This festival of foolishness has an obscure origin. Since the new year used to be counted from the end of March, some scholars think that the day came when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582, which changed New Year’s Day to January 1. Some people, though, were too ignorant to know about the switch, so they celebrated New Year’s on the wrong day, April 1, to the ridicule of those in the know who made fun of the April Fools. That’s a good story, but the day seems to have been celebrated before that! See this for background.

Still, in our project to rehabilitate old holidays and put meaning back into them, how do you think we should pour content into April Fool’s Day? How should we celebrate it? Not by pranks, tricks, or silly lies, such as you will see everywhere today on the internet and on other blogs (let the reader beware). We here at Cranach will not prank you. Really. I mean, that post about the mile-high skyscraper might SEEM to be an April Fool’s joke, but, as far as I know, it isn’t!

Nor is the post about Al Gore an April Fool’s joke, though it would make a good one. (Our problem today is that REALITY is often so close to jokery, that it’s difficult to tell them apart!)

I see no reason why Hillary Clinton should bow out of the Democratic race in favor of Barack Obama. Let the people vote. Let the superdelegates conspire in their smoke-free rooms. But the latest fantasy in the Democratic party is that the convention is all locked up so that the delegates agree on a compromise candidate: Al Gore! Do you think that would fly with the primary voters, choosing someone none of them voted for? Or with the rest of America?

A British newspaper has a frontpage story proclaiming, with some glee, that the United States has entered a new Great Depression.

This is a silly exaggeration, it seems to me. (The paper bases its conclusion on a small uptick of the number of Americans on foodstamps, which was primarily caused, the paper itself admits, by an advertising effort to get eligible people to sign up for them!) But certainly many Americans are going through hard times. I read somewhere that, though by most measures the economy has been booming, the soaring prices of food and fuel have hit average families really hard, impacting them in concrete ways and making them feel the pain despite what the abstract overall numbers say. Now the big financiers are also feeling the hurt.

I worry about the economy, but I also worry about what seem like draconian plans for the government to regulate it all. (If you really want to get scared, read this, about how the Fed is studying how the Nordic states nationalized their banks.) It is as if free markets are fine as long as everybody is making money, but once the free market creates its losers, as it has to, politicians become Keynsians again. Imagine, with this going on in a Republican administration, what a Democratic victory will do. Statist liberalism will be back. With a vengeance. And might socialism come back into vogue?

Or do I overstate the case? Are we depressed over a Depression, or do we just have the blues?

I caught the chef Gordon Ramsey on my new favorite show, BBC’s comedy car show “Top Gear,” and since he could drive really fast, I decided to watch his show Hell’s Kitchen.

This is a sort of American Idol of cookery, only the sole judge is Ramsey, the Simon Cowell of chefs. The different cooks compete in doing the various tasks required in a professional kitchen and the winner gets to run one of Ramsey’s restaurants.

Watching the show reminds us of the hard work and high pressure that professional restaurant workers have to deal with. Ramsey is like a drill sergeant, demanding excellent work, quality preparations, and outstanding service for the customers. He yells at the contestants and cusses them out (carefully bleeped) when they fall short, but he also teaches and mentors.

The show can demonstrate to young people the demands of the no-coddling real world of demanding bosses and high performance standards. We often see the customers enjoying their peaceful dinner, unaware of the turmoil that it took to prepare it. The show makes us appreciate the vocation of the professionals who prepare us our daily bread.

(I just caught the reruns. The new season premiers tonight after “American Idol.”)

A Saudi prince is planning on building a skyscraper that will be a mile high, twice the height of the tallest buildings today. I wonder how big the Tower of Babel was going to be.