My Turkey Has a First Name, it's D-E-A-D-MEAT.....

Blog down, blog down!

Or rather, blogged down. I've been blogged down, you see, and that's why there have been fewer posts these days. I knew my productivity would take a hit when I left the warm, squishy confines of Facebook, and now it's cold in the big, wide world, and the seasons are changing and the cancer fund-raisers are funding, and the morels are coming up, secret fungal gnomes of the forest, appearing for a limited time only, under a spreading chestnut near you....

However, I am no Sham-Wow impresario. Operators are not standing by. You, dear reader, are your own operator.

What did I do in the last several days? Well, I finally entered the fray of the Spring Gobbler hunt. As my old hunting mentor puts it, "It's the best of all hunts." For the uninitiated, Spring Gobbler goes thusly:

You are after the boy turkey, and you imitate the girl turkey. If you're really sexy, the boy turkey comes to check you out, and while you distract him by acting all coy and stuff--bedecked from boot-to-beaver in Scrubby-Moss camouflage--you shoot him in the head with a high-powered shotgun. And then hopefully eat him for lunch, because you have to be out of the woods by 1 p.m. What could be better?

My first two days of GobblerQuest 09 was in western Pa with my hunting guru, Art Barlow. Art is as organic a hunter as they come, and deserves his very own posting one day, which I will no doubt write. For now, suffice to say that one goes into the field with him, ostensibly for game, but one inevitably comes out of the field with a larger, enhanced sense of Nature itself. To wit:

In terms of turkey hunting, Art chalked it up as the worst two days in his hunting career---which is some half-century of serious pursuit--but here's what we saw and did: Jumped a velvet-horned buck as soon as we got into the woods; talked to the hawks; happened upon the aftermath of a hapless ruffed grouse, ended by some kind of badass (fox, owl, opportune stoat... who the hell knows); was buzzed by a screaming Pileated woodpecker; and found the most perfectly formed bear print that any of the three of us had seen. The third guy was Billy--the chap one wants at every turkey hunt, otherwise known as He Who Really Knows How to Call. If it were softball, Billy is the guy who would come off the bench, work the other guy into a 3-1 hitter's count, blast one out of the park and then flirt with the ball girl as he rounded Third. Billy is the ringer. He has a wooden box call that Art's dubbed "The Strad" and he's mostly interested in calling birds...the shooting is left up to other parties. Oh yes, and he's developed a nose for ferreting out edible wild mushrooms. One of Billy's idea of fun is to get up at 4 a.m. and shoot video of the birds coming off the roost at dawn. I'm just sayin'...

And so, our two hunting days produced nary a shred of Turkey bird, but a Master's Thesis in CSI: Clarion County. We sucked in the high-spring air and used a hunter's forensic skill to deduce who ate whom, who pooped where, and how the wild owl might best fill his raptor's belly on a sumptous morning in May. On the way back, we took a side trip near the burial mounds of local veterans dating back to the War of 1812, and also to what's reputedly the smallest Post Office in These United States...
Note the blogger, outfitted in arguably the only camouflage Dance Theatre of Harlem baseball hat in existence. There's a story there, involving Ben Vareen backstage at the Kennedy Center, but that's for another time.

As is my third and fourth mornings of turkey hunting... in which Blaiser gets the turkey to talk back, and then breaks his radius....

But before we even contemplate that, get hip to this: the water--any water, really--in greenery's finest. We spent a dreamy Wednesday afternoon on the Clarion River, Art & Sheila, his wife, in their canoe, and me in a borrowed kayak from the excellent bankside host, Jim.

Be thankful for dappled things in the poetic manner of Hopkins. And also, for things in bathing suits...

Paddle about in whatever suits you. As Ratty put it, to Mr. Mole, "There is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." It's all there for the taking, just out of sight, like the morel, the trilium, the albino stag. ..

I learned something from my son the other day that I suppose I taught him, but one forgets and needs reminding from time to time. It is thus: Don't give up. You may not get what you want, but the discoveries on the road of action? (If I were a copywriter, here's where the million-dollar phrase would be "priceless" but Homie don't work for an ad agency, fortunately. At the moment, I do my saturnine satire for free.)

Here's how it shook down: Faithful readers of BlaiserBlog already know about the Weekend Bond Film Fest with Benjamin. I thought it had come to a close, having cycled through all the PG-rated Bond films. Au contraire.

