April 1, 2016 Ridley's Believe It Or Not April Fools Day

Ridley’s Believe It Or Not For April 1, 2016. Only 294 days to go in President Obama’s pathetic lame duck term but fortunately March Madness is in full swing for both men and women and the Pac 12 has two teams in the Women’s Final Four. Great political theater as Fox News exposes that protesters on Trump are totally clueless on why as they pocket $15 an hour for appearing and Hillary completely loses her cool against a Sanders’ supporter who exposed her hypocrisy of taking huge contributions from fossil fuel employees. As always, I hope  you enjoy today’s holidays and observances, a music link to Champs, factoids of interest, a  relevant quote from Ken Adachi while looking forward to a large slice of sourdough bread, blessed with a positive attitude and  secure in  the knowledge that if you want to find a gift for any memorable events like birthdays, weddings, or  anniversaries, you know that the Alaskanpoet can provide you with a unique customized poem  at a great price  tailored to the event and the recipient. You need only contact me for details.

1. Fossil Fuels Day—promoted by environmentalists to encourage movement away from dependence on fossil fuels for energy—fuels and fools sound pretty close together.

2. April Fools Day—what a great holiday to have an open license to perpetrate hoaxes and pranks on friends, family, strangers and an unsuspecting public. If on April 1, 2015 you would have proclaimed that a confirmed socialist would be neck and neck with the heir apparent to the presidency or that a man who has asserted women should be punished for having an abortion would be leading the Red field such statements would have gone down as classic April Fools Day statements but today are true.                       

3. 1958 Number One Song—celebrating the number one song in 1958 on a run of five weeks in that position Tequila by Champs instead of Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. Here is a link to Champs following an introduction by a very young looking Dick Clark performing Tequila: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyl7GP_VMJY

4. National Sourdough Bread Day—celebrating a great bread introduced to California by French bakers in San Francisco during the California Gold Rush.   

5. Wave Goodbye To Another Final Four—celebrating the birthday on this day in 1998 of the twins Brook and Robin Lopez, two seven footers who played for Stanford and after taking Stanford to the Final Four in their junior year entered the NBA draft and today are still playing professional basketball on different teams, the Knicks and the Nets.

On this day in:

a. 1854 Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times began serialization in his magazine Household Words which was a creative way to get published and create demand for the novel.       

b. 1873 the White Star Line RMS Atlantic while trying to enter Halifax, Nova Scotia missed the entrance and ran into a reef and sank; 571 people died, including all but one child aboard.         

c. 1893 to the future joy of this poet’s father who served with great distinction in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a Chief Petty Officer (the rank that really ran a U.S. Navy warship), the rank of Chief Petty Officer was created.   

d. 1949 in a real what took you so long moment to act, the Canadian government finally almost four years after hostilities had ceased against Japan repealed the internment of Japanese-Canadians; like the U.S. under President Reagan Canada ultimately in 1988 Canada agreed to pay $21,000 to each surviving internee and restore Canadian citizenship to any person repatriated back to Japan.    

e. 2004 Google announced that Gmail was available to the public.    

Reflections on internment during the war from a Canadian-Japanese citizen: “ Born in Canada, brought up on big-band jazz, Fred Astaire and the novels of Henry Rider Haggard, I had perceived myself to be as Canadian as the beaver. I hated rice. I had committed no crime. I was never charged, tried or convicted of anything. Yet I was fingerprinted and interned.” Ken Adachi, noted Japanese-Canadian literary critic and author of The Enemy That Never Was One of the dividends to this poet of creating Ridley's Believe It Or Not-This Day In History each day is that one can learn something new each day. Until now I never knew the country of my mother’s birth put Japanese including those born in Canada through the same privations as we did and worse it took Canada four years after the war had ended to to end those privations.

Please enjoy the poems on events of interest on my twitter account below (if you like them, retweet and follow me) and follow my blogs. Always good, incisive and entertaining poems on my blogs—click on the links below. Go to www.alaskanpoet.