See the sun going down
April 1st is a day I always look forward to, since it’s a chance to have a little fun with the piping and drumming world. The key to a good April Fool’s joke is for it to be fairly topical and remotely believable, so that the many altruistic people among us fall for it.
This year’s was in the works for a few days, and Piobaireachd Society President Jack Taylor was in the know and signed off on the ploy, good sport that he is. He even provided the quote. What would Kilberry think?!
A differentiating feature of pipes|drums and the old Piper & Drummer is humour. At the end of the day it’s just music, and, if you stop to think about what we do and how seriously we so often take ourselves and all this competing, you just have to have a chuckle.
I sourced a few of the past April Fool’s stories, which are always only viewable for the one day, but I opened them up again just for today.
Tenor-drummers gird for world boycott
SLOT announces Greenpeace sponsorship
Hope you get a good laugh.
With all the hubbub concerning Scotlands stranglehold on the location of the World Pipeband Championships, this article seems timely and appropriate.
The rate the modern Piobaireachd Society is going at, for a minute I thought the April Fool thing was genuine – well for a few seconds, then I was sitting killing myself laughing at 5.15 am when the whole street was asleep. Couldn’t help laughing out loud, it was so hilarious, esp the message on that mobile phone. Still laughing at it now. Hilarious.
It would be a good idea to have judges using computers or similar technology to fill out their score sheets and submit them in real time to a secure data base. Assuming that they could type, this would speed up the compilation time and we would actually be able to read them! Why, who knows, with the time saved, it might even be possible to resurrect the “Best Rainbow Trout” award.
I may be a fool to admit it, but I look forward to these all year, and they never disappoint. (Although for sheer eyebrow-raising oddness, I still have to pick the SLOT sponsorship article as my favorite of the lot.) Thanks for taking the time to write ’em!