Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre

Adding this to my list of favorite April Fool's pranks -- my favorite being the recently featured islands of San Serriffe.

And apparently they took place on subsequent April Fools Days -- 77' and 78'. Must have been a golden era for pranking.

The Museum of Hoaxes publishes their own Top 100 April Fools list: https://hoaxes.org/aprilfool/

Ah, like 'Arkhan Land', rediscoverer of the Land Raider.

(And of course, Jimmy Space).

Haha, adding this to my list of funny academic pranks. This is right up there with the MIT balloon at the Harvard-Yale game.

How much of standardization or cannon is 'invented' in the same exact way? Very William S. Burroughs.

Well, or Thomas Pynchon.

I grew up seeing Al Kaline in the baseball box scores, and much later reflected that I would have rolled my eyes had I seen the name in The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow.

I found myself wondering whether this was about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Littr%C3%A9.

Why make the rule that capital letters only be used when the unit is named after a person, if the rule is discarded the instant it is inconvenient?

lol, I love this. These gems are one of the reason I hang out on HN ;-)

He couldn't have come up with a more french name? /s