders hugging in light of April Fools' Day. Image via Getty Images
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