The Editor speaks: Which one is an April Fool’s joke?
The official publication date of today’s iNews Cayman is Monday April 1st, although it went live yesterday evening (Sunday March 31).
And, as most of us know, April 1st is known around the world as April Fool’s Day or All Fool’s Day.
The jokes and their victims are called April fools. People playing April Fool jokes often expose their prank by shouting “April fool(s)” at the unfortunate victim(s). Some newspapers, magazines and other published media report fake stories, which are usually explained the next day or below the news section in smaller letters.
So which below is the April Fool’s joke?
- The Tower of London is now giving free washing to all lions. It is charging an admission fee of One Pound sterling, to watch the washing.
- It is now legal for same-sex couples to be married in the Cayman Islands.
The answer, my friends, is blowing in the winds. The winds of change, and that means number 1 is the April Fool’s joke. Number 2 is true.
Despite the rhetoric from MLA’s here a few years ago that on their watch there will be no same-sex marriages allowed, it is here. And here to stay.
Even one of the staunchest opponents to same-sex marriages those few years ago, McKeeva Bush, went the way of the winds of change and said publically last week, “Whatever the legal word is, that will be the word, the government cannot overrule the court.”
Chief Justice Anthony Smellie has now given his decision.
Caymanian same-sexcouple, Chantelle Day and Vickie Bodden Bush, stood up for their rights and went to court.
I am not surprised at the verdict.
Bush also said, prejudice is not the Caymanian way. He’s not hearing what I am hearing.
It is a pity the Chief Justice didn’t wait and make his decision on Monday.
Until twelve noon it could all have been an April Fools joke.
You see, in the UK, where we are bound mainly by their laws, the joking ceases at midday.
In Scotland, April Fools’ Day was traditionally called ‘Huntigowk Day’. The name is a corruption of ‘Hunt the Gowk’, “gowk” being Scots for a cuckoo or a foolish person;
In England a “fool” is known by different names around the country, including a “noodle”, “gob”, “gobby” or “noddy”.
“Noddy”? Now he was a character created by English children’s author Enid Blyton. And Blyton got into big trouble over twenty years ago when she had a friend of Noddy’s called “Golliwog”.
That character was removed from all of the Noddy books. You see, although Golliwog wasn’t a villain, he was naughty. And, “although the golliwog, it seems, was not in origin a racist icon, whereas the offensive term ‘wog’ had a separate derivation.
“However, there is no doubt that the golly came to prominence in an age that was racist and that he was all too easily implicated in racist discourses, both in name and image.” – author, David Rudd.
If Blyton was alive today, she could have had Big Ears and Noddy falling in love and getting married in the most beautiful country in the world, a British protectorate called The Cayman Islands.
And, just like Chantelle Day and Vickie Bodden Bush will I’m sure, have lived happily ever after..
And for an April Fool’s joke we could turn the whole of Noddy’s marriage into one of today’s soap opera’s and add in P.C. Plod, the policeman to break it up. He was also Noddy’s good friend. and secretly wanted him, too.
Sadly, the way we are going now, nothing will be an April Fools joke.
PS: Since posting this Editorial I found I left out a statistic that I want to share with you. In the USA it is now almost 50/50 the percentage of couples living together and having babies out of wedlock and the ones that are married. There are 60 to 40 percent more couples living together against married couples.
These stats are for heterosexual couples.
In the same sex couples 75% want to be married and that number is rising.
Of course some want this status as it helps their tax returns.
And what is my point? The majority of lesbian, and gay, adults are in committed relationships and many couples have been together 10 or more years. Empirical research shows that lesbian and gay couples have levels of relationship satisfaction similar to or higher than those of heterosexual couples.
It’s a strange world isn’t it?
The best ever April 1 prank was done by the BBC many years ago. It involved the growing of spagetti in Italy. Locally In the eighties I asked Arek Joseph to do a presentation to Rotary about the proposed canal between North Sound and seven mile beach. There was an uproar at the meeting. Arek was brilliant. Of course these days it could actually happen.
Years after the police arrived at a Rotary meeting on April 1 with writs served on Rotarians for selling raffle tickets in contravention of the gambling law. The recipients were not amused, the rest or us were in fits of laughter, as indeed were the police.
Oh happy days.
When I was working in the UK we ran an April Fool front page story reporting that a local breeding zoo was using a barcode reader to keep track of their herd of zebras.
That was back in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, someone didn’t see the funny side and shortly afterwards an editorial edict was issued banning any more spoof stories because one of the directors felt they undermined the credibility of the newspaper.
Unfortunately the credibility of the mainstream newspapers (in particular US) is already lost. And the televised news is so politically weighted it is a disgrace.
When opinions take up more space than actual news there is something very wrong.
Colin
Colin, you’ll have no arguments from me on that one.
In 1991 I worked alongside a number of large media organisations in Yugoslavia. You could get most of their TV news services in the hotel we were based in and it was like watching several completely different conflicts unfolding. I learned a lot about mainstream media bias back then.