As children, my brother and I liked to fool each other on April 1st. It was such fun to be able to trick each other into believing something that was absolutely not true and then to be able to say, “April Fool!” The older we got, the less likely we were to fool one another.
If someone tried to play an April Fool’s joke on us on another day, it was fun to say, “April Fool’s Day is past. You’re the biggest fool at last.”
I started thinking about April Fool’s Day yesterday when my friend Ruth called to warn me about a computer virus that was due to be launched today. (In fact, some people had already experienced the effects of this virus.) At the time I’m writing this I haven’t learned how successful the perpetrators of this “Conficker Virus” have been.
To me, anything that causes damage is not much of a joke. I do like reading about some of the harmless April Fool’s Day jokes that people have fallen for over the years, such as those posted on the website www.museumofhoaxes.com. Among the “Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes, I liked the one from a respected BBC news show that reported in 1957 how Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop because of the elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil. In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of people who fell for the hoax hurried to their phones to express their outrage.
My mother (who knew lots of quotations) used to tell us,“You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." This quotation, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, is probably not linked to him, reliable sources say.
While none of us like to be made fools of, April Fool's Day is a healthy reminder that many of us need to lighten up. No Foolin'!
