April Fool's

I'll be honest. The very first thing I did in front of my laptop today was to try to find Google's April Fool's joke. I quickly found the new "feature" of Gmail (Custom Time). Pretty good. And the "Wake-up Kit" in Google Calendar. Not bad. And the "I'm feeling lucky" button for events, which set me up on "dates" with Angelina Jolie, Anna Kournikova, Pamela Anderson, Jessica Alba, and (yikes!) Paris Hilton.

But I knew there had to be something... more.

And there was. Google Virgle.

I had to sign out of iGoogle and visit the classic home page twice before I found the link, but oh boy, it was worth it. Over the next one hundred years, Google and Virgin Inc. will lead an "interplanetary Noah's Ark" to create a self-sustaining population of over 100,000 Martians, living on the first open source planet in the universe.

There's an application to become a pioneer in the "adventure of many lifetimes" as well as an FAQ - the highlight of that might be:

How'd you learn all this stuff?

Reading. Surfing. Studying. Cramming. Arguing. Improvising. Special thanks to the brilliant minds at the invaluable Mars Society

There's even a post on the Official Google Blog from Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Inc.

:-D

Well done, Googlers.