Bran blog

Yesterday was April First and I was up in the air - flying home from Boston after visiting family for Easter. So here I am again, baking bran muffins for neighbours and ​picking up the reins of a run-away schedule. If you are a list-person like me, you have an agenda for each day, not that it gets fulfilled each day but a man's (woman's) reach must exceed his/her grasp or what's a metaphor?  April Fool'sDay, I gather, is a wide-open invitation for elaborate hoaxes made possible by hi-tech magic. In my day we didn't have YouTube, we just lied.  One's success depended on how straight a face one could keep and how plausible the lie.  Today anything is plausible, which makes it both easier and harder to fool anyone.  People keep saying how stressed they are, so I guess a little techie joke relieves tension. It certainly draws attention to how beguiled we are by trivia. Trivia is global, actually, trivia are global. (When were we ever drawn in by one trivium?)  Trivia have the potential of going viral, and do. You see it on the nightly news: someone or something has gone viral,  Fools' Day or not.  Newscasters welcome a trivial report.  The old rule is inexorable for the evening news now: "if it bleeds, it leads."  So, failing a battle, a flood, an earthquake or a famine, they are left with local murder and mayhem.  How grateful they are for a giggle or a joke to sign off with. The more fool  we. My muffins are ready.