“Is this how you’re spending your retirement money?” asks my old velo-comrade Charles Pelkey. “Check the sponsor at the bottom of the sign. Bwah ha ha ha.”
Apparently it’s a billboard in Michigan, though it looks like a Photoshop/A.I. kind of thing to me. Wasn’t my doing. Hmm, lemme think here … who do we know in Michigan?
AND THE GREAT WEATHERPERSON spake unto the People, saying, “Place thy Shovels where thou canst Find them in the Dark, for I shall send a Snowpocalypse to thee, yea, even unto the Upper Reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, wherein roam the Purse Dogs from which it takes its Name.”
“And they shall be Sore Vexed, for their Darling Little Aztec-Themed Sweaters and Tiny Suede Booties shall not Warm them and keep their Feet Dry in this, the Hour of their Need. And they shall Tremble and Yap and Bite the Hand that Feeds them, which is to Say it shall be the Same Ol’, Same Ol’, only Colder and Wetter.”
But the promised Snowpocalypse failed to Eventuate, and the People grew Restless, having Armed themselves with Shovels, Snow Blowers, and Strong Drink, and endured many painful Bites from their Chihuahuas as they stuffed them into the Cutest Miniature North Face Gore-Tex Insulated Jackets with wool Paddygucci Beanies and Itty Bitty Sorels.
“What gives?” they enquired. “Where it at the Snowpocalypse?”
And lo, the Great Weatherperson answered in a Voice like Thunder, proclaiming: “Ho, ho, got you again, didn’t I? Check the Calendar, dummies. April Fool! You might get a little Rain if you’re Lucky. Gotta run; these Chihuahuas don’t make Themselves, y’know.”
We were down to one avocado and it didn’t look good.
I had just sliced it into halves when the dreaded brown spots made their presence known.
So I showed it to Herself, our resident avocado whisperer.
“Doesn’t look good,” I ventured. She agreed. What the hell, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is not into the morning guacamole anyway. She prefers a lick or two or three of a butter-smeared finger.
But when I went back to the kitchen with the dubious avocado I thought, “No, goddamnit, avocados cost, what, five bucks apiece? There’s gotta be enough edible flesh on this bad boy to spread on a couple pieces of toast.”
So I performed some reductive surgery on it, tossed the salvageable bits into a bowl with lime, salt, onion, and tomato, and hey presto! Guacamole for toast. No foolin’.
Either that or birds building a nest on our roof.
April Fool’s Day has been consigned to the rear-view mirror, so it’s safe to navigate the Innertubes again.
Like St. Patrick’s Day, April Fool’s Day is for amateurs. Pros do their drinking and fooling year-round without regard for the calendar. Some of the marketing ploys soiling my in-box yesterday were weaker than watery green beer filtered through the kidneys.
I had no time for foolery yesterday. There were menus to devise, groceries to be purchased, bread to bake. Also, Herself’s CR-V required some attention from the Honda grease monkeys down on Lomas; this required me to engage with Albuquerque traffic, which is thick with fools year-round.
Why anyone would buy a new car in this burg remains a mystery to me. You might as well haul a sledgehammer down to the dealership and give your new ride a couple stout whacks before you roll off the lot, get used to the idea of driving a dentmobile like everyone else.
While parked at the curb in my own ratty beater I took a squint at this blog and saw that — in the mobile version, anyway — it remained buggered by WordPress and its filthy Gutenberg block editor, foisted upon the unsuspecting customer base by knaves, cutpurses, and coders who cannot be adjusted by sledgehammer, more’s the pity. So once I got back to El Rancho Pendejo I had to dive into the Classic editor and replace the text and image in the “Playing with blocks” post.
And all of this on a beautiful spring day, too. High in the 60s. Instead of a long bike ride I had to content myself with a 45-minute hike-slash-jog, which come to think of it was not half bad.
And that’s no foolin’.
I lay low for April Fool’s Day. It’s gotten to be kind of like the St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve of comedy — not for serious funnymen. Funnypersons? Persons of funny?
My favorite April Fool’s gag may be the time the Gazette caught the Greeley Tribune napping. It was in the late Seventies, and some wisenheimers on staff faked up a photo of an El Paso County pickle farmer inspecting a bumper crop (reporter Don Branning in a planter’s hat, examining a plump dill tied to a tree across the street from the newspaper).
We ran it on the Metro front, then put it on The Associated Press wire just for giggles. To our astonishment, the Tribune picked it up and ran the shot on its Farm page despite the photo credit, which read something like, “GT photo by Aprylle Foole.”
The desk jockey who made that call clearly was not a local boy with shitcaked bootheels. The Tribune is in Weld County, one of the richest agricultural counties east of the Rockies, the state’s top producer of grain, sugar beets and cattle.
Not pickles, though. El Paso County had all the pickle farms in Colorado.
Here in New Mexico the ash and juniper are providing all the comedy, if your idea of a good laugh involves watching some poor sod’s nose run like an irrigation ditch with a busted headgate.
I pretended to be a runner yesterday afternoon and came home with an enraged snotlocker, a condition that persists this morning. Snot funny, man.
Mad Blog Media 