No fooling, it's April. Time to pay your taxes, collect on your March Madness bets, and go find some Easter eggs
Your monthly guide to becoming the smartest person in the room -- or the Zoom!
I’m sharing this month’s newsletter earlier than usual to give you time to prep for April Fools’ Day, which as we all know comes about each year on March 32.
We’ll be including a little history of this odd day and, as always, note the events you need on your calendar including—but not limited to—Easter, the income tax filing deadline, dates and times for the March Madness Final Four, and everyone’s favorite holiday, National Pillow Fight Day.
BREAKING NEWS
Even as I was typing this, Elon Musk has announced that with all the federal government layoffs he’s inflicting, the Internal Revenue Service now will have to extend the tax filing deadline as there aren’t enough people left to process returns. So, mark your calendar: The new tax deadline is April 15.
Oh, have I mentioned April is also National Humor Month? Probably because of April Fools’ Day, right? So here’s a bit of that history I promised a few short sentences ago:
If you dive into the never-wrong internet searching for the origin of April Fools’ Day, you will find yourself mired in conflicting stories, so much so that it’s popular to say that nobody knows for sure about how it got started.
The people saying this should be ashamed of themselves: Never let conflicting facts get in the way of a good story. So, after a handful of minutes thoroughly investigating this, I have settled on what henceforth will be known as:
The Official April Fools’ Day Origin Story
It all began in a galaxy far, far away. Oh, full stop. No, it didn’t. It actually began in Rome around 46 BCE. BCE, by the way, is the politically correct way to say what we used to call BC. BC was shorthand for Before Christ. BCE stands for Before Common Era. The change is designed to take religion out of calendars. Maybe someday we’ll scrap all this nonsense and just start using Star Dates like Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the Federation.
Anyway, back in ancient Rome, Gaius Julius Caesar had just named himself dictator for life and decided to invent a calendar based on the Egyptian solar calendar. At the time, the Romans used lunar cycles to delineate their months, but that didn’t accurately reflect the full year and they were constantly having to reset the clock in the Colosseum. Also, it drove history students mad because the dates were always changing.
Caesar, with the help of an astronomer, figured out that a year was 365-and-a-quarter days long.
He decreed this would be the new calendar—the Julian Calendar—and it was an improvement, but not quite right. It was 11 minutes off (close, but no cigar because those minutes add up over the centuries).
But give Caesar credit where credit is due. He totally nailed the “dictator for life” title. He was dictator until his very last breath, which wasn’t long thereafter when he was stabbed XXIII times for being a narcissistic jerk and naming a calendar after himself. (There possibly were other reasons, too.)
A thousand years or so later there came a pope named Gregory who figured he could correct the errors in the Julian Calendar, and, like Caesar, he named it after himself—the Gregorian Calendar. It’s the one we use today.
As I noted in another article I recently wrote, it’s a puzzle why a pope, being a Christian and all, kept all the old Roman names for the months, when many were based on ancient pagan gods. Probably figured fiddling with calendars was messy enough.
And he was right about that because one of the big questions you have to answer when making a new calendar is when does the year begin? It’s arbitrary, of course, but Julius Caesar had it starting on April 1, according to a post on Rutgers Today, which I believe because it is the easiest of all the origin stories to understand.
Gregory, however, settled on January 1, which I think was genius. I mean, if he hadn’t, wouldn’t we all be wondering why we call Jan. 1 New Year’s Day?
So, the new calendar was launched, but because the internet had yet to be invented in the year 1582 (Star Date 8207.3), word traveled slowly, and some people still celebrated the beginning of the new year on and around the first of April.
They got teased for being foolish, and thus started a tradition.
That’s one version, anyway.
So right about now, I’m sure you’re asking yourself what are the more popular pranks that have been played on people for April Fools’ Day. It used to be the height of ribald humor to tell someone their shoes were untied. Or to tie their shoelaces together. But then along came slip-ons wrecking that joke. Here are a few historic greats:
In 1957, the BBC broadcast a news segment announcing that the Swiss spaghetti weevil had been eradicated saving all that nation’s spaghetti trees.
Taco Bell in 1996 announced that it had purchased the Liberty Bell renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.
NPR broadcast a story in 1992 reporting that disgraced former president Richard Nixon was running for president again with the campaign slogan: “I never did anything wrong and I won’t do it again.”
And in 2025, Donald Trump, getting ahead of April 1, announced he was renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Hahahahahaha. What a kidder.
Mark Your Calendar
April 1 -- Nothing But the Truth Day.
April 2 -- National Ferret Day. For your edification: Male ferrets are called Hobs, female ferrets are called Jills, and their offspring are called Kits.
April 3 -- World Party Day. Its origin is traced to the 1995 novel Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel by Vanna Bonta, which ends with a global celebration on April 3rd. Haven’t read it, but I’m sure the party was great as long as there were no Ewoks.
April 4 -- Women’s Final Four. March Madness continues. The last four teams standing in the NCAA tournament will meet in Tampa with games starting at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on ESPN.
April 5 -- Men’s Final Four National Basketball Championship games from San Antonio. First game at 6:09 p.m. Second game at 8:49 p.m. On CBS.
April 6 -- Women’s Basketball National Championship game. At 3 p.m. on ABC.
April 7 -- Men’s Basketball National Championship game. At 8:50 p.m. on CBS.
Also on April 5
It’s HANDS OFF day around America as demonstrations organized by a coalition of liberal groups will be protesting the DOGE cutbacks in federal spending. Numerous cities around the nation will be holding rallies with the keynote event at the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
It is also, theoretically, the deadline for TikTok to be sold. We will see.
