Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Happy Birthday Joseph Haydn
That's my April Fool joke. Haydn's birthday was yesterday.
Today is Sergei Rachmaninoff's birthday. He was kind of an April Fool's prank on 20th Century classical music.
The Weird New Jersey calendar notes that WFMU DJ Glen Jones moved to Asbury Park on this day in 2007.
Two practical jokes I played as a kid:
I peeled a very small opening in a sealed fresh jar of Skippy's chunky peanut butter, slipped in one whole shell peanut, & resealed it with a dab of library paste. It might have been a week before jar was taken off the kitchen shelf. I wasn't around for the reaction. I recommend the concept of the practical joke with no self-gratifying "payoff" as a minor step of spiritual advancement for brats.
My older brother Jim used to watch reruns of the Andy Griffith Show on summer weekday mornings when he was home from college. While I had no dogmatic objections to the show, I hated, absolutely hated it being the first thing I heard when I woke up & stumbled downstairs. One day I noticed the TV antenna wire running down from the roof was spliced just before it entered the house through a hole by the back porch. The window there gave me a clear view through the dining room of the TV in the living room but not of the couch where Jim sat eating his Cheerios, a cereal that smells like urine. The TV went haywire with diagonal bands when I shorted out the splice. So I did the old "water fountain" gag of messing with the TV reception, watching Jim enter my field-of-view to adjust the TV, & restoring the picture just as he reached for the dial. I must have done this half-a-dozen times before he became suspicious, about the same time I became bored with annoying him & gave up to have my Wheaties in the backyard. I mentioned this to him years later & he recalled the incident.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Today is Sergei Rachmaninoff's birthday. He was kind of an April Fool's prank on 20th Century classical music.
The Weird New Jersey calendar notes that WFMU DJ Glen Jones moved to Asbury Park on this day in 2007.
Two practical jokes I played as a kid:
I peeled a very small opening in a sealed fresh jar of Skippy's chunky peanut butter, slipped in one whole shell peanut, & resealed it with a dab of library paste. It might have been a week before jar was taken off the kitchen shelf. I wasn't around for the reaction. I recommend the concept of the practical joke with no self-gratifying "payoff" as a minor step of spiritual advancement for brats.
My older brother Jim used to watch reruns of the Andy Griffith Show on summer weekday mornings when he was home from college. While I had no dogmatic objections to the show, I hated, absolutely hated it being the first thing I heard when I woke up & stumbled downstairs. One day I noticed the TV antenna wire running down from the roof was spliced just before it entered the house through a hole by the back porch. The window there gave me a clear view through the dining room of the TV in the living room but not of the couch where Jim sat eating his Cheerios, a cereal that smells like urine. The TV went haywire with diagonal bands when I shorted out the splice. So I did the old "water fountain" gag of messing with the TV reception, watching Jim enter my field-of-view to adjust the TV, & restoring the picture just as he reached for the dial. I must have done this half-a-dozen times before he became suspicious, about the same time I became bored with annoying him & gave up to have my Wheaties in the backyard. I mentioned this to him years later & he recalled the incident.
Labels: growing up, holidays
