Dave’s Diegesis: Fooling the Fire
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. LeGuin
I’m as jocular as the next guy, so it should come as no surprise that April Fool’s Day, originally named All Fool’s Day and called Poisson d’Avril in France, is one of my favorite days. Like baseball, however, the origins of this day are disputed. Some say that in the conversion from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the hidebound people that didn’t convert to the new calendar were mocked and sent on fool’s missions. Others say that its genesis was in the Roman festivals of Saturnalia or Hilaria (held in the winter and spring respectively), the Indian celebration of color called Holi (where participants threw multi-hued powders at each other), or the Northern European fete of Lud (the Celtic god of humor). At any rate, it’s a day where people can loosen up around each other, although some folks, like my teammate Kevin Millar and his semi-nude jumping jacks, hardly need an excuse.
Here are some of my recommended pranks:
- Tell your friends that you solved one of the Millennium Problems and that you’re going to share the prize money with them.
- Write an amusing paper for the Annals of Improbable Research, perhaps something about insomniac cats with eating and/or attachment disorders.
- Claim that you’ve downloaded Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and will have a viewing tonight. Show Spaceballs instead.
- Develop and design a website showing that Star Trek: Enterprise wasn’t canceled. Send the link to your mailing list.
- Fiddle with Theo Epstein’s laptop, adjusting my stats so that I’ll make the 25-man roster.
Enjoy the day, gang. Unfortunately, this will be the last “Dave’s Diegesis” for a while, as I’m working on a knuckleball and that will take up a lot of my time. I’ll try to drop in as often as possible, however.
Every Friday, Dave McCarty will join us to discuss a topic of interest to him and probably no one else but the author of this site.
April Fools! I’ll be back next Friday, same bat time, same bat channel
Comments
In a largely unrelated note, I went to Fordham, which is in the Bronx, and a haven for bootleg video sellers. Anyway, a friend of mine was coming home from work one night, and was really bored and stuck for plans that night. So, she bought a bootleg copy of "Ghost" for $5 on the street. She loves that movie.
So she gets home, pops it in the VCR, and waits. Black screen. For about five minutes. Nothing.
Then, out of nowhere, pops this image of a room with a grey backdrop. It sits quiet for about 30 seconds until an image jumps from screen right into the frame. He's wearing a huge sheet over his head down to his feet, and there are two holes cut for his eyes, a la Casper the Friendly... Ghost. He was dressed like a Ghost.
He shouted "BOO!" a couple times, then video over.
"Best $5 bucks I ever spent," she said.
Hey, it was a prank... sort of.
BSMemorial ∙ 1 April 2005 ∙ 3:55 PM
I love the last suggestion...
Piney ∙ 1 April 2005 ∙ 6:30 PM