Benjamin (completely unlike his father!) is a negotiator. Like the smart little colt that he is, he's learned the benefits of testing the fence for weaknesses and how to get a few extra oats of opportunity. That day, the schedule included tennis, shopping, library, film-of-some-type, dinner, ice-cream parlor--killer day for a Third Grader. Pretty sweet for adults, too.

I had been hoping for a film at the library, as NetFlix was in transit and I hate giving money to Blockbuster, where they are unctuous and have erected a gauntlet of super-sized candy bars on the way to the cashier--an obesity-encouraging toll plaza, where small is huge and Third-Grader-inappropriate DVDs play in the background. Curses: Weekend library hours...not so much. With better planning, I could have avoided the dastardly chain whose very name embodies what I think is wrong with the country. (If someone opens a video chain called "Humility," however, I'm totally there. We could line the aisles with organic local produce. Bill & Melinda, take note.)

At Blockbuster, they've reorganized their action flicks alphabetically by title, so naturally, I find all the Bond movies together under the character name Bond (ahem), and Benjamin longingly flips through the PG-13 titles that I've placed under the verboten status. The Living Daylights is one that he's had his eye on, and when he flips over the DVD case, low-and-behold, it's PG. "Daddy!! I can see this one," he crowed. This day just improved a notch. If I have to give Blockbuster $5, at least it's for another Bond.

So we navigate the outrageous snacks and when we get to the cashier, the bomb drops: The guy shakes his head--this must be one of the empty cases that a worker mistakenly shelved...Brickbouncer keeps the actual DVDs in the actual cases, unlike the library, or video places that pull your selection from behind the counter. But no.... that would be too simple...the guy explains that it even though there is a DVD in the case, Bombbreaker cannot rent it to us -- something about the computer not recognizing the bar code. Benjamin will not be deterred. "There's another one," he breathlessly calls out, and scoots back to the Action section. They have additional cases without the official movie art on the cover, just generic typography of the film title, but I've never seen one that wasn't just a placeholder. Triumphant, Benjamin arrives with cinematic grail in his fist, and sure enough, another DVD, this time whose right to exist is digitally recognized. Hallelujah--the Bond canon has not yet fired its last parental-guided shot.

Benjamin's diligence prevailed, and the guy at Blockbuster was actually very pleasant. For an encore, my boy traded his ice-cream visit in favor of bumping the showtime up two hours--before the shopping trip rather than after. And you know what? Timothy Dalton wasn't such a bad Bond after all. Also I had forgotten all about the hilarious ski-resort escape, as Bond and Bond-Girl-Du-Semaine Maryam d'Abo toboggan across the Slovak-Austrian border on a Stradivari cello. Additional fun comes in the form of John Rys-Davis as Russian General Pushkin, whom Bond respects but is ordered to kill, and franchise utility man Joe Don Baker, who's a bad guy in this one, but turns up as a good guy assisting Pierce Brosnan's Bond in the 90s.

I continue to question, a bit, whether these films are too violent. But Benjamin, nearly 9, is already throwing and catching strikes in organized baseball, and further, knows comedy when he sees it, and I found myself defining "camp" for him when we talked about it. Also, the filmmakers ride the PG line so well, there's only a few times I've had to cover his eyes. Mostly, he self-censors, routinely scurrying out of the room when the tension builds and someone's demise is imminent, in a one-on-one situation--always demanding that I narrate the action for him. But what he relishes is the 11th-hour Battle Royale, and The Living Daylights has a glorious one--complete with Afghan mujahedin vs. rogue Russians, and Bond scattering $500 million worth of opium out of a transport plane while fighting an Aryan Hit Man dude off the cargo netting at 5000 feet.



Timothy Dalton's Bond is comparatively dovish in this film--twice he ignores orders to kill based on his instinct. We were more lenient in the 80s it seems. Without detente, and with the severely lethal R-rated Daniel Craig pulling the trigger these days, the instinct is to kill more indiscriminately. And twenty years later, now the U.S. is tearing the crap out of the Afghan hills, instead of the Soviets.

Later that night, Benjamin sat in my lap and paged through the World War II coffee-table book I worked on during my time in publishing. He was serious, subdued, and it was clear to me that he understood the difference between largely tongue-in-cheek fantasy secret agents; the playroom wars he dioramas with army guys and Star Wars figures who mount anti-stuffed-animal campaigns; and the terrible reality of what happens when actual old men direct actual young men to kill each other.

Thanks again for reading, and try not to forget that sometimes it takes an Irish undergrad posting a fake French-composer quote to demonstrate to the world that Wikipedia is merely an agreement, not the best source of fact...

