Who is fooling whom?

It’s April 1st! Pull a fast one — publish a post that gently pranks your readers.

The bug is back! “0 Responses” again and the grid empty. Like in the beginning of the crisis. Are the daily prompt contributors so busy this April 1st that no one has had time to write a funny post for the occasion? Is this the particular prank from the WordPress editors or its tech team to us?. Who knows. I’m in Europe. I don’t have too much time to write my piece and I don’t know if the grid will work at the end of the day.

In Spain we don’t celebrate fools day today, but December 28th. I’ve worked many years as a reporter in newspapers and we used to publish some obvious prank that day to make laugh our readers. It was a tradition. Everybody knew about it and looked for the prank in the paper that day. The problem was when they believed us. Once,  when I worked in Bilbao, we published that a shark entered the estuary following a boat and it was easy to spot it from the famous suspension bridge of Barakaldo at some specific hours following the boats. (There are no sharks in those waters). We published an edited picture with a shark fin painted under the bridge. (It was way before Photoshop). That day the bridge received thousands of visitors who were looking at the water to see if they could get a glimpse of the shark.

When I moved to Pamplona I found that my new newspaper didn’t publish pranks in the local section. And that was because once, a man felt offended and sued the editor.  So we only published pranks in sports. It seems they have more sense of humor.

I used to make jokes but most of them are puns, so are very difficult to translate. Once I was on fools day at a hotel and I had with me an unfinished sweater I was knitting. So I left it to the laundry service with the needles and all, and a note saying: “please, finish”.” I like it with V-neck”. When I came back to my room the sweater was perfectly folded like if finished, with the needles on top forming an V and a note saying: “We hope the V-neck is deep enough”.

Fool Me Once.