Dear blogs,

Look, if I put you on my reading list, I expect a certain level of effort and respect. I know this post can come off as miserly. I also know that I am fighting off wisdom tooth pain that makes me less likely to be nice and do that whole “live and let live thing” that I normally practice so well.

April Fools Jokes, by definition, need a few things to work. They need believability, because no one believes Microsoft bought you. They need good timing, because even if you come up with a good angle, sometimes it won’t work because of the specifics. You need to maintain that aura of credibility and at the same time dash just a few hints of zaniness into the solution so smart people can figure it out.

We are in the information era now. Everyone knows it’s April 1st, nobody is sleeping on it. So posts either need to be crafted with maximum effort, or they need to not be done at all. I know someone is going to give me that “spirit of the day” crap, where we have to be really obvious about something so a bunch of nitwits think it is “cute”. I completely disagree. The spirit of the day is tricking people, not being completely obvious about a lame joke. If I were a Rockets beat writer, I’d be filing a story about how Ron Artest got into a shootout with the police and is currently being arraigned. Thanks to Ron’s background, you have a story that is almost guaranteed to be believed by a few people. Those that do jump and run with it will probably be a bunch of newspaper hacks who always bury the NBA for being a thugs league, and then you get to expose them for the frauds they are.

Instead, we get…Mark Cuban buys the Lakers. Spare me. Look, if you’re going to do a good April Fools joke, it needs to be well-researched, and well-implemented. It’s just not clever to come up with a goofy idea and exclaim that it’s “for the spirit of the day”.

Clearly, the difference is just in effort. As you can see from my last few blog posts, I am clearly the kind of person who should be making this distin–wait, nevermind.