There's Only One Smoking Gun?

The Metropolitan Opera House. Twenty-seven productions, 4-6 of which are performed in rolling rep. at any given time, over a 32-week season, 6 shows a week. Nothing stops it except hijacked planes or three feet of snow. Between rehearsals and performances, they mount an average of 12 operas--most of which are fully staged--every week. Average opera length: at least four hours. Average midday switch from one opera to the next: at least three hours. Average number of outside gigs that Met stagehands do outside "the Building," during the opera season? About Zero-point-Seven. You do the math.


I walked into the Building as a 35-year-old with a fair amount of experience in the business--including touring around the world to many different theatres--but when I made it as far as the Met stage--as one of 53 (fifty-three!) electricians for the rehearsals of a new production of Die Zauberflote--my mouth hung agape, and stayed that way for about three months. The scale of activity at the Metropolitan Opera House, plainly, is unmatched.

But the first performance I worked at the Met was the 501st performance of Die Walkure (Kill the Wabbit...) September 29, 2004. As I walked down the Stage Left wing, a man swept by me enrobed in Norse Caveman drag and carrying a huge spear, who looked an awful lot like the famed tenor Placido Domingo. This would be because it was, in fact, Placido Domingo. Five hours after the curtain rose, some other guy with a spear, named Wotan, summoned a set-engulfing ring of fire and the house curtain came in for good. (Or, at least until the audience filed out and the "Night Gang" filed in. From September until May it's essentially a 24-hour-a-day enterprise.) In the interim, I had born witness to the traffic patterns of carpenter and prop guy, stage manager and assistant conductor, dresser and artist. "Artist?" I thought. What, are they painting or singing here?" I stayed for three years.

Last night, April 28, 2009, I went back to work there for the first time in 18 months. What was the opera? Die Walkure, having worked its way up to performance # 521. Security guys at the stagedoor? The same. Stage Left Carpentry crew? The same. Strike force of heavily armed sopranos at the top of Act III? Same. Maestro? James Levine (yes, opera freaks, it was Valery Gergiev back in '04) Norse Guy? Still Mr. Domingo. Triple rig of smoke machines that provide the smoke part of the smoke-and-mirror effects at the end of the opera? The saaa.. HEY! Wait a minute -- what the hell's that? Three smoke guns have been replaced by one that feeds three parts of the Stage Left set with an impressive array of hoses, plenums and stragically perforated PVC piping.

They Don't Make Five-Hour German Opera Like They Used To...

Change does not usually come swiftly to the opera house, until it does. For the stagehands, one classic manifestation is that whenever a particular production is first mounted, whatever technology they used at the time is forever bonded to that production no matter how often it's revived. In other words, one night you're struggling with an electrics prop or a chandlier that up close looks like Dr. Frankenstein got medieval with some sheet metal and a spot welder--for a 1985 Zeffirelli production of Tosca--and the next, you're programming robotic lights for a very modrene re-design of 2005's Madama Butterfly. Old shows chug along until a General Manager or a Board smites it with the Divine Hand of Upper Management and commissions a completely new design.

And yet, last night, I found an anomaly--a more efficient smoke gun rig in an old Met production. It's as if a Galapogos turtle mutated and shed a few vestigial organs as it plodded around Darwin's favorite islands. My Electrician brothers have been tweaking here and there--even at the Met, evolution cannot be denied. All will be well and good until a comet hits, and from the ashes a new "intelligent designer" rises up and says, "OK -- now you're a platypus," and Poof! A wholly new species of Die Walkure, genus Wagner will be birthed.

Ice Hockey is Not Green....

Well, it's simply been too long for any self-respecting blog to remain silent. I've started a bunch of stalled essays, ranging in title from Why I Believe The New York Times to Baby Elephants: Why So Cute? but I went nowhere with them. The Old Grey Lady is more embattled as an institution than it's been since the Depression--they've stopped stocking the newspaper machines at the train station in South Orange, which is disconcerting to say the least, and I'm not so sure how to even begin an argument with someone whose opinions are formed by Rush and Bill. (However, I am working on it!) And baby elephants...well once you get past that wrinkly little trunk, what else is there, really?

So I decided to simply drop all half-baked thoughts and write the day. Today is Earth Day. Since the financial collapse, Matters Green have slipped on several banana peels, effectively lowering them from out sights. Thankfully, Mother Nature does not forget much, if anything, and she recently reminded us by snapping a 25-mile-long ice bridge in Antarctica, on Sunday, setting the stage for the addition of a Connecticut-sized tumbler of cracked ice into our global cocktail. And yet just on the other side of the pole, that most alien continent is gaining ice, but probably due to a hole in the ozone the size of Utah...

