1995

No-Hole Polo Mints

Spoofing the increasingly complex regulations mandated by the European Economic Community, Polo Mints ran ads in British papers announcing that in accordance with EEC Council Regulation 631/95 they would no longer be producing mints with holes. This regulation supposedly required that all producers of tubular foodstuffs delete the holes from their products. To satisfy the regulation, all the existing stock of Polo mints would be supplemented with a EURO-CONVERSION KIT containing twenty 7mm Hole Fillers to be placed inside each Polo mint. A detailed instruction leaflet would also be included.

The Multicolor Gondolas of Venice

For hundreds of years, the gondolas of Venice have been colored black - and only black. According to legend, this is because after the plague struck Venice in the sixteenth century, it was decreed that all the gondolas had to be black as a tribute to the victims. Therefore, massive shock and outrage was triggered by an announcement on the front page of Il Gazzettino Venezia that the city council had decided that all the gondolas should henceforward be colorized, not only with bright shades of red, yellow, blue, and green, but also with swirls and geometric shapes. The city council, the paper said, made this decision after conducting thorough market research on the tastes of tourists and Venetians, which had determined that people were tired of seeing dismal black boats plying the canals of Venice.

Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers

The April 1995 issue of Discover magazine reported that the biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had found a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin, the article quoted her as saying. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.