April Fool's
Day
Many glaciations
ago, A Neanderthal Person with a corresponding sense
of humor pasted prehistory's first "Please Club Me"
sign to the back of an unsuspecting fellow
missing–link, whom fun–loving passers–by then
bludgeoned into gristle, a process that garnered boffo
yuks from the cave crowd. "Whew! That silly chap
certainly was some April Fool, n'est-ce pas?",
they chortled, thus naming a month and starting a
glorious tradition much loved by all those who have
ever found their shoes nailed to the floor.
Playing tricks on others
goes way back. We get our word "jovial" from the great
god Jove who was said to be quite a card up there on
Olympus. To spice up the blandness of omnipotence, he
once confronted Vulcan and pointed to an imaginary
spot on this lesser deity's toga, bidding him behold,
for, yea, the raiment was soiled with ash from the
Heavenly Forge. When the Fire God looked down, the
Jovial One brought his index-finger up and flicked him
one right in the old schnozzola! Verily, the welkins
rangeth all over the placeth with the sound of
celestial guffaws and congratulatory high–fiving.
Vulcan, on the other hand —a sorehead at best— erupted
and destroyed the Minoan civilization on Crete.
There is no evidence
that any of this happened on April First, so–called
"April Fools' " or "All–Fools' Day". In fact, there is
no certainty why any of this takes place on April
First, at all. There was the festival of Hilaria in
ancient Rome (hot-footing sandals, getting locked in
the vomitorium —that sort of thing) and a similar
Hindu festival called Holi. Both of these took place
on or close to the Autumnal Equinox. What better time
to play tricks than a time of the year when Nature
herself does the same? A more prosaic explanation is
that when various cultures went over to calendars that
moved the celebration of the New Year from the spring
back to January 1, news traveled so slowly that there
were still plenty of people who sent New Year's
greetings and gifts at the wrong time of the year and
this degenerated into the sending of mock gifts to the
"fools" who didn't even know when the year started.
In Italy the
April Fool is called "Pesce d'aprile" (April
fish). They say there is an increase of young fish at
this time of year and that young fish are easily
"hooked." But I heard that on April Fool's Day, so who
knows? April Fool's Day is not much of an Italian
custom, much less one peculiar to Naples. There is
a day for playing stupid practical jokes on people,
and that is at carnevale —Mardi Gras.
There is even a stupid bit of doggerel to cover it: "A
Carnevale ogni scherzo vale" (At Mardi Gras,
all tricks are fair). That is when someone might spray
you with shaving cream or throw an egg at you. But
there don't seem to be any elaborate April Fool's
pranks. In some places, back in horse-and-buggy days,
when April 1 fell on a Sunday, a good prank was to
skip the service and stay outside and hitch horses up
to the wrong carriages and then watch the fun when
church let out and horses start to trot their way home
on their usual paths, taking churchgoers to the wrong
homes.
The BBC (British
Broadcasting Corporation) has traditional April Fool
gags. The first one appears to be this 1957 report
from the Ticino area of Switzerland, "where the
mild winter and the virtual disappearance of pests
like the spaghetti weevil have resulted in a bumper
spaghetti crop" (image, right). Not all viewers
were amused. They criticized airing the item on what
is supposed to be a serious factual program. Others,
however, asked where they could buy their very own
spaghetti bush.
This is a YouTube video of the original
broadcast.
Once the "Beeb" started their annual spoof on April 1,
then, of course, people tuned in to see what it was,
knowing full well that it was a put-on and expecting
to be amused. So, you had reports on flying penguins
or whatever. All jolly good fun. I don't know if
anyone bought their 1975 "report" on Decimal Time.
But they could have.
The report was on "the government's decision to
begin a phased introduction of decimal time."
It was very straight-laced and news-like. It was to
be much like the conversion to decimal currency a
few years earlier —"for a while we'll have
two systems plus conversion tables." No
problem. "It won't come into effect right
away. You and I probably won't notice the change
until 1984 - or 1985, as it'll be then." The
"back-story" —which the BBC did not
mention— has to do with the
French Revolution and their decision to "ten-i-fy"
weights and measures (whence we have kilometer,
kilogram, and centigrade (aka celsius).
They really did propose a 10-based
time system. The image (right) is a French clockface
from 1800 with the old 12-hour system as well as the
new revolutionary system of metric time. Unlike the
meter, decimal time never made it out of the
Revolution. The new time system made absolutely no
inroads anywhere, certainly not in Naples in spite of
nine years of French rule under King Murat
during that period. (Metric time didn't fare much
better in France, either.) That's fine with me;
imagine referring to the film High Noon as High
Five.
The information in the last
paragraph is rewritten from my page on "archaic
measuring systems."
p.s. Celsius is
named for Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1700-44). He had 11
fingers on his left hand. Just think what might have
happened.
added Mar 3, 2022
Two Hairs Past
a Freckle and the Big Hand is on the 8
Brave New
Time - The Green Witch - Soul Music Comes to Null
Island
The
French Revolution wasn't kidding about this time
stuff. The French Republic was the starting point of
history, a break between the old and new. Everything
was to be renewed. Time would start again, and that
meant doing away with the old way of marking time, the
24-hour "sexagesimal" system, which goes back to
ancient Babylonia. It meant starting a new
revolutionary system, the "Republican" calendar, with
everything based on ten. The Gregorian calendar,
thus, came to an end on the 1st of Vendémiaire
Year II (September 22nd 1793) the autumn equinox.
Brave New Time (!) began at midnight at the true
autumn equinox as given by the Paris Observatory. The
new calendar was based on two principles: the
Republican year should coincide with the movement of
the planets, and it should measure time more
accurately and more symmetrically by applying the
decimal system wherever possible. It was non-religious
in that no days or months were named after deities.