Our precious blue-green orb is mottled, pockmarked by our folly, punctured by the pellets of industry's shotguns, gutted by greed. Aeysh! It's enough to depress a fella. Let's not be depressed on Earth Day.

There are small things one can do. Nearly every time I'm in a park, or in the woods, I pick up trash. Not everything I see, but one or two items--a candy wrapper, a Popsicle stick. If I have a day pack, perhaps an abandoned bottle or crumpled can. I'm not one for organized religion, but this is one of my forms of prayer--that the good energy I put out is tangible and means something.

And larger things, too. One of my proudest achievements was putting solar panels on our garage roof. It's a small system, limited by the best southern exposure, but thanks to New Jersey's forward-thinking incentives, we paid for about 40% of the total cost, and the state paid for about 60%. Just having solar panels made us twice as energy-concious, holding out until the last moment to turn on the window AC units, and replacing some incandescent bulbs with fluorescents. The system generates about 60% of the house's yearly power needs. But best of all? Before the digital meter was installed, on a nice day in May you could see the sucker spin backwards--we made more power than we were using at the time--and with the Bush Administration waging war on three fronts (Iraq, Afghanistan, the U.S. Constitution), it restored a small, yet crucial, sense of control in day-to-day events.

I like to walk, too. This morning at Penn Station, as we were all hitting the street, I was the only person on the stairs. All the other bleary commuters were escalating. When it's later in the day, and there are a lot more people coming and going, I always look over and compare the people on the stairs and the people on the escalators, and I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the escalator passengers are chunkier. It may not seem like the same category, but taking the stairs is green.

So is green. Green is green. It was my favorite color long before I was aware of Earth Day, which wasn't really until I went to sleep-away college at Binghamton. (When you grow up in the woods, once or twice a year you had City Day--a subject for another space and time.)

Tune in next time, when I'll attempt to serve up not only why The New York Times remains the paper of record in this country, but also a more fair and balanced treatment of baby elephants.

As always, thanks again for reading, and don't forget that even if Sasha Cohen herself became my personal goal-tending fitness coach, I would still rail against professional ice hockey season extending past February.

My dog says Wow...... Bow Wow.....

Every Saturday, my son, Benjamin, and I (and excuse this interruption, but can we please have a quick wave of appreciation for the appositive? I think later today, I'm going to nominate it for the Pro-Am Bloggers' Association MVP for the month of April--Most Valuable Phrase. It's one elegant piece of language, the appositive, and so useful. Seriously, you just try setting yourself off with commas for the rest of the day, and see if it doesn't give you enormous game.)

Where was I? Right, so my kid and I have this great Saturday ritual. it turns out that pre-PG-13 James Bond movies are manna from heaven to a red-blooded 8-year-old boy--there's a reliable supply of cool gadgetry, several flicks end in a Battle Royale in which a bunch of guys in jumpsuits and hardhats are bloodlessly mown down, and at this stage, the romance is still nauseating to the Third Grade loin. Thanks to Netflix and, much as it pains me, a national video-renting chain that will remain unnamed, we've almost worked through the canon, and it's been fun for me to rediscover secret-agent-camp at its zenith. Benjamin snuggles into my lap, and holds a pillow at the ready--he's very adept at self-editing the parts that he finds scary. Only once or twice have I felt the urge to cover his eyes. We go on the adventure together, and look forward to it all week, periodically belting out Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" just to get psyched up. Add stove top popcorn, and you've got yourself great late-afternoon father-son "bonding."

Last Saturday, it was For Your Eyes Only, with a diaphanous Sheena Easton theme ballad, a submerged detente-altering encryption machine, Q turning up in a Spanish confessional, a long haired actress whose principal contribution is handiness with a crossbow, and the inexplicable presence of an un-sexy, jailbait Bond-chasing Olympic ice skating hopeful played by a truly awful Lynn-Holly Johnson.

The real bonus, however, was the mysterious Columbo--a Chessire grinning Topol, our perennial Tevye--as a sort of Basque badass, who feasted mightily on the cellulose and provided much of the fun, particularly in a late-night wharf-side shoot-em-up in which his good-guy credentials are cemented when he and his band of Basque buddies assault a bunch of other guys in blue shirts who wind up all kinds of dead. Benjamin was thrilled when he saw Topol's name on the DVD jacket, for we had just seen him live in the 34th "Farewell" tour of Fiddler on the Roof at NJPAC. I can tell you, in his late 70s, the man still fills a theatre.

