4/3/2011 Ponderings

Ponderings 4/3/2011

1. If I dated my Ponderings as 4/1/2011 everybody would immediately raise their gullibility guard.

2. NCAA really needs to start the season one week earlier, so that March Madness is truly March Madness.
1B. The worst part about VCU getting knocked out is that during the Final I won't be able to yell BOOOM SHAKKKA LAKKA every time VCU scores, or the broadcast showed Coach Shaka.

3. The government should reveal all of its technology development secrets on April 1st every year. People would laugh it off as pranks and then 5 years later when the technology is shown the government could say: "We told you about this precisely in this article on April 1st". If for some reason the secrets ends up not being developed they can say: "It was a April Fools Joke".

4. We need to change mailboxes to be painted neon pink instead of Dark Blue. How many times have you wanted to mail something and it takes 10 minutes to find a mailbox which is literally one block away? (Note: Mailbox here is not referring to your e-mail inbox.)


5A. When India won the world cup, I realized how Facebook and social networking in general has revolutionized the Sports World. People, who don't know the rules of Cricket found a way to watch the match, keep track of the score, and post a status on Facebook.

5B. The next part about Facebook and social networking is the recent change of loving a game to having a specific allegiance. (This is not new but the number of fans I am calling Facebook Fans has increased because of Facebook.) The majority of fans love teams, not the Sport. The "Sports Fan" watches every single game because they enjoy the specific game, the Facebook Fan watches their team and could care less about the rest of the games (unless it has an impact on their team). These are not mutually exclusive as most sports fans have teams they love. But the thing to note is how easy it is for people to jump on an allegiance without necessary understanding the game. In the Sports World this is fine and actually quite exciting to see how a community gets behind a team, but if this behavior translates to other places it is quite scary.

6A. April Fools Day becomes worse and worse every years as you grow up. Every year you are aware of more pranks and based on the setting pranks tend to become less and less frequent for various reasons. For example, this year how many April Fools Jokes did you see? I saw maybe 6 and was a part of 2 of those 6. In order to bring back this I propose the following:
A. Any time you successfully Prank someone they owe you $5
B. You cannot prank someone twice until they have pranked you back successfully.
C. If you don't have a successful Prank on April Fools you owe $5 to a common pool which goes to the person who does the best prank on April Fools Day as voted by the pool.(Nobody is allowed to vote for themselves.)


6B. All pranks needs to have several components: novelty, execution, element of surprise, and they need to be good natured (at least for pranks for your friends, colleagues, etc.)Being able to pull this off is extremely difficult on April Fools Day because everybody is on their guard. Instead the system should be changed too allow everybody to prank everyone once a year anytime, anyplace, anywhere. If people think that plan is too stressful then we introduce a month of pranking so at least people are a little bit less on guard.