Look, I don’t mean to be a downer, that’s not the purpose of BotB since heck knows that there are plenty of places you could go on the net these days to have your mood ruined (like pictures from the set of the Watchmen movie, or Fox “News”). But today, April 1st, used to have some real meaning for those who took the holiday seriously, and I’m afraid that despite all the gifts the internet has given the section of humanity who can afford to reach it, it has in turn stolen something very precious: the Practical Joke.

It used to be all but an art form: The BBC’s Spaghetti Tree harvest, the newsletter for the New Mexicans for Science and Reason’s Alabama changes the value of Pi to the biblical “3,” and the Taco Liberty Bell. All three shining examples of the true meaning of “the Joke” itself: its ability to teach.

It’s 1957 and the BBC is broadcasting a film supposedly shot in Switzerland of family farms plucking ‘fully-grown’ strands of spaghetti from a tree-filled orchard. Ridiculous? Of course it is in retrospect, but you have to take into account that people do in fact believe what they are told, especially if the entity doing the talking is one like the highly respected British Broadcasting Corporation. That coupled with the fact that it’s human nature to fear “The Other.” People who look differently then they do, people who speak a different language, and most importantly, live in a different culture. So in the end you have people who were convinced it was perfectly reasonable to call up the station and ask where they could get spaghetti trees of their very own. They were fooled, but they learned something. They learned not to trust blindly what they are told and they learned that they have much to learn about people in other parts of the world.

(There are lessons attached to the other two as well, but I’ll let you figure them out. Call it homework,)

Like the commonly accepted interpretation of the jesters of old, a good joke can deliver a daring, provocative message coated in a less than blunt and very palatable melts-in-you-brain-not-in-your-hand kind of shell. But how far we’ve fallen since then.

Here’s the message to the internet: We all have watches, we all have calendars, and if you’re reading this, we all have computers. We know what day it is. Changing your site design, or posting a strange picture or a fake 404 error is not going to “fool” anyone, and it hasn’t for years now. Reporting that Microsoft has absorbed Apple and is mandating that the iPhone now must run only Vista or whatever is not clever or interesting. It’s just another example of the transformation of April Fool’s Day into Don’t Believe the Internet Day. And since most reasonable people have learned that 99% of the net is lies anyway after about 15 minutes logged onto it, you’re just clogging bandwidth.

You want an example? How about Blizzard’s Bard Class announcement for WoW today? Who in their right mind is going to fall for the same old “Sonic & Tails in SSB:Brawl” joke for the nth time? What were they thinking? Tell me they weren’t just making a craven attempt for attention, links and hits? Well congrats for lowering the standards for an art form.

Look, there is only one way to fix this, and that’s an indefinite moratorium on April Fool’s joke attempts. A ban that we might never be able to lift. The jester’s going to need a new crown, we’ve broken this one.

This is my stop.

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Back of the Bus is © 2008 by Seth “4:10” Robison, used with exclusive permission by gamertransit.com. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.