Back to FYEO...later, there's an assault on a mountain monastery, and I have to say I appreciated the detail with which they handled all the pieces --- turns out it's not that easy to scale a sheer cliff... Roger Moore, with a good bit of labor, lays in no fewer than three climbing points, and then one of the bad guys starts to knock them out, one by one, through quite a lot of effort of his own. When Bond finally makes it to the top, he winches up Topol & Co. in the slowest moving wicker basket ever to appear in an action flick, and you know what? The sucker's not big enough for the whole crew, and we actually wait for the basket to make a second trip. For a minute there, I thought we were watching Bridge over the River Kwai or a pyramid-building re-enactment on The History Channel.

Another interesting throwaway--from one of the better Bond movies you haven't thought about in ages--when the rogue Russian general shows up via whirlybird at the film's conclusion to collect his scale-tipping ATAC thingy, Bond ultimately tosses it off the mountain top and it breaks into smithereens. "Now you don't have it, and I don't have it," he tells the empty-handed general, who instead of wasting everyone in sight with superior firepower on pure principle, merely shrugs, and clumps good-naturedly back to his chopper. It was like Sam the sheepdog and Ralph the wolf punching the time clock after a typical day at the office. The cold-war message? In the end, we needed the Russians and they needed us.

Design-wise, a bit of a bummer--the football for which everyone is playing is a sad, chunky keyboard console that makes the TRS-80 look chic. The most ingenious gadgetry is perhaps the right-angle forearm cast that obliterates an unfortunate dummy in Q's lab. Oh, and there's the notable opening sequence--you actually see the girl paddling about in all those bubbles, and it's Sheena Easton... she not only sings the song, but she's the babe at the beginning, too.

At this point, Benjamin and I only have On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man with the Golden Gun and Never Say Never Again in our ongoing Saturday Bond Film Fest, before we run up against the hard, cold reality of PG-13.... and for that, he'll have to wait a few years. For my part, I'm looking forward to a meditation on the finer points of Timothy Dalton, continued delight with Desmond Llewelyn's paternal scolding, and Benjamin's further education in secret-agenting.

Textual Analysis (or, We can make him Better, Stronger, Faster...)

Posted in response to a New York Times blog, that you can check out here --- it really hit a nerve -- some 430+ posts in three days...http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/when-dad-banned-text-messaging/?apage=17#comments

Technology and entitlement….

I’ll be 40 in July. As a kid, my parents smartly required me to buy all my own video games. I got the Radio Shack knock-off of Pong and then the Sears knock-off of the Atari 2600, the first console with interchangable game cartridges. When Atari trotted out the 5200, and many of my friends’ parents marched out and bought the latest, greatest, I understood fundamentally, even at a young age, that this crap–and demand for my hard-earned money–would never end! It’s one of the primary reasons why Bill Gates is a bazillionaire.

I started rudimentary e-mailing in 1987. I spent too much time doing it, and my education suffered.

When cellphones hit the market, I found their intrusiveness nauseating, and I’m an extrovert, I can tell you. I watched my friends curse their loss of freedom–always on the leash with the job. I held out against them until 2002, when I was working freelance and started losing jobs because voicemail response time became slow enough to affect my income. That’s a good reason to upgrade, in my book. Not simply because one can.

My third grader has yet to give the full-court press on cellphones, but I know the debate is coming. So far, his mother and I have refused, also, to get him a Wii because it is up to us to decide what’s appropriate in a world in which it sometimes feels as though reason is indirectly proportional to technology. Witness the A-Bomb, the mother of all goings-too-far…

I’m not a Luddite, really. I appreciate my extended life-expectancy–know where it comes from–and I make my living operating a computer, but I have fiercely maintained that we have long since surpassed the line in this culture of so-called time efficiency and balance.

It's as if Reason has been largely kicked to the curb in American Life, by SUV-driving reality-television watching, “diet” soda-addicted, Travel-team parenting Narcissists who rationalize their own “peace of mind” by handing cellphones of mass cultural destruction to Grammar Schoolers.

Ms. Parker-Pope—I don’t know if you stopped your counter-posts, but as I was reading them, it was as if you were texting along in a “conversation” obsessively following the debate, even commenting on how bad it was for you to comment…..I submit to you that your rationalization of “balance” during the school walk-a-thon could also be seen as having one’s IT cake and eating it, too. I don’t know what the snarky commenter said, but I bet there was a grain of truth there. Your use of the thing was no doubt equally annoying, and the breakdown of boundary invites criticism.

