Progressive Revelations 7-18-06

Don't be a fool today (wait until tomorrow)

April 1, 2008

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Beginning the month of April with April Fools' Day is like walking into a room and immediately getting karate chopped in the head. That's not to say that I know what it feels like to be karate chopped -- unfortunately -- but I imagine ten to fifteen years from now that I will be chopped, and I will immediately yell out, "Ah, it's like April Fools' Day!"

I am hoping that I do not have anything important to say today because I know that no one will take me seriously. It is for this reason that I have already postponed my cruise on the new Titanic. I have a bad feeling about the iceberg lettuce. Everyone knows, though, that only fools utilize April Fools' Day, and the rest of us are less predictable by waiting to pull our pranks until some other day, like tomorrow for example. Boy, will everyone be surprised when I prank them tomorrow! And the day after that, too. Yes, that will be quite funny...

If I do decide to organize a major prank today, I am thinking of using emoticons to do so. Clearly, a colon with a parentheses after it (I would demonstrate it within parentheses, but I cannot set up the introduction without an additional colon) makes everything funnier. I will e-mail everyone very horrible news like, "Hey, everyone you know has just died," but then I will make it a prank by adding ":)" after it. I just hope everyone doesn't die tonight. I'm already excited to use the smiley face, and I don't know if I can adjust to a frown without any notice...

One emoticon that is becoming increasingly more popular each day is this one: <3. Until yesterday, I thought it was an ice cream cone, and I was constantly upset over the fact that no one was sending me ice cream. But now that I know it's only a sideways heart, I am totally fine with not receiving it. I also recently learned that Japanese emoticons should be read from top to bottom rather than sideways. For example, "(O_O)" indicates amazement in Japanese emoticon language, whereas ":O" indicates amazement in English emoticon language. I thought about visiting Japan at some point, but I don't think I will be able to get over this language barrier. I also heard they eat raw fish there. Imagine that: raw fish...

Back to April Fools' Day, though: If I am not going to celebrate the day until tomorrow, when everyone else will be celebrating the 35th anniversary of LexisNexis, then I must come up with something else to do with my time. Through research, I have learned that April 1, 1948, is when the Faroe Islands received autonomy from Denmark. That could be a good celebration, but I left my Faroe flag in a storage bin. On April 1, 1976, Apple Computers was formed, but it's hard to celebrate that without a MacBook Air, which I can't actually see because it is too skinny. Finally, on April 1, 2004, Google introduced its Gmail product to the public, which is pretty important to all of mankind. However, when this e-mail system first originated, I wonder if people thought it was a prank. I bet people forwarded this joke to everyone they knew...

But I digress.