No April Fool

Yesterday was April Fool's Day.

Not my favorite day of the year by any stretch of the imagination.

My sense of humor is not bad, though it's a little out of the ordinary. But I find April Fool's jokes, unless they are incredibly exceptional, to mostly be in poor taste.

So much information on my Facebook page yesterday appeared to be false that I simply gave up looking at it. Someone reposted NPR's story from 2015 about Hillary Clinton's announcement that she was running for president, and that set off a firestorm from the schmucks who only read the headline and didn't look at the article to see the date.

Not funny. Not even remotely amusing. That loss still stings and rankles and I expect if I live to be over 100 (which I won't), it will sting and rankle.

In school, April Fool's jokes consisted of, "You've got a bug in your hair! Ha ha, April Fool's" or similar nonsense. It is rather like being pinched on March 17 if you are not wearing green. Who comes up with this dumb shit?

Apparently nobody knows, or at least not the Wikipedia writers. They guess it started way back in the Middle Ages (about 475 a.d. to 1500 (a very long time for stupidity to reign)), tracing it by some accounts back to Chaucer (1392).

At any rate, it goes back hundreds of years, this foolishness.

So what makes a good April Fool's joke? Some of the local ones are more hoaxes than jokes. I seem to recall a radio station saying that the city was going to rename Mill Mountain, or some such, one year. I listened to indignant callers for a while, some who were obviously smirking and in on the joke and some who had been taken in totally and really though this was happening. Funny? Maybe. But I think hoaxes are ultimately mean, even if meant in fun or jest. Who wants to feel the fool, anyway? Doesn't that happen often enough in day-to-day living without creating special circumstances for it?
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Lastly, I have to note that yesterday was the day my aunt, Carolyn, and my uncles, Jerry and Junior, along with their wives and perhaps a cousin or two, went to Kansas to finish the burial of my uncle who perished in a fire back in the winter. There is nothing funny about that, but my aunt and I both thought (me, at least, with a touch of melancholy and slightly wry amusement,) that it was an appropriate and fitting day to bury Uncle Butch. Not that he was a joker or a fool; I know he was a loved brother, husband, father, friend, etc. Still, for some reason it seems fitting that he was finally laid to rest on All Fool's Day.