1311 April Fool

Hey! Your shoelace is untied.  April fool!  Oh, when will we stop this silliness?  It wasn’t funny. Not even in the beginning.  

Hey! When was the beginning?  Well, no one really knows.  But middle English historian Alistair Balthazar Newcastle Bolstridge III, professor emeritus at the University of St. Andrews says the holiday didn’t see print until Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the 1390s.

Others say it was based on the Roman festival of Hilaria.

Festival of Hilaria?  Maybe someone’s playing a prank.  

Hilaria, indeed.

Maybe Chaucer was playing a prank.

Maybe Alistair Balthazar Newcastle Bolstridge III is playing a prank, although he actually KNEW Chaucer and once borrowed his lawnmower.

There has to be a way to rid ourselves of this annoying holiday.

If Obama backs April Fool's Day, congress is sure to oppose it. Can’t you just see it now?  Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham and the rest of that crowd could kill it as just another socialist program to control your behavior.

The clergy would be on board in no time.  Pat Robertson would step up and condemn it as a pagan throwback.  So could the current Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell’s kids.

Rev. Terry Jones dropped plans to burn copies of the Quran. But he probably could be induced to burn a stack of Johnson Smith  or Prank Place catalogs.

The world would be a better place without whoopee cushions.

In this age of extremes, it’s funny that those handshake buzzers are still around.  You’d think by now someone would have invented a Taser version.

On the other hand, someone seems to have formed a club to promote the holiday, the NAS, the national Aprilfool Society.  And they have already declared that some amendment or other gives everyone the right to bear practical joke toys.

We respect your right to own such things as self-tipping hats, Groucho glasses, toilet paper with pictures of barbed wire printed on it, dribble glasses and even lifelike rubber or plastic ants and roaches.

But we draw the line at exploding cigars, fake parking tickets, rubber animal droppings and fake blood.

Our founding fathers may have guaranteed our right to carry concealed pranks.  But they never thought of gum packages that squirt water or pregnancy tests that always show positive.

Shrapnel:

--Earth to Hobby Lobby:  the morning after pill does not attack a fetus. It temporarily restricts the ovaries from manufacturing eggs for long enough to deprive an errant sperm of a target.  Even if you believe that life begins at conception, it’s not abortion because there has been no conception.

--Craft stores are creepy.  You want to eliminate waterboarding and have terrorists begging to tell you all they know?  Lock ‘em up in a craft store for four or five hours while they wander around the artificial flowers, the build-your own jewelry stones and findings and supplies for making bad art. They’ll do anything to get out.

--With things heating up in Europe, can Asia be far behind?  Maybe it’s time to revive SEATO which, had it lived, would turn 60 this year. And this time, it could do its own funding.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014