I must\u2019ve been about 10 years old one April Fool\u2019s Day back around 1960 when I came downstairs for my bowl of tasty and non-nutritious cereal. My mom waited til all us boys were face deep in our General Mills products before she announced she\u2019d just heard on the radio that school was canceled today. You want your cereal to snap crackle and pop, this is how you do it. No school! Free at last, free at last, an entire day to spend on our own mischief. Hallelujah!<\/p>\n
Needless to say we were jubilant, hopping on one foot then the other, clapping hands, laughing like baboons. Until finally she couldn\u2019t help herself, she\u2019d been waiting for the precise moment when she could pop our happy balloon, hollering April Fools! Call it sadism, call it cruel — we weren\u2019t amused at our childish gullibility but you best believe our dear mom laughed herself nearly sick. People need psychotherapy for less trauma than this. Years after even.<\/p>\n
Doesn\u2019t seem like April Fool\u2019s Day holds the same place in our modern culture. Maybe moms still jerk their kids\u2019 chain, I don\u2019t know, but I suspect we\u2019re more reluctant to pull rugs out from under one another. We got the internet to do that. Social media. Biased news. Now even Artificial Intelligence. Every damn day is April Fool\u2019s. And you ain\u2019t seen nothin yet!!<\/p>\n
Wait\u2019ll you get the coming political ads, realistic animation of an opponent speaking in his own voice, all plausible, all looking and sounding exactly what you\u2019d expect \u2026 but all bogus, all created to deceive you. And it will — at first. Every day, like the boy who cried wolf. Until you won\u2019t believe anything, you won\u2019t trust your own eyes or your own ears, you\u2019ll just finally believe whatever you want to believe, why not? And the funny part — the machines will be the ones who get the last laugh. April Fool, Human!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I must\u2019ve been about 10 years old one April Fool\u2019s Day back around 1960 when I came downstairs for my bowl of tasty and non-nutritious cereal. My mom waited til all us boys were face deep in our General Mills products before she announced she\u2019d just heard on the radio that school was canceled today. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[150,3563,6400],"class_list":["post-17619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-april-fool","tag-april-fool-is-everyday-now","tag-gullibility-day"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17620,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17619\/revisions\/17620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}