Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - April Fool’s Day (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Every day on April 1st, you have to be careful what you read and hear. This day, known to accountants as the beginning of the second quarter, is known to most people as April Fool's Day. Why do we even have a day where we try to trick people, and why does that day occur on April 1st? Learn more about April Fool's Day on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing.

Starting point is 00:01:19 You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. The idea of a day where people would play pranks on each other goes back to antiquity, which is a theme you should now be familiar with on this show. However, the association of April 1st as that day of mischief is pretty much shrouded in mystery. We really don't know where the tradition came from.

Starting point is 00:01:49 There were several things that were historically similar that happened around the same time of year, and that's the best guess we have as to where originated. The Romans had a festival known as Hilaria, which took place on March 25th. Make note of that date, because it's going to come up again soon. As the name might suggest, Hilaria in Latin means, the cheerful ones, and is the root word for the English words, hilarious and hilarity. The feast was a celebration of the goddess Cybele, who in Rome was also known as Magna Mater, the Great Mother. We don't know a ton about the festival, but we do know that the people wore

Starting point is 00:02:23 masquerades, and they could mock whoever they liked without repercussions on that one day. Another possible origin for April Fool's Day has to do with the change in the calendar. If you recall from my previous episode on why we celebrate New Year's Day on January 1st, many countries used to celebrate the start of the new year on March 25th. The week-long New Year's celebration would end on, you guessed it, April 1st. The theory holds that after they changed the calendar in 1582 in France, they made fun of people who still celebrated the new year on March 25th, by making fun of them on the last day of the festival, April 1st. However, there were mentions of things happening on April 1st before the calendar changed, so it's highly unlikely that that was the thing that was the origin of April Fool's Day. In 1508, a French poet made reference to Poulson de Avril, or April's Fish.

Starting point is 00:03:13 April Fish Day was similar to April Fool's Day, except you'd try to pin a paper fish on someone's back and playing jokes on gullible people who would be hooked like a fish. If you played a joke on someone, you'd put a fish reference somewhere in the joke to signal the fact that it was an April Fish Day joke. By the late 17th century, playing pranks on April 1st was firmly established. In London, people were sent to the Tower of London to see the washing of the lion ceremony, which was something that didn't exist. In 1686, English writer John Aubrey called it Fool's Holy Day. In Scotland, it was known as Hunting Gawk Day, which comes from the phrase, Hunt the Gawk, a Gawk basically being a cuckoo or a snipe, something that doesn't exist. The joke was you'd send someone on an errand to deliver a sealed message to someone else.

Starting point is 00:04:01 When the recipient read the message, it would say, didn't a laugh, didn't a smile, hunt the gawk another mile. The person would then send the deliverer of the message to yet another person and the next person would do the same as long as they could continue the ruse. There's a long history of famous April Fool's jokes. The longest running source of these has probably been the BBC. Perhaps the most famous was a 1957 segment of the BBC News Magazine Panorama. They did a story from Italy about the spaghetti harvest.

Starting point is 00:04:30 They shot footage of people picking spaghetti off of trees. 1957 was a bumper crop for spaghetti because they had eradicated the spaghetti weevil. The BBC had dozens of calls with the spaghetti. people asking how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. In 1980, the BBC World Service reported that the clock on Big Ben was going to be changed to a digital display, and that the first four callers would win the hands of Big Ben after they were retired. In 2008, the BBC reported a newly discovered colony of flying penguins. They even got Monty Python member Terry Jones to film it documentary style

Starting point is 00:05:03 and follow the penguins migration to the Amazon rainforest. The BBC doesn't have a monopoly on jokes, however. In 1978, the people of Sydney, Australia, woke up to see an iceberg in Sydney Harbor. An entrepreneur named Dick Smith claimed to have towed it from Antarctica. In reality, it was just a barge covered with white plastic and foam. In 1985, Sports Illustrated ran a story on a baseball prodigy named Sid Finch. He supposedly could throw a baseball 168 miles an hour, which was something he learned from Buddhist monks in the Himalayas.

Starting point is 00:05:34 He would also only wear a single boot while playing. In 1966, Taco Bell took out full. page ads in major newspapers around the United States to announce that they had purchased the Liberty Bell, and that they were going to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, Burger King announced the left-handed whopper. The ingredients were the same as the right-handed wapper, but everything was rotated 180 degrees. One thing to note is that for any proper April Fool's Day joke, it should be done in the morning. It isn't really something you do in the evening. In fact, if you do an April Fool's Day joke afternoon, many people will consider you, you,

Starting point is 00:06:10 to be the April Fool. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit.

Starting point is 00:06:29 If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show. It isn't only in Britain that spring this year has taken everyone by surprise. Here, in the Ticino, on the borders of Switzerland and Italy,

Starting point is 00:06:56 the slopes overlooking Lake Lugano have already burst into flour, at least a fortnight earlier than usual. But what, you may ask, has the early and welcome arrival of bees and blossom to do with food? Well, it's simply that the past winter, one of the mildest in living memory, has had its effect in other ways as well. Most important of all, it's resulted in an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop. The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer. There's always the chance of a late frost, which, while not entirely ruining the crop,

Starting point is 00:07:32 generally impairs the flavour, and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets. But now these dangers are over, and the spaghetti harvest goes forward. Spaghetti cultivation here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry. Many of you, I'm sure, will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Poe Valley. For the Swiss, however, it tends to be more of a family affair. Another reason why this may be a bumper year lies in the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, the tiny creature whose depredations have caused much concern in the past.

Starting point is 00:08:13 After picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length but this is the result of many years of patient endeavour by plant breeders who've succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti and now the harvest is marked by a traditional meal toasts to the new crop are drunk in these pocolinos and then the waiters enter bearing the ceremonial dish and it is of course spaghetti

Starting point is 00:08:47 picked earlier in the day dried in the sun and so brought fresh from garden to table at the very peak of condition. For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real home-grown spaghetti.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - April Fool’s Day (Encore)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.