The year was divided into twelve months, each with
thirty days, the names of which were inspired by the
weather and the seasons. Five extra days, the sansculottides,
were added for the Republican holidays. After a
four-year cycle called a franciade, a sixth sansculottide
was added to the end of the year to make the
Republican calendar year coincide with the sidereal
year. (Good news! You don't have to know what a
sidereal year is to be overjoyed that this thing never
got off the drawing board!) (Or even what that other
kind is called that the sidereal year is not!)
(ok, the tropical year). Each month was divided
according to a decimal system of three ten-day periods
known as décades. The old divisions of the day
into 24 hours and sexagesimal subdivisions were gone.
Instead, the day, from midnight to midnight, was
divided into ten hours, each hour with 100 decimal
minutes of 100 seconds. And so decimal time was born,
with one decimal hour being equivalent to 2 hours and
24 minutes. Noon was now at 5 o’clock. They had to
overlook the fact that 12 wasn't that bad a number for
those old Babylonians, who shrewdly noted that one
year had approximately 12 months. (Some cultures today
—Islam, for one— use both solar and lunar
calendars. If your planet has more than one moon,
things can get hairy. Take Mars. Please.) But in
Republican France on planet Earth in the 1790s that
was not a problem. Everything was 10! What could go
wrong?
Clock and watchmakers had to adapt and
produce new timepieces with dials and hands that
showed the day of the décade, the date and the
Republican month. Between 1793 and 1796, timepieces
became "bilingual". To help the public get used to the
new system, both systems, sexagesimal and decimal,
were shown on clocks and watches. They were
stupendous! The dials had concentric circles swept by
a single pair of hands to show both the five 'new'
hours and 12 'old' hours of half a day, and the ten
hours equivalent to the 24 hours of a full day; or
they showed ten hours on two circles, one for the day
and one for night, and around the perimeter were the
duodecimal hours shown either as I to XII or 1 to 12.
They were extremely complicated to make accurately.
The ones from the 1790s that survive today in museums
have been carefully restored and are masterpieces of
precision watchmaking, or you can buy new wristwatches
today (image, right) but I don't know why you would
want to.
The latest gimmick I know of is Internet Time,
invented and marketed by the Swatch (Swiss Watch, get
it?) corporation in the late 1990's. Instead of
dividing the day into 24 hours and 60 minutes per
hour, the Internet Time system divides the day into
1000 "beats". Each beat is 1 minute and 26.4 seconds.
Thus you can say, I'll see you at (beat number such
and such) and it's the same all over the world. Wait,
yes, but the day still has to start somewhere!
They abandoned the Greenwich Meridian (see below); the
new Meridian goes through Swatch's office in Biel, in
Switzerland and is called the BMT Meridian. Not
revolutionary, but cute. OK, maybe not even that.
p.s. I don't know how any
of this works if you can't tell time unless it's all
numbers. That is, you see 16:25, but don't ask the
kids in (my) class to set the minute and hour hands on
a dial to match that time. Forget big-hand and
little-hand. Might as well talk sun-dial or
hour-glass. Great watch, though. No concentric circles
or sweeping hands —just
row upon row of flashing numbers, one for 12 and 24
hour hexigesimal numbers; one for French Revolutionary
numbers; one for Swatch beats; one for summer seasonal
adjustments; and maybe one for just random numbers. I
want one! You wouldn't even have to know where
Greenwich is (or how it's pronounced! Remember the
Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz? She was
green, so it works out.) It's where the International
Meridian Conference was held in 1884 and where they
created Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the basis
for our 24-hour time zone system. Greenwich Mean Time
(GMT) was chosen as the world’s time standard, the
reference line or starting point, because the Royal
Observatory in Greenwich (image, above) is easy to
find. It's at 0° longitude in England! Ask around.
(The line through Greenwich is the Prime Meridian of
the World! - Longitude 0º. Every place on Earth is
measured in terms of its distance east or west from
that line. The line itself divides the eastern and
western hemispheres of the Earth, just as the Equator
divides the northern and southern hemispheres. If you
stand with one foot on the east side and the other
foot on the west, you are perfectly balanced between
east and west.)* UTC was officially adopted in
1967. It was adjusted several times until 1972, when
leap seconds were introduced to keep UTC in line with
the Earth's rotation, which is not entirely even. Of
course, the Earth, itself, is slowing down like a
giant spinning top, ever more slowly. Sooner or later,
it will just topple over, roll to the side of the
cosmic table, fall off into nothingness and die. Don't
worry about that. Well, maybe worry a little bit.
* 
If are looking for serene balance in
your life, try going to the point on the Earth’s
surface where the Prime Meridian from Greenwich
crosses the Equator; that is, at zero degrees latitude
and zero degrees longitude (0°N, 0°E). (I know.
It looks magical!) "Null Island" is the name
used to refer to that point. It's not really an
island. That's too bad. (I had my bags all packed).
That's Null Island in the image on the
right. It's in international waters in the Gulf of
Guinea (in the Atlantic) off the west African coast.
Right now a weather and sea observation buoy is moored
there. The buoy is named "Station 13010 – Soul". It is
anchored by a cable to the seabed at a depth of around
4,940 meters (16,210 ft) and is part of a set of 17
buoys installed in the tropical Atlantic Ocean since
1997 by the United States, France, and Brazil. Like
the other buoys in the system, it is named after a
musical genre, but I'm not sure why or if any music
has been written about it or if the flippered creature
sunning itself on the buoy (the last time I looked)
would like it.
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