Don't Lie to Me
Apr. 1st, 2008 07:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feste_sylvainToday is April Fool's Day, which means that any number of ill-considered lies will be flung about from sources one normally wouldn't presume are lying. Oh sure, morning DJs on radio stations are chuckleheads who should never be trusted, but I'm looking at a few trolling pranks on some LJ communities which almost got me to respond.
I've always considered the phrase "practical joke" to be an oxymoron. Yes, when I was eight years old, I replaced the sugar in the sugar bowl with salt, but April Fool's Day was on a Saturday that year, so my dad didn't salt his Cheerios until April 3. It wasn't funny. That was the last time I ever tried; I was mortified that I'd screwed up his morning.
Sometimes I can write off such things as "all in good fun", even if I'm not having any fun. But the very notion that it's okay to falsify and string along is abhorrent. (I was going to tack on "to me" on that last sentence, but the ancient Zoroastrians actually applied the death penalty to lying and not to killing, so it's not just "to me".)
Look, life is strange enough without having to create more strangeness. Humor abounds naturally, so these unnatural hoaxes perpetrated "because it's the day for it" only serve to undermine the nature of truth and information. I have no trouble with things like "Rabbit Hole Day" because they're well-labeled, just like the fiction I read (and, for that matter, write).
And if any of you think that I'm stringing you along right now, that just proves my point.
I've always considered the phrase "practical joke" to be an oxymoron. Yes, when I was eight years old, I replaced the sugar in the sugar bowl with salt, but April Fool's Day was on a Saturday that year, so my dad didn't salt his Cheerios until April 3. It wasn't funny. That was the last time I ever tried; I was mortified that I'd screwed up his morning.
Sometimes I can write off such things as "all in good fun", even if I'm not having any fun. But the very notion that it's okay to falsify and string along is abhorrent. (I was going to tack on "to me" on that last sentence, but the ancient Zoroastrians actually applied the death penalty to lying and not to killing, so it's not just "to me".)
Look, life is strange enough without having to create more strangeness. Humor abounds naturally, so these unnatural hoaxes perpetrated "because it's the day for it" only serve to undermine the nature of truth and information. I have no trouble with things like "Rabbit Hole Day" because they're well-labeled, just like the fiction I read (and, for that matter, write).
And if any of you think that I'm stringing you along right now, that just proves my point.
