Outrageous!

I worked really hard on this year's April Fool's joke. It was called "The Blog Dongle Uproar (part II)". All about Bradley Smith, formerly part of the Federal Elections Commission.

The post had to do with a dongle (see picture down below) that all bloggers would have to attach to their machines in order to post.

It involved a blog tax, the proceeds of which would be used to fund Orrin Hatch's attempts to ban P2P and all sorts of useful progress in online technology. It involved registering all bloggers and creating a division of the Department of Homeland Security that would monitor all blog posts to see if they threatened our moral security.

Link: The coming crackdown on blogging | Newsmakers | CNET News.com.

"The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.

Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don't give bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to online-only journals like CNET?"

My whole shtick was that I was going to support  the blog tax and talk about what a good idea it was... thus leading other bloggers to be outraged and rip me to pieces for supporting something so entirely stupid.

But I'm not going to post it. In fact, this is my last post until Saturday. Why? Because everything is being taken so seriously, especially when individuals feel deceived, mistreated or foolish.

I got a note earlier today from someone excoriating Best Buy because the price they offered for a CD in the store was <gasp> a few dollars different from what they were offering the same thing online. They were outraged.

Outrage seems to be the order of the day. Outrage is the new currency of politics, it's the currency of marketing and it's the currency of our interactions on the road--did I mention a woman in a GMC Jimmy--probably 55 years old--honked at me for more than a minute today (and flipped me the bird) because she didn't like my driving?

This is going to be the biggest April Fool's day in memory. There will be political fools and satirical fools and just plain goofy fools. I figured I could get a lot of mileage out of inventing the "blog tax" fool, and it would be a good story to tell my grandchildren. But then I realized that if it worked, I'd get all this incredibly angry mail and trackbacks and I'd have to deal with it.

So, alas, no Fools for me. Good luck tomorrow. Be careful out there.