April Fools Day

My daughter has requested that I submit an article related to April Fools Day for her weekly "family newspaper". So, here is my article.

April Fools Day...that ridiculous holiday in which we spend our day tricking our family/friends while trying not to be tricked. What's with that? Why would we spend our day torturing each other?

Well, the history of April Fools day is, from my research, somewhate debateable. The most common, and in my opinion, the most likely explanation is that April Fools day is a remnant of of the ancient festivities surrounding the Vernal equinox (March 25th-ish). Similar to Halloween, this is one of those holidays left over from the pagans of Europe.

In short, the holiday has been around in one form or another since anitquity...primarily derived in Great Britian from the time of Roman occupation. In that time it has evolved and spread, now celebrated in many countries around the world. In America, April Fools Day is now celebrated on a purely informal basis on the first day of April.

Typical merriment includes practical jokes and hoaxes. Generally, these jokes are meant to expose the gullible as fools by making them appear foolish in public. Many times these pranks are small, harmless, and well intentioned. However, some of the more famous pranks through the years have been on a much grander scale.

Here is a small sampling of famous hoaxes (referenced from Wikipedia):

• Alabama Changes the Value of Pi: The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article written by physicist Mark Boslough claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to the "Biblical value" of 3.0. This claim originally appeared as a news story in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.[3]
• Spaghetti trees: The BBC television programme Panorama ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. They had claimed that the despised pest the spaghetti weevil had been eradicated. A large number of people contacted the BBC wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees. It was in fact filmed in St Albans.[4]
• Left Handed Whoppers: In 1998, Burger King ran an ad in USA Today, saying that people could get a Whopper for left-handed people whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side.[5] Not only did customers order the new burgers, but some specifically requested the "old", right-handed burger.[6]
• Taco Liberty Bell: In 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times announcing that they had purchased the Liberty Bell to "reduce the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell." When asked about the sale, White House press secretary Mike McCurry replied tongue-in-cheek that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and would henceforth be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.[7]
• San Serriffe: The Guardian printed a supplement in 1977 praising this fictional resort, its two main islands (Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse), its capital (Bodoni), and its leader (General Pica). Intrigued readers were later disappointed to learn that San Serriffe (sans serif) did not exist except as references to typeface terminology. (This comes from a Jorge Luis Borges story.)[8]
• Metric time: Repeated several times in various countries, this hoax involves claiming that the time system will be changed to one in which units of time are based on powers of 10.[9]