I’m not posting this in order to get more great gifts for my birthday…unless you happen to be out shopping. By the way ‘Boarderline‘ is reopening for the season tomorrow…just saying.
To put April 1st 1953 in perspective, the hit movies in April of ’53 were; ‘Shane’, with Alan Ladd, ‘House of Wax’ with Vincent Price and ‘Invaders from Mars’. I have included the trailer from Invaders below for your viewing pleasure.
I was born on April 1st 1953. Yes April first…I am an April fool. As those of you who are ‘Haweaters’ well know, I was born in Toronto and my family moved here when I was 4 years old. The origin of April Fools Day or all fools day is up for grabs. There are theories of course there are always theories. One is that when the start of the year was moved to January 1st from the first day of spring word of this change was slow in getting around and some folks still celebrated new years in the spring…they were known as April Fools…
Another suggests that the Roman emperor Constantine allowed his jester to be king for a day…hence Fools day… The tradition has continued and we have fools in charge 365 days of the year but that’s just my opinion.
It is a day to celebrate jokes and hoaxes. My favourite of all time was the furor on the internet caused by the infamous shark attacks helicopter photo. It was gobbled up by the masses as factual of course.
Before the internet people tended to believe what they saw or were told. On April 1st 1957 the BBC aired a story on a show called ‘Panorama’ that there was a bumper harvest of spaghetti. Viewers watched Swiss farmers pull pasta off spaghetti trees as the show’s anchor Richard Dimbleby (bet his kids got beat up a lot) attributed the bountiful harvest to the mild winter and the disappearance of the spaghetti weevil. He detailed the ins and outs of the life of the spaghetti farmer and anticipated questions about how spaghetti grows on trees. Thousands of people believed the report and called the BBC to inquire about growing their own spaghetti trees to which the BBC replied, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.” I saw one of these ‘tins’ at Mike Coomes…
On April Fools’ Day in 1996 readers in five major cities opened their newspapers to learn from a full page announcement that Taco Bell Corporation had purchased the Liberty Bell from the U.S. government and was re-locating it from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Irvine, California. The move, the corporation said in the advertisement, was part of an “effort to help the national debt.”
Hundreds of other newspapers and television shows ran stories related to a press release on the matter put out by Taco Bell’s public relations firm PainePR. Outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia to express their disgust. A few hours later, the public relations firm followed with another release stating that it was a hoax.
I’m not sure what I will do to celebrate the first day of my 62nd year on this blue orb… If you watch the clip below, gee whiz = WTF!