April Fool’s!

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

So, hopefully you got a little kick out of our front page April Fool’s Day edition. I assure you the intention was to elicit chuckles and not offend anyone.

I say that because we certainly live in a quick-to-be-offended society these days, and I don’t want to get “cancelled” or anything…

I’m actually not great at April Fool’s Day pranks. I can think of maybe a handful of times doing something silly as a kid like putting plastic wrap on the toilet seat or putting a fake spider on my Mom’s car seat. Later on, I found great success with putting a rubber band around the sprayer on the kitchen sink.

I’ve done that one more than a few times (although, in full disclosure I actually managed to ger myself with that one year, having forgotten about doing it and then going to rinse off a

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dish or fill up the dog bowl or something, for got I had rigged the sprayer and ended up spritzing myself pretty good.

I wonder if there will be any cool April Fool’s Day stunts this year online or anything. I remember several years ago, Rock 103 (which is now Rock 102 — I will never get used to that) started off their broadcast day by announcing they were changing their format to “Disco 103” and playing nothing but disco music.

Many listeners, apparently unaware what day it was, called in with all sorts of complaints, which they, of course, played on the air after revealing it was all a prank.

There was also the year that 98.1 played nothing but different versions of the song “Louie Louie” nonstop for the whole day, but the jike was on them — my friendt and I drove around all day in his jeep listening to it!

The funny thing (or maybe not-so-funny thing) about trying to pull off an April Fool’s Day news story these days is that a lot of what is really happening in the world today is so unreal that at first glance there’s not much you could put out there that at least someone wouldn’t accept as maybe possibly real…