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Editors Desk
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Who Will Fool The Fools?
As a satire and humour writer I have to admit that I loathe April Fool's Day. Now I'm not trying to be grinchy, scroogey, or be accused of sour grapery. You see, The Toque is already an all-year-round April Fool's joke, so when April 1st comes around, the event is somewhat anti-climactic for our already lethargic writing staff. Given that most of what we write is made-up (there I said it), and that we're usually still suffering from St. Patrick's Day hangovers (hey, we really know how to party...or we don't), we're somewhat less enthusiastic about April Fool's Day and the online explosion of nigh-believable news content and other mockish frippery.
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Editors Desk
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Hollow Chocolate Rabbit Leaves Me Hollow On The Inside
 Hollw Chocolate Bunny! When I was a child, I looked forward to Easter nearly as much as the other "significant" children's holidays (Christmas, Halloween), because I knew that there was going to be a bounty of chocolate to keep my head swimming in a sweet sugary high for weeks. When Easter would hop in, I knew that the Easter Bunny would leave me a treasure of foil-wrapped chocolaty goodness that I could enjoy, after the obligatory searching effort. Usually, the ear off of an injection-molded milk chocolate rabbit was enough to send me soaring into a sugar-induced magical world.
But that all came crashing down like the buzz off of a Starbucks 4-shot mocha, after I spent one Easter at my grandparents', where, two nicely arranged Easter baskets were waiting for my sister and I, and beside them, standing in front of us like two magical chocolate creatures straight out of Alice In Wonderland, were two giant chocolate bunnies sealed in a clear plastic covering.
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News Bits
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Arthur C. Clarke Had One "Hal" Of A Lifetime
 HAL 9000 It is with great sorrow and sadness that we acknowledge the passing of one of the world's most famous science fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke, who brought us the spectacular 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010, "Rendezvous With Rama", and many more amazing essays and short stories.
Mr. Clarke's impact on popular culture will be permanently embedded in society, like a giant crater on the surface of the moon.
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Human Interest
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Spiking A Shamrock Shake Is An Irish Tradition
AT THE DRIVE-THRU-- Spring is the air, and just around the corner (and over the leprechaun's rainbow) is St. Patrick's Day, the annual feast day that celebrates Saint Patrick, one of the great patron saints of Ireland. And what better way to acknowledge this hallowed Irish holiday than with a tasty Shamrock Shake...mixed strongly with Irish Cream, Irish whiskey, or some other form of hard alcohol.
Yes, it's a respected tradition...mixing booze with that minty milkshake concoction, the nearly-revered Shamrock Shake. Every year, people seek to blend potent alcoholic spirits with their triple-thick green milkshakes, all in deference to the great Irish saint.
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Computers
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In an effort to refine, revise, and control the way that users perform search requests using their search engine, Internet mogul (as is giant, not those funny bumps on ski hills) has announced that they will be immediately removing several redundant terms from their search engine queries. Explaining that redundant keyword searches are to blame for low server performance across Google's network, and are a waste of precious search resources, several pointless and unnecessary words and terms will be abolished from Google search databases in order to conserve bandwidth and Internet congestion.
One of the most notable keywords that Google has already removed from their search system is the word "gullible", which Google technicians state is one of the highest wasters of server resources, using as much as 5% of the total database, while offering no value to users who type in the keyword. Organic search results from several other search engines, such as Yahoo, and Windows Live, has also determined that the word provides little or no value to Internet users.
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