Cable-y April FoolsThat Made Us Chuckle

Kudos to those publications nervy enough
to run fake headlines and items on April 1.
People are so touchy these days!

The Evening Bridge had a couple of good
ones, including that John Malone’s Liberty
Global had made bids to buy Comcast,
Time Warner Cable, Cox and Charter (although
Cox is a private company). Cablevision
wasn’t involved, Malone was “quoted,”
because Chuck Dolan is too good a negotiator.

River Ave. Blues, a New York Yankees blog,
also made Cablevision’s ruling Dolans a bit
of a punchline with an item about the Steinbrenner
family negotiating to sell them the
team. It later added an apologetic update
about earlier citing a sports business publication
as the source of the made-up item
— see, you have to be careful.

The best was the U.K. Daily Telegraph
report that Virgin Media has been using
specially trained ferrets to lay broadband
cable in rural areas. “The ferrets wear jackets
fitted with a microchip which is able to
analyse any breaks or damage in the underground
network,” the story said. Look it up
online for a shot of one such busy critter:
http://tinyurl.com/y8zs6ll.