April 8 -- Draw a Picture of a Bird Day. There is a touching story behind this holiday, very sad, very moving. I write about it in my Florida Weekly column coming out in a few days. I’ll also share it with you as a newsletter subscriber when it publishes. Keep an eye out for it in your inbox.
April 9 -- National Chicken Little Awareness Day. The sky is falling.
April 10 -- National Alcohol Screening Day. Why anyone would want to pour their booze through a screen is beyond me, but you be you.
April 11 -- Louie Louie Day. Celebrating what some people believe is the greatest dance tune of all time, an assertion with which I disagree and have more on that in another newsletter coming out later this month.
April 12 -- Passover. Celebrating the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery and, by extension for people of all faiths, the importance of freedom.
April 13 -- Palm Sunday. Commemorating Jesus’ triumphal arrival in Jerusalem, the beginning of the Christian Holy Week leading up to Easter.
April 14 -- Reach as High as You Can Day. It’s about reaching your goals, not your ceiling.
April 15 -- It’s Tax Day. If you haven’t done so already, this is the deadline to file your returns with the Internal Revenue Service or what’s left after Elon Musk is done with it. The history of the income tax in America is a bit twisted, as I will share in an upcoming newsletter that will be arriving in your inbox (I know, the anticipation must be killing you).
April 16 -- National Eggs Benedict Day.
April 17 -- International Haiku Poetry Day. Haikus are written in three lines with a total of 17 syllables, five on the first line, seven on line two, and five on the last line. They don’t have to rhyme. For instance, this haiku referencing my upcoming short story, Scribbles From Space:
Elon Musk hates me
Because I wreck his Tesla
In my novella
April 18 -- Good Friday. Commemorating the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. It is called “good” because in the Christian faith Jesus’ death was necessary for humanity’s salvation.
April 19 -- Garlic Day. Try it with ice cream. I have. It’s unforgettable (but not in a good way).
April 20 -- Easter. A holy day in the Christian faith celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. Like Christmas, it’s also a secular holiday personified by the arrival of the Easter Bunny.
April 21 -- The White House Easter Egg Roll ordinarily takes place on this day, but Elon Musk fired the bunny.
April 22 -- Earth Day. A global celebration to raise awareness of the importance of our environment. And, yes, global warming is real.
April 23 -- World Table Tennis Day. Keep your eyes peeled (yeah, it’s painful) for future announcements regarding the International Underwater Ping-Pong Championships for which I am in training.
April 24 -- Pigs in a Blanket Day. Because pigs get chilly, too.
April 25 -- World Penguin Day. Celebrating these amazing birds and noting this date because it marks the start of the Adelie penguins’ annual northern migration in Antarctica.
April 26 -- Independent Bookstore Day. A great place to buy your very own copies of The Strange Files series.
April 27 -- National Immunization Awareness Week. (Yes, pay attention to this please, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s called science.)
April 28 -- National Superhero Day. My current fave: Jeff the Land Shark.
April 29 -- International Dance Day. World’s greatest dance: The Gator as revealed in all its glory by John Belushi in National Lampoon’s Animal House.
April 30 -- National Accuracy in Newsletters Day.
Letters
Dear J.C.
In your story about the origin of April Fools’ Day, you referenced that our months are named after pagan gods. Is that true for all the months?
G. Anicius
Actually, I said many, but not all. The month we’re in right now, for instance, is from the Latin word “aperire” meaning “to open” as in the opening of flower buds in springtime. Here’s a full rundown of our months and their origins:
January: From Janus, the Roman god of, among other things, doors.
February: From the Roman festival of purification, Februa, where they whipped one another with animal hides. Fun times.
March: From Mars, the Roman god of war.
April: From the Latin “aperire.”
May: From Maia, the Greek goddess of fertility.
June: From Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth.
July: Yeah, it’s about Caesar, named after Julius.
August: Yet another Roman emperor who got a month named for himself, Augustus.
September: From the Latin word “septem,” meaning seven, because at one time it was the seventh month of the year in the Roman calendar (Caesar wasn’t wrong in trying to fix things.)
October: From the Latin “octo” meaning eight. Same story as above.
November: From “novem” the Latin word for nine. Yes, the Romans at one point only had ten months, to wit…
December: You guessed it. From “decem,” Latin for ten.
Aprilisstulti: Latin for April Fools!
Dear J.C.
You mentioned International Pillow Fight Day earlier in the newsletter, but it wasn’t listed in the calendar of events. Was this an oversight?
M. Lindell
No. It was a test and you passed. International Pillow Fight Day is always celebrated the first Saturday in April (this year, April 5), although the first recorded organized pillow fight took place on March 22, 2008, as part of a 25-city flash mob. The brains behind that event were Kevin Bracken and Lori Kufner, a pair of University of Toronto students who created an art collective known as Newmindspace. They have since been deported to El Salvador by ICE.
Dear J.C.
That isn’t true and you know it. Take it back or I’ll remove you from my Signal contacts list.
P. Hegseth
Okay, okay. That was just a lame attempt at humor, I admit it. Kevin Bracken and Lori Kufner were not, as far as I know, deported to El Salvador. But, I have to say, I spent at least two minutes trying to track down their current whereabouts and failed. So, as far as I know, they’ve been disappeared. Kev, Lori, if you’re reading this, give us a shout so we know you’re okay.
Parting Shot
J.C. Bruce is a journalist and author of The Strange Files series of mysterious novels (available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, other online booksellers, and at selected libraries). He holds dual citizenship in the United States of America and Florida. His latest novel, Strange Timing, was recently named Book of the Year in the Royal Palm Literary Awards where it also won Gold Medals in the Sci-Fi and Thriller categories. When he’s not writing, he’s in training for the International Underwater Ping-Pong Championships.
Sponsored by TROPIC PRESS, publisher of The Strange Files Series of Mysterious Adventures.
