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Some Tomfoolery … Flying Penguins … And The Left -Handed Whopper
Don’t look at me.
It was Publisher Louis Melamed’s idea to print our front page upside down in honor of April Fool’s Day. In fact, he’s been looking forward to this for about 4-1/2 years. (It took awhile for the calendar to come around to April 1 on a publication Wednesday.)
Anybody who knows The Great Loudini personally, knows that he enjoys a bit of tomfoolery now and then—it’s consistent with the personality of someone who regularly pulls rabbits out of hats and pours water out of folded-up newspapers.
But we can assure you, that all of the articles included in the April 1 edition of The Citizen are the real deal, whether they’re upside down or not.
We cannot promise that about the ads, however. Take a good look at all of them: one may even be fake! Or not.
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April Fool’s Day is celebrated annually around the globe, though not always on April 1.
It must be part of the human psyche to want to play a trick now and then. In my college folklore classes, we studied “Coyote,” the anthropomorphic trickster who stars in many Native American tales. As the legends go, Coyote is responsible for a lot of mischief in the world.
There’s a little bit of coyote in all of us, I think. I know I dabbled in a few April Fool’s Day tricks as a young person. Most of them turned out badly.
There was the time I forgot that I’d substituted table salt for the contents of the sugar bowl late on the evening of March 31. The next morning my father, who was not amused, made me eat my Cream of Wheat—salt and all. Then there was the time I vaselined one of the toilet seats in a junior high girls’ restroom very near my 5th hour French class. I’m not going to tell you the rest of that story; suffi ce it to say that it eventually dawned on me that these sorts of activities are best left to those who are not so absent-minded.
There are many theories on where April Fool’s Day originates.
Some argue passionately that it has to do with the Julianto- Gregorian calendar conversion in 1582, which was kind of like a giant daylight savings day “leap forward” to bring the calendar back into synchronization with the seasons. (The last day of the Julian calendar was Thursday, 4 October 1582. This was followed by the first day of the Gregorian calendar, Friday, 15 October 1582.)
Those who refused to change, got the news two years late (hey, it happened!), or were superstitious about losing ten days of their lives were referred to as fools, or so the theory goes.
But some scholars say that Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” published earlier (ca 1400), refer to the tradition in the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” This tale of two fools—Chanticleer and the fox—ostensibly took place on March 32nd. (That would be April 1.)
There are lots of other theories too numerous to mention here, but the tradition of a day of pranks is found in Poland, Iran, France, Spain, and Belgium, in addition to many other countries.
The news media indulges in the April Fool’s tradition to an incredible extent, so much so that many people don’t believe any extraordinary news published on April 1. (Frankly, I think a bit of skepticism is in order any time you read anything, but that’s just my philosophy.)
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia. com) is good for a long list of media pranks.
In 2008, its Web site says, a newly discovered colony of flying penguins was the topic of a story by the BBC, even going so far as to feature a video that followed their flight to the Amazon rain forest.
In 1976, British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore announced that an upward gravitational pull caused by two planets in unique alignment would result at precisely 9:47 that morning. “Radio listeners were invited to jump in the air and experience ‘a strange floating sensation,’” or so the story goes. Apparently, dozens were sucked in by the hoax and reported that they had, indeed, experienced the “Jovian-Plutonian” phenomenon.
Burger King has a sense of humor, as well: in 1998 the company announced in an ad placed in USA Today that they would begin making a left -handed Whopper “whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side” instead of the left. People actually ordered them—and some actually took pains to order the old, right-handed burger to make sure they didn’t get the left-handed one by mistake.
Taco Bell took out a fullpage ad in the New York Times in 1996 proclaiming that the company had purchased the Liberty Bell, thereby reducing the country’s debt (were it ever so simple!). The company planned to rename it the “Taco Liberty Bell,” readers were told.
Among the fictitious characters who claim April 1 as a birthday?
Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman and J.K. Rowling’s mischievous twin pranksters, Fred and George Weasley, from the Harry Potter series.
So, in honor of Fred and George’s birthday, I’ll be passing around some canary creams.
Enjoy.