The April Fools

It just goes to show: Anybody can have a holiday named after them. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

AS I WORKED ON THIS PORTRAIT GALLERY of foolish people, I thought: “I have no idea where the tradition of celebrating ignoramuses comes from!” So I typed a query into Gemini, Google’s AI helper. According to the web-crawling bot, April Fool’s Day…

• could be related to that time when France switched to the Gregorian Calendar, and changed New Year’s Day from April 1 to January 1. People who resisted the move were called “April Fools.”

• or it could be related to an ancient Roman festival of Hilaria, where people dressed up and mocked one another.

• or it could all come from the ribald English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who documented a joke played on a rooster, on March 32nd. But wait! There is no March 32nd! Correct: April Fools!

All of that makes me rather foolish, too, because I treated those as actual facts, rather than the mad hallucinations of a program built on the ancient practice of “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

Of course, Google and I aren’t the only credulous idiots coming to faulty conclusions based on computer-aided misinformation. April Fools come in all stripes.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a great poet, but he doesn’t know the modern hellscape formerly known as Spring.

The Early Bird who decided, just this once, to sleep in.

The Oily Bird who decided to just, you know, take Iran’s oil.

The Motorheads who trusted that would just take a coupla weeks, tops, to, you know, just take Iran’s oil.

People who deny that taxes, like death, are inevitable.

And then there are the April ignoramuses who believe that this, THIS!, is the Cubs’ year! Again!

It can’t take another 108 years, right? It can’t!

“People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools. ” ― Alice Walker

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