Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I am not a fan of April Fool jokes. While they may be tolerable when practiced by very small children, I find the adult fascination with them peculiar.
The ones in the media are usually only mildly amusing. I never note the special day except that NPR usually does hoax stories on it that are so weird that I realize that something is off and remember that it is April 1. This year it was a story about eye surgery to allow people to see 3D films and TV without special glasses (on Morning Edition) and another about a coffee shop that provides old-time slow internet via modems as part of a movement to get people to slow down the pace of life (on All Things Considered).
The only people who enjoy such hoaxes are the perpetrators. While most are harmless and usually merely a waste of time, some people’s ideas of what’s funny can be dangerous and trigger the “What on Earth were you thinking?” feeling.
For example, this year the Plain Dealer had a story about a woman, a Cleveland city government employee, who called her boyfriend and said that she was hiding under her desk at work because a gunman had entered the building and was firing shots. He naturally called 911 and they sent out police and SWAT teams that swarmed through the building searching for the gunman before uncovering the hoax. Someone could have got hurt or even killed if the SWAT team misinterpreted an innocent action as threatening.
Having said all that, once in a while the extra latitude allowed on April Fool’s day allows some creative people to indulge in a piece of inspired whimsy, such as this one by the BBC in 2008. This is an example of where the victims also enjoy the joke because of the ingenuity involved and the beauty of the result.
You can see how it was done.
Unfortunately most hoaxes come nowhere close to that level of cleverness and are merely annoying.
I said that I wouldn’t waste time analyzing the politics of the seemingly hundreds of publicity seeking wingnuts who are flirting with running for the Republican nomination, but I will make an exception when The Daily Show showers on their lunacy the ridicule it deserves.
The Republican Party leadership, by treating these ridiculous people as if they were serious policy voices and creating the image that they represented mainstream party views, now faces the problem of how to marginalize them as otherwise they risk a humiliating defeat in the 2012 presidential election.
They make special mention of Ohio’s new governor John Kasich and he richly deserves the treatment.
Yesterday, the Libyan war had already been shifted to the inside pages of my local paper The Plain Dealer, with the news from the other ‘old’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Let the euphemisms begin!
Customized freedom packages depending on the country!
… the Onion News Network suggests a disturbing possibility.
Not all of the people were obvious to me. Try and guess who they are. I will provide the names in the comments.