To all the folks who wrote TPP, most of you skipped the pure pleasure of writing out Parker-Pope, which is a fabulous name, really, and I wouldn’t have known that had I not TAKEN THE TIME to scroll to the top and discovered for myself–it would have been too easy to simply parrot everyone else who used TPP.

It’s all connected. In a certain way, it’s all about low self-worth clouding decent judgment. I love being an American, and I love modernity, but I see a huge chasm in our national critical thought, and we ought to be shouting across that canyon to the people on the other side. If they’d just take those earbuds out, they could have an actual conversation about it.

Thank you for posting Ms. Geiger’s thoughts. It obviously hit a big nerve. Yes, people can be harsh–many here thought she was cluelessly unreasonable by texting her kid during school time. I’d agree. Thanks for anyone who made it the end of my long rant!

For the Fools among us, and we know who we are. (or, We have found the enemy, and they is us!!)

When I was a little kid, one April Fools Day, I pranked my mother by taking a GI Joe doll, popping his head off, placing it on my Captain Kirk figure (much smaller proportions) and popping big-head grotesque Kirk next to the orange juice in the 'fridge. Creepy, really.

If I had been a little more devious--and daring--I might have dreamed up something with more mileage, like pilfering the laying mash our nine chickens enjoyed as a daily breakfast, and pouring it into the flour jar. My brother, Matthew, for example, got in big trouble the year he buried a thin explosive charge in the end of one of my mother's Kent cigarettes. (He was giggling; she, however, did not enjoy the humor.) For its part, the cigarette was impressively destroyed, and for anyone who remembers how the mini-AT-ATs shredded the trees in the battle against the Ewoks... well, it was just like that.

Another memorable April First.... I spent the better part of the day riding the bike in Prospect Park heartbroken at the news that Brooklyn was going to have to tear down the victory arch in Grand Army Plaza because the French were suing over Arc de Triomphe copyright infringement.... I had read it in a local Brooklyn weekly--can't remember which one, but I swear it wasn't until late in the day that I realized it was an April Fool's story.

And for anyone who's ever spent time on tour... this story could be apocryphal, but, it's just such a great prank, and in fact kept my best friend Jonathan and I in gasping apoplexia, when I told him about it in a Kansan bar in late 1992. It goes thusly: The night before your tour leaves (international is best, but domestic will do), find an unsuspecting charming suburban or rural home, note its address, and liberate their ceramic lawn creatures. (For the story I told Jonathan, they were 'lawn frogs.') Wrap the creatures in packing blankets and stash in the back of the truck. At every tour stop, find the most famous landmark, and photograph the lawn creatures next to it (St. Louis Arch, Big Ben, The Louvre) and send the photos, in postcard form, back to the house. When you return to your home port, return the creatures under cover of night, and presto, the intrepid travelers return home. It's a lot of committment for a prank, but give a group of bored stagehands just a little bit of time and motivation, and then, watch the hell out... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7556244.stm

With just a little research the other day, I turned up a ton of historical April Foolery. So far, my favorite was that the April 1998 issue of New Mexicans for Science and Reason published a story reporting that Alabama's state legislature had voted to change the value of Pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0.

Like the best comedy, it hits on three or four levels.

Thanks to 20th-Century global financial alchemists (coupled to SUV-sized greed), Planet Earth's violently hiccupping economy has made nearly every day one in which to feel the fool. Is April 1 still relevant? Perhaps I should be agitating for April Wisdom Day, in which we freely hand to the masses unexciting, dulled pearls like "Getting Rich Quick Is A Lie" or "If you think you're getting a free lunch, you'll pay thrice for dinner..." or the like. Call it a "wisdom bailout."

On second thought, bollocks that. In our more responsible, more egalitarian 21st Century, we should be doing that every day except April 1, and so in that spirit, I indeed hope today everyone is gleefully waiting for when their best friend opens the springy-snake-in-the-peanut can/steps in the fake doggy do/walks into their living room to discover in place of the couch, a scale model of Nebuchadnezzar II's Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Go extreme today, people, for we live in extreme times and are in need of extreme humor.

Write your favorite April Foolery below, realized or imagined. Don't forget, if God had intended cars to fly, he would have put Texas Nerf Bars on a DC-9.

Thanks again for reading.