March 31, 2002
April fish!
Soon it will be April 1st, and madcap prankery will be the order of the day. The tradition of the April fool is a relatively recent one, an artifact of calendar reform. The Julian calendar, devised at the orders of Julius Caesar after his conquest of Egypt, was 365.25 days long, slightly longer than the real, solar year as judged by the equinoxes. As the centuries progressed, the Julian calendar slowly slipped out of true. In the sixteenth century, disturbed by the slow progression of holidays into the wrong seasons, Pope Paul III set several astronomers on the question of calendar reform, and in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII chose the plan proposed by Christopher Clavius, a steadfast defender of the Ptolemaic system. A papal bull was issued, the calendar was minutely shortened, the year was decided to begin on January 1 rather than April 1, and twelve days were lopped off to put the holidays back where they belonged. Whether called April fools, April fish, or April gawks, some people failed to acknowledge that the calendar had changed and were, human nature being what it is, soon made the butt of their neighbors' jokes. Perhaps England is lucky that it was not the target of pranks from the rest of the content, as the backwards folks in England didn't switch from the Julian calendar until 1752. The event provides a crucial plot point for Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and is memorialized in cal, the Unix calendar application. From such small beginnings are traditions born; tomorrow will feature pranks (from the limply satiric to the jaw-droppingly elaborate to the viciously entertaining) the nation over, except, perhaps, at the prank-free zone of MIT.