That’s why this fine Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, available for as little as $9.78, became one of the online retailer’s most popular items in the last week. Prompted by a link at the IAC (IACI)-owned site, CollegeHumor readers bought up scads of the shirts, and filled Amazon (AMZN) with glowing reviews like these:

Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather…

This is the only t-shirt Chuck Norris wears. Wolves howl at the moon, and the moon howls at Chuck…

…So I’m looking for threads that say, “Hey baby…I’m real boss!” when I stumble upon this epic creation. The wolves spoke to me in a language all their own; it was like German, Mongol, and Bitchin all mixed together. I mean, one wolf howlin at the moon is major…but three???

Why bother? If you have to ask, you’re probably never going to get the joke. More info via the Washington Post, including the most pertinent detail: As clever as the CollegeHumor dudes are, they neglected to actually figure out how to profit from the stunt themselves.

First the company gave us CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), an “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system with the personality of a 12-year-old girl and accompanied by its own homepage, YouTube channel, blog, monograph and versions of Google Earth and Google Maps. And to these, Google has added Google LOLCODE, Google Brain Search, Google Chrome with 3-D and a new Gmail auto-reply feature. The search giant also announced a new upside-down viewing option for YouTube and an automatic red-eye function for Picasa.

Overkill? Maybe, just a little. Google (GOOG), of course, wasn’t alone in pumping the Web full of pranks. Seems people with Web sites everywhere fancy themselves Don Rickles today. Hotels.com began taking reservations for rooms on the Moon. And Expedia (EXPE) began offering flights to Mars. Microsoft (MSFT) renamed its Kumo search product Omuk and unveiled Alpine Legend for Xbox 360. Some angry librarians staged a Kindle burning in a Los Angeles park. Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media appointed Gary Busey as Director of Human Resources. Torrent index The Pirate Bay partnered with the hopelessly litigious Warner Bros. The Guardian adopted an all-Twitter publishing model. Gizmodo was taken over by spam overlords. Amazon (AMZN) launched a brand new cloud-computing dirigible called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE. Yahoo (YHOO) debuted an Ideological Search. And, finally, Qualcomm (QCOM) took convergence a bit too literally.

There are plenty of others, of course, far too many to mention here, and most of them unworthy of that mention in the first place. As Good Morning Silicon Valley aptly notes, “The sad fact is that pranks are like fireworks–once amateurs get to fiddling around with them, somebody’s going to end up lame.”

Google’s current engineering facilities in the United States, India and Switzerland are all leaders in search technology development. However, by locating a research and technology center on the moon, Google engineers will be able to experiment with an entirely different set of parameters. For example, imagine tapping unlimited solar energy to drive megawatt data centers and power innumerable arrays of massively parallel lava lamps, with ample no-cost cooling available to regulate the temperature of server farms sprawling over acres of land unblighted by sentient lifeforms or restrictive zoning ordinances.”

–Excerpt from “Google Copernicus Center Is Hiring,” the company’s 2004 April Fool’s Day hoax

With the establishment of the Google Lunar X Prize, Google’s 2004 Copernicus Center announcement seems less April Fool’s Day hoax, more company aspiration. At Wired NextFest in Los Angeles yesterday, Google said it will award up to $30 million in prize money to anyone able to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon.

To win the purse, the lunar craft must travel the lunar surface to a distance of at least 1,640 feet and relay video, images and data back to Earth. And it must do so by the end of 2012.

“We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration,” said Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation–the nonprofit institute working with Google on this effort. “Moon 2.0, the second era of lunar exploration, will not be a quest for ‘flags and footprints.’ This time we will go to the moon to stay. The moon is a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth–energy independence and climate change.”

That seems a noble goal. Question is: is it an attainable one? There are plenty of skeptics who claim it’s not. “It’s hard to imagine this project costing less than a few hundred million dollars; PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, so far the most accomplished of the ‘new space’ entrepreneurs, has pumped an estimated $100 million into his Falcon 1 launch vehicle [and] still hasn’t reached orbit,” says Popular Mechanics air and space correspondent David Noland. “Against that kind of financial investment, $20 million is a drop in the bucket. A prize-winner would have to come up with millions upon millions on his own. Anyone who can come up with that kind of money would probably want to make up his own rules, not follow Google’s.”