Friends turn into fools on Facebook

In case you've been wondering why all of a sudden your friends are all pregnant, or engaged, or leaving—check your calendar. No, it isn't due to Holy Week lethargy that your Facebook friends have taken to posting shocking status messages. It's April 1, and if you've already posted your violent reactions, the joke is on you. April Fools day has been every prankster’s favorite holiday since the Middle Ages, when the practice gradually took shape, possibly as the result of European medieval folk making fun of others as part of some spring ritual. Some think the day of foolery originated in “The Nun's Priest's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Others believe it arose from the Gregorian calendar replacing the old Julian calendar in 1582. New Year’s Day used to be on March 25 in most European towns, and celebrations lasted for a week until April 1. The first documented April Fools prank had a crowd of gullible victims troop to "see the lions washed" at the Tower of London on April 1, 1698. The BBC's Swiss Spaghetti Harvest tops the Museum of Hoaxes list of 100 best April Fools pranks of all time.

In 1957, BBC’s television news show Panorama announced that Swiss-Italian farmers were enjoying a hefty crop of spaghetti from “spaghetti trees." The announcement said the bountiful crop was due to a mild winter and "the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil," and was accompanied by footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Viewers called the BBC asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. The answer was to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." The reputable network was able to pull off the hoax because at that time spaghetti was not a popular dish in the United Kingdom, and many British people didn’t know how pasta was made. In some places, April Fool's Day pranks are exposed after noon. In many places however, people take advantage of the license to mislead well into the dark hours until midnight. In the Philippines, where most people do not take well to such mischief, April Fools pranks are pretty tame. NU 107, a rock music-oriented FM radio station, celebrated April Fools Day a few years back by switching their format to play mushy songs, leaving their loyal listeners staring befuddled at their radio tuners. Fast forward to 2010. Today, it seems Facebook is the place for easy April Fools tricks that require no more than a simple change of relationship status. Marc Inting, bassist of fast-rising band Twin Lobster, posted on his status message that he "is done. Has had it. Bye, Twin Lobster." In a matter of minutes, concerned netizens had posted a flurry of comments expressing sadness and surprise, offering him a shoulder to cry on, or an invitation to a post-breakup drinking session. Two hours later, his status read "It's April 1, people haha! Sorry, Nicholas Lazaro, and Manfred Marius Francisco. I love you, bandmates! :D" Many institutionalized couples were suddenly "single," and some self-proclaimed carnivores announced that they would be going vegetarian. A Fine Arts student announced she would be shifting to study nursing. For more ideas, there's a website dedicated to all sorts of tomfoolery for April Fool's Day. Check out their suggestions, or be creative and invent your own tricks. There are still a few hours left for you to pull some harmless monkey business. Many hours remain yet, actually, since in this Facebook age of time zone trickery, you could play a prank on April 2, Philippine time, and friends and relatives on the other side of the world would still fall for it on the right day.—JV, GMANews.TV