Posts Tagged ‘April Fools Day’
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”*…
Readers sometimes ask me where I find the items featured in (Roughly) Daily. The answer is that they are sifted out of the reading (politely put, “broad”; less politely put, “undisciplined”) that I do on a relatively continuous basis. I’m going to take today– April Fools Day– to spotlight the source of an occasional post, but of very regular enlightment and entertainment: Today in Tabs, from Rusty Foster.
Following, a lift of a single section of a recent issue…
Today in Scientists: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week. “Should we be worried?” asks The Guardian’s Rich Pelley in a rare anti-Betteridge [see here]. A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing, reports Wired’s Emily Mullin. At last, we’ve created ChickieNobs from the famous Margaret Atwood novel “Don’t Create ChickieNobs.” “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.” Should we be worried? Scientists put 792 ants in a particle accelerator. They found out ants are all full of even littler stuff inside them. I already believed that, but it was just a superstition. Now we know it’s true. Should we be worried? Robert Hart in The Verge: No, ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer. Apparently it’s relatively easy to make a genetically customized mRNA vaccine that does not cure cancer. Who knew! Becky Ferreira in 404: Why It’s Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science. Should we be worried (complimentary)?
Today in Headlines: “Quadruple amputee and cornhole pro accused of fatally shooting man while driving” is the craziest headline since “Charlie Kirk’s Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident,” which itself was the craziest headline since “Vaginal weightlifter sex coach charged with assaulting census taker who knocked at door.”
There’s so very much more where that came from: Today in Tabs, from @rusty.todayintabs.com— one the subscriptions for which I’m happiest to pay.
For the history of today’s distinction, see : “How Did April Fools’ Day Get Started?” (source of the image above)
* Shakespeare (Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene II)
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As we smirk, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that Britain’s premiere documentary public affairs television show, the BBC’s Panorama, aired a segment, reported by host Richard Dimbleby, featuring a family in Ticino, Switzerland picking spaghetti from a “spaghetti tree.” About 8 million people were tuned in. The next day, hundreds of people called the BBC to ask if spaghetti trees were real and how to grow them. The BBC told callers to put some spaghetti in a can of tomato sauce and “hope for the best.”
“There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”*…
There was, of course, a flurry of silliness on April Fools Day. Now the dust has settled; we can identify a winner, found by the polymathic Ethan Iverson (a composer, performer, and piano teacher at the New England Conservatory of Music; see also here)…
Marc-André Hamelin is a renowned pianist and composer (as the New York Times puts it, “A performer of near-superhuman technical prowess”). Charles-Louis Hanon was a 19th century composer and piano teacher best remembered for The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises, still in use.
As Iverson observes: “Part of the joke is how musically Hamelin plays the exercises. A god among pianists, truly…”
Hamelin recorded the spoof in the studios of GBH in Boston, where his wife, Cathy Fuller, is a producer and host at Classical WCRB.
* Johann Sebastian Bach
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As we tickle the ivories, we might spare a thought for Johannes Brahms; he died on this date in 1897. A composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period, he composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, voice, and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works.
Considered both a traditionalist and an innovator by his contemporaries and by later writers, his music is rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters; at the same time, it embeds Romantic motifs. It is a measure of the esteem in which his work is held that Brahms is often grouped with Bach and Beethoven as one of the “Three Bs” of music (a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow).
Consider (all joking aside) this marvelous example:
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