The revolution has come in the process of insurancethe supply chain, some call it. The Internet and the changes it has forced (new data standards, different workflow, and so on) have streamlined the business process, giving savvy carriers the opportunity to save money with the right technologies. And many of them are doing just thatread on to see how.

Andrew Kantor
Editor-in-Chief

What Fools They Be

Its April, when, traditionally, an editors fancy turns to thoughts of Tom Foolery.

Running April Fools jokes has long been a tradition of many otherwise stoic publications, from local newspapers to national magazines.

Science magazine Discover is one of the most consistent purveyors of fake news stories in April. (See www.discover.com/science_news/fool.html.) Its pieces have included stories on the discovery of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal tuba, the unearthing of the Holy Grail, and Arctic mole-rats with heat-organs on their heads that burrow through the ice and prey on penguins.

Cincinnati-based Artscapes April events calendar includes listings like reviews of a movie by Robert Altman in which Holly Hunter plays a movie studio executive in New Zealand: The Player Piano. And Connecticut magazines April jokes included one about flatworm beauty contests.

PC Computing got plenty of mail when columnist John Dvorak wrote about a Senate bill that would outlaw drunken driving on the Information Superhighway.

Even venerable Scientific American has gotten in on the act, running April stories that included one demonstrating that Einsteins special theory of relativity contained a logical flaw; one about a chess program that had established, with a high degree of probability, that pawn to kings rook 4 is a win for White; and one of a diagram of a flush toilet attributed to one of Leonardo de Vincis lost notebooks.

My old haunt, Internet World, ran a news story about the ScentMaster 2000, which allowed personal computers to generate odors from .OLF files. It was years later, in 2000 in fact, that real scent boards were announced.

The Orlando Sentinels Sunday magazine ran a feature story on a trainable, cockroach-eating rodent called the Tasmanian Mock Walrus, that fooled thousands of readers who wanted to buy them.

So, too, with Gamess 1997 April Foolone I had the pleasure of co-authoringthat told the story of Orions Crystal, an invisible puzzle taking the toy world by storm. Hundreds of readers bombarded local (and confused) toy stores with phone calls and visits demanding one.

Arguably the most famous magazine April Fools joke is The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, written by George Plimpton for Sports Illustrated. It features the tale of one Hayden Siddhartha (Sidd) Finch, a Buddhist pitcher recruited by the New York Mets who could throw a baseball with deadly accuracy at 168 miles per hour. Complete with photos and quotes from players, the article was such a success it spawned a novel.

So April has become a special month for we editor types. Why am I telling you this? No reason. AK

Want more? Eric Berlin, co-author of the Orions Crystal piece, has a terrific article on the history of such jokes at www.ericberlin.com/reader.html.