caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

The origin of April Fools Day
While the exact origin of April Fool’s Day is not known, there are possible mentions of it in literature and history dating as far back as 1392 in Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, “The Canterbury Tales“. In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a cockerel is tricked by a wily fox on the 32nd day of March, or, April 1st. French poet, Eloy d’Amerval refers to the “fish of April” in one of his works from 1508, which may the first reference to April Fools Day in France, while in 1561, Flemish poet Eduard de Dene wrote a story about a nobleman who would send servants on foolish errands on April 1st every year. The tradition of playing pranks on April Fools Day has been a popular custom since the 19th century, and it certainly hasn’t shown any signs of losing its momentum.

https://glampinghub.com/blog/the-best-april-fools-day-pranks/

Something/Someone Old

My Something Old this week is Kenneth Grahame's 1908 book The Wind in the Willows.

Despite the crowing of its governor and state PR machinem the predictions and projectinos of anti-maskers and of lockdown devotees, Florida is neither the ideal covid-19 response model, nor the worst, at least based on two specific metrics. It is, as they say, smack dab in the middle.

Article by Derek Thompson in the Atlantic: The Curious Case of Florida’s Pandemic Response. A good, quick read.

(Full disclosure: I am a member of DSA.)

I guess there's a sort of to-do on Facebook, now, about Don McIntosh's interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Talking Socialism: Catching Up With AOC. I will go through a part of the interview point by point.

I've disliked the EU ever since they started putting austerity measures in place for small member countries like Greece. It showed more than anything to me that the EU was really Germany in charge of the rest of Europe from an economic standpoint, without other member countries having a way to control their finances like any other sovereign country (e.g., print more money, go into debt, etc.).