No free bottles of booze in Taipa Bar: April Fools’

The story “Bottles of spirits, wine free at Taipa bar,” published yesterday in the Times (p12) was our April Fools’ joke.
The fictional Taipa Bar is not offering bottles of booze – though some fine and genuine establishments do have excellent happy hours and treats (but avoid crowding). Even in this time of global crisis, we didn’t want to break with this centuries’ old ritual.
The “bottles for free” prank created a lot of buzz on our Facebook page, with some readers spotting the joke right away and commenting with wisecracks, while others were very supportive of the idea. A few netizens said that they were organizing teams to find the “treasure bar” – Taipa is small “it won’t be that hard to find it,” noted one. Attention bars!
We appreciate your sense of humor, in harsh times.
April Fools’ Day – also named All Fools’ Day – is celebrated every year on the first day of April as a day when people play practical jokes and hoaxes on each other. The jokes and their victims are known as “April fools.” The press has followed the tradition by publishing a hoax on this day, before retracting it over the subsequent days. Popular since the 19th century, the day is not a national holiday in any country, but is well known in Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, the Philippines and the United States.
This year the tradition took a turn. Google announced that it wouldn’t participate with their usually grandiose pranks because of the pandemic, while countries like India and Thailand threatened jail sentences for April Fools’ jokes related to the virus.
In Korea, a K-Pop mega-star went too far. Kim Jaejoong revealed yesterday to his 1.9 million followers on Instagram that he had contracted Covid-19 and was currently hospitalized seeking treatment.
Kim Jaejoong told fans he was ill with coronavirus in an Instagram post which he has since deleted.
Fifty minutes later, he updated a caption on the image to state that it was a joke to “raise awareness.”
He said that while he “did go too far for April Fool’s Day,” he has family and friends who “are getting sick…and dying.”
The New York Times reported that the social media account was deactivated due to a deluge of criticism. PC