Ha. Ha. And Ha.

Note the date on this post. It was NOT written on April Fool's Day.  Not that you should trust it any more than you would any of the other 363 days of the year, but at least you know.  As you also know, that day just past brings one thing to mind for most people- stupid pranky lyin' things.  For me, though, it has a second connotation. Two of the most important bankruptcies of my career were filed on April 1st, and yesterday almost brought a third.

(I'll come back to the wibbly wobbly pranky lyiny part later.)

Both of the prior April 1 cases marked major turning points for me.  The first of them was 25 years ago yesterday. It was a deliberate choice- April Fools that year was a Friday, the debtor was a longtime client, and it seemed perfect timing to bury the news of it so nobody, in those pre-electronic days, would find out about it until the following week.  It was also significant because it was the last case I would file as a partner in my original Rochester law firm.  We (Eleanor-and-me-we) had decided in the preceding weeks that I needed to move on from the toxicity of that place, and we (my then-partners-and-me-we) could not reach any other way to maintain any kind of ongoing relationship. So when it came time to present the bankruptcy papers the client- two, actually, brothers who'd also been personal clients and friends of all of ours for years- it was also time for them to decide whether they should stay or they should go.

They stayed. As did virtually every other major client that 34-year-old me didn't know how to poach.  We made the move nevertheless, and after some high and low months and years in the new setting, we came to another April Fools filing 12 years later. Let's just say this was an even longer-time client, and it was tied to ending yet another toxic career relationship I'd gotten entwined in. This time, all the bankruptcy work stayed with me, as I overcame decades of fear and resistance and finally stepped out into the world of solo practice.  That case succeeded, more followed it even as filings overall dropped like a stone under new bankruptcy eligibility rules, and while it generated a lot of stress, it was also essential to how I as an attorney, and we as a family, were able to move on from there.

Yesterday would've brought a third.  It's been in the pipeline for a few months, the information and retainer coming to me in installments, but first thing yesterday, the urgency got ratcheted up, so I emailed the needed documents to the client to sign.  He never got them- or rather, he got versions he couldn't open. We tried it another way today- this time, I was the one having trouble receiving the signed pages. So we're doing it the old fashioned way first thing tomorrow morning- meeting to sign in person. Only nobody's leaving this time.

They say there's no such thing as a coincidence.  Sometimes it's because something just isn't;)

----

Also, sometimes things aren't funny because they're just not. As is much of what passes for humor on the first day of the fourth month.  Fake breakups and faker pregnancies; marketers using the day to outdo each other with over-the-top posts; and, of course, smartasses like me trying to Rickroll the passing public.


Most of the humor I find in the day comes from trying to guess which stories with April Fool datelines are actually true.  Here were the top three contenders I saw yesterday:

- Dunkies announces Peep-flavored products for the Easter season;

- BK rolls out a meatless Whopper that actually tastes just as good as the "real" thing;

- Cheeto puts a Senator on his Replace Obamacare Team who was convicted of billions in Medicare fraud.

Yup. All of those from yesterday were true.  (Rick Scott is, of course, a Florida Man, the most reliable source of April Foolery each and every day of the year.)

There's too much competition for the modest yuks on April 1st, and far less of a chance of getting away with it because it's the one day people are actually skeptical about shit they read on the Internet.  No, the better approach is a different style on a different day.  Going back fifteen years before my 1994 memory, I was an active participant in such under-the-radar Foolery: it was done by The Cornell Daily Sun, and at least internally, we called it the "Joke Issue."

----

Originally, and traditionally, the paper kept this spoof away from awareness-heightened times: not April Fools, not Halloween, but something then (and maybe still) called Fall Weekend, which fell near but rarely on Samhein itself.  As a freshman in the fall of 1977, I got Sunrolled by this story along with everybody else in my dorm save the one or two who worked on the paper- EMERGENCY HOUSING SHORTAGE FORCES THIRD ROOMMATES INTO ALL DORM ROOMS.  The hooks, lines and sinkers were meticulously planned, right down to the "who to call" number on the front page which was invariably that of a particularly no-commenty university official or a grumpy famous professor.  By the following fall, I was helping to write them, and learned the style: start plausible, slowly descend into absurd, and make the final paragraphs utterly ridiculous, if only to prove that nobody reads to the end of a story.  The tradition always ended with a small correction box on the ensuing Monday morning, with the final sentence being, "The Sun enjoyed the error.")

Sometimes current events helped. When Fall Weekend came in my junior year in 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis had just begun, and the just-deposed Shah had fled to Cornell's downstate medical school for treatment.  We made up fake stories about the Ayatollah offering millions in blood money (please, to call them "donations") in exchange for Cornell turning him over to the Revolutionary Guards.  The fake editorial page chimed in with its own view: "SELL THE SHAH."  (Ridiculous, right? No government, no matter how corrupt, would EVER stoop so low, right?)

I'd heard, some years after getting started in law practice, that the Joke Issue had faded into history, likely a casualty of snowflakery on college campuses.  The Sun itself changed much as well over the later years- first ending its newsstand and subscription models in favor of free distribution, then reducing its press runs from daily to thriceweekly with more constant daily online updates. But some more recent online archives suggest both good- that the Joke Issue is still alive- but also bad.

Bad One: The issue has moved away from its traditional and sneakier Fall Weekend spot.  It looks like in the oughts, it settled into being a Halloween publication; but more recently, it sprung forward into the far more obvious territory of April Foolery.  Until a University president died right before April Fool's Day in 2012, which led to....

Bad Two:

A Cornell University employee recently stole the spoof section from every copy of a Cornell Daily Sun issue available for pick-up within a prominent campus building.  The staffer’s aim was apparently “to prevent parents and prospective students visiting for Cornell Days [a special program for recently-admitted students] from reading them.”

As a trusted source tells me:

    “The Sun, like many other college papers, typically produces a joke issue on April 1.  However, this year, a former Cornell University president died over the weekend, so the editors decided to postpone the joke issue until April 20.  April 20 happened to coincide with Cornell Days, a series of events put on by the university’s admissions department to host newly admitted students on campus. The joke issue featured satirical articles about serious issues on campus, and someone in Cornell’s administrative building removed the joke pages from every copy of the Sun in at least one administrative building where all admissions student tours run through.”



We Were Not Amused:

Perhaps our content may have offended the sensibilities of parents bringing their high schoolers to campus for the first time, but the removal of the cover should not have been allowed to occur. The decision is telling, and it indicates that Cornell is more concerned with constructing the image that it presents to prospective students than it is with giving them the honest account of life at Cornell that they deserve. . . . This decision, however small, cannot be allowed to set a precedent. If the university removed this spoof cover, the next step would be to remove copies of the Sun that paint the university in a negative light.

Day Hall, home of the University hierarchy, has always been a symbol of student oppression and image preservation.  Since the late 60s, they've put out their own weekly house organ with the Proper Positive Spin on everything, lovingly referred to in our newsroom as the Cornell Comical.  I have no doubt that if The Sun accepted any financial support, the strings attached would clog the roads down East Hill leading to the newsroom.

One consequence of that kerfuffle is that the Joke Issue appears to have moved permanently to 4/20, which, if our Guv has his way, will be providing much more in the way of Merry Pranks in years to come. 

Last year's:


I hope someone has a sense of humor down there, still.  If not, and a libel suit results, there's always Chapter 11 as an option;)