Mount Cleveland erupting photographed from the ISS. Image belongs to NASA/JPL and is from the Wikimedia Commons.
Pretty much all of the US has by now noticed our small little April fool’s joke. Why now you might ask? Well, let us start at the beginning.
The readers and commentators at Volcanocafé are as a crowd a highly intelligent and very knowledgeable group. Since the onset of Volcanocafé we have published a bogus report on some extremely unlikely volcano that either is about to erupt, or is erupting, every April first. The only problem is that our readers are so fantastic that we have to place the level high to fool them for even a split second.
As such this year’s Aprils joke was a failure. It took about a minute for our regular readers to see through the joke. There was also a hidden clue in the piece that anyone with a high degree of geological knowledge could find and call us on our bluff.
In the end it was not that hard, this was April first, the article was tagged April 1st, and to really top it off we chose the least volcanic area on the planet. So, nobody should have been fooled in the long run.
Enter those who Dream Dark Dreams of Destruction and their Prophet Steve Quayle. For those who do not know about Steve Quayle he is a syndicated radio talk show host who sprouts nonsense about doomsday and conspiration theories.
Steve Quayle. The image is from disclose TV and the show True Legends with Steve Quayle. It is used under European Common Law as fair usage by a non-profit organisation.
Steve Quayle or his staff seems to like our not so little site for reasons that are rather unfathomable for us who write and edit Volcanocafé. After all we try to go to painstaking lengths to fact check our articles and present scientific facts as they are without any agenda whatsoever except our shared love for volcanoes. In other words, we are about as far away as it is possible to be from a nibiruist such as Steve Quayle. Two times before he has used our site as a source in his shows on things volcanic and that probably improved his program quality quite a bit. But this time he forgot what date it was, and did not even bother with reading the first comment, nor the taglist.
For him the result was tragicomic. In his usual style he proclaimed the doom and gloom as the northern part of the world would suffer tremendously after the Lake Dellen Supervolcano erupted. So far it was just sloppy work from him and his staff. What followed is a travesty.
The larger syndicated networks started to pick up on Steve Quayles “breaking news”. So, the US citizens were duly informed about the end of the world as they drank their morning coffee. Not bad for a popular science blogzine, or whatever now we should call ourselves. We are soon 3 years old and we do not even know what to call ourselves…
Afterwards we have had people complaining about the joke and saying that we should have written clearly that it was an April Fool’s joke. It is not a joke if you have to tell people it is one. The intention is to fool you in an amusing way.
Will we as a very serious popular science site continue with publishing pranks? No and yes. We will continue with our April Fool’s tradition if we feel like it, and we do feel like it. It is hellishly fun to write something untrue when you spend 364 days writing the scientific truth as well as it ever can be done. It is even more fun when we can bamboozle the arse out of Steve Quayle. He really made my year.
Something that should be known about our readers, they are not an elitist crowd, they come from all walks of life and the majority is not working as professional scientists. But they all share a love for science and a deep-rooted understanding of the fundament of all science, critical thinking. In the end they were not fooled, but a syndicated radio personality was fooled. It says something about the conspiration theorists, but I let you, our beloved and informed reader figure out what that is.
Riddles
Last week Kelda grabbed a shared lead with our Grand-Master Sissel. What will happen this week? As usual there are 3 volcanoes hidden, 1 volcanologist and one volcanic term.
- Image – Concepción in Nicaragua (Lughduniense, 2pt) The painting is the original La inmaculada Concepción, or Our Lady of Imaculate Concepcion.
- Atlas of Borismania – Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen (Diana Barnes, 2pt). He wrote Atlas des Ätna (1858 -1861)
- As I am sad I shed myself of these – Pele’s Tears (Dinojura, 2pt)
- Petite Famous English Fatty Owl’s – Pico Basilé in Equatorial Guinea (Sissel, 2pt). Basil Fawlty and his Fawlty Towers was the way there.
- Saint Martin in the Fields playing in tuxedos – San Martin Tuxtla, Mexico (Sissel, 2pt)
| Score board | ||
| 20 Sissel 20 Kelda 12 Dinojura44 12 Cryphia 10 Evan Chugg 7 Dorkviking 4 Edward |
4 Matt 4 Pyter 4 Spica 3 GeoLurking 2 Alison 2 Inannamoon 2 Lughduniense |
2 UKViggen 2 Bobbi 1 DFM 1 Diana Barnes 1 KarenZ 1 Sa’Ke |
CARL
The original post can be found here:
https://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/a-hitherto-unknown-supervolcano-about-to-erupt/
VolcanoCafé 
All the riddles except no 4 is now solved.
Someone has though been pretty close to solving no 4, but I will not say who.
4 Mount William
Or his “sister” Bessie Butte, Newberry
or Mt Hamilton
4 Pico Basilé (formerly Pico de Santa Isabel) is the highest mountain on the island of Bioko, which is part of Equatorial Guinea. With an altitude of 9,878 ft (3,011 m), it is the summit of the largest and highest of three overlapping basaltic shield volcanoes which form the island (Wikipedia).
And from there you get to Basil and his Fawlty Towers via the Fatty Owl.
So… DING!
Fatty Owls was read on the sign of ‘Fawlty Towers, 10th episode, ‘ The Kipper and the Corpse’. In that episode there is a dead guest sitting in his bed, Mr. Leeman.
There is a geologist/ volcanologist who goes by the name William P. Leeman , but I’m not sure he’s petite and a Brit…
Congratulations to the winners!
And new post by Agimarc is up!
https://volcanocafe.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/redoubt-an-introduction/