Don’t believe everything you read online, especially today. April 1 is commonly known as "April Fools Day" and there is no shortage of pranks to be found, especially on the intertubes.

Thinking about today got me thinking, how did April Fools Day come about? What is the history of this strange "holiday"? I decided to scour the internet to find out.

My first stop took me to an obvious place when searching for information – Wikipedia. I came across this entry that gives a vague and convoluted history of this day, much of which is pure speculation:

In many pre-Christian cultures May Day (May 1) was celebrated as the first day of summer, and signalled the start of the spring planting season. An April Fool was someone who did this prematurely. Another origin is that April 1 was counted the first day of the year in France. When King Charles IX changed that to January 1, some people stayed with April 1. Those who did were called "April Fools" and were taunted by their neighbors.

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Today we celebrated Earth Hour – where people around the world turned off the lights for one hour in a worldwide symbolic vote for Earth! At 8:30pm the lights in my house went on, and a few candles were lit so I wouldn’t trip over the cat. The entire city of Chicago also took part in Earth Hour.

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Today, the Federal Trade Commission began a conference in Seattle, WA to discuss digital rights management – aka DRM. While no policy shift changes were announced, I was pleased to read via this post on Ars Technica what one FTC official had to say as a warning to companies that use DRM:

Mary Engle, an FTC Acting Deputy Director, began her remarks by warning that those who use DRM had better get serious about disclosing it and the limits that it places on products. She referenced the Sony BMG rootkit debacle, saying that "sellers who use DRM technology to enforce the terms of bargains with consumers need to be particularly careful to disclose in advance" what those bargains are.

Isn’t that what the fine print is for, to disclose shady terms to consumers without actually expecting the consumer to read about the shady terms and conditions associated with DRM. According to Ms. Engle, that is not acceptable:

And just stuffing the disclosure into the fine print of an End User License Agreement (EULA) isn’t good enough. "If your advertising giveth and your EULA taketh away," she said, "don’t be surprised if the FTC comes calling."

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I’ve always thought that Japanese was one of the harder foreign languages (I struggled through basic Spanish in high school and college). But when I read this article on Yahoo!, I have a new-found respect for those who can read, write and speak Japanese.

Why is Japanese such a hard language? This gives you a good idea:

Just reading the newspaper requires knowledge of about 2,000 characters. Another 50,000 are less common but useful to recognize.

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This weekend I’ll be giving away a copy of the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (aff link)! I have been a faithful subscriber to this magazine for a few years now and I love it. The magazine talks about literature, writing, publishing and a variety of other content that keeps me going.

Why the giveaway? For some reason I received 2 issues in my mail rather than one. Instead of letting the extra copy go to waste and throwing it out, I thought I’d give it away to one of my faithful readers!

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This past week has been a rather difficult one, to say the least. It started when my Powerbook G4 decided to suffer a catastrophic failure – the details of which you can read in this previous post. And the week reached its low point on Saturday February 14 (yes, on Valentine’s Day, but I wasn’t feeling the love) when it became clear that the computer was beyond my ability to repair it.

Here is the result of my efforts:

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The other night I was happily surfing the tubes, when my Mac Powerbook G4 started making funny clunking sounds. Before I could react, everything froze up on me and I had to shut the computer down. After waiting a few minutes, I tried turning it back on and to my horror, I could only get a blank blue screen and a funny whirring-clunk noise coming from the hard drive.

After doing some research (I still have my old Dell laptop, which still works fairly well) I found that the hard drive on my Mac is probably toast and will have to be replaced. Hopefully a new hard drive will do the trick.

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Join the conversation on these posts that have recent comments! It has been a while since I’ve posted a "recently commented on"-type post, but there has been a lot of commenting activity lately, so I figured it’s now or never.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Author smackdown: Stephen King disses Stephenie Meyer

Computerworld: Ebooks about to catch on fire!

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, ebooks and the definition of irony

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When something becomes too difficult or a burden, just ban it! That appears to be the philosophy that the city of Birmingham in the UK used when the city council decided to ban the apostrophe from all city signs:

The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.

As absurd as this story is, there is more:

However the decision was described as "absolute defeatism" by John Richards, the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

"This is setting a terrible example," Mr Richards said. "It seems retrograde, dumbing down really. All over Birmingham, and in other cities, teachers are trying to teach children correct grammar and punctuation. Now children will go around Birmingham and see utter chaos."

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Now that President Obama is in office, maybe we’ll see the government finally take steps to promote, cultivate and nurture the arts (including literature) in the U.S., at least according to this article from the New York Times. The article notes that the various arts groups and non-profits contribute an estimated $167 billion to the economy each year – so even during this economic crisis, the arts remain important.

Even more exciting, however, is what President Obama campaigned to do for the arts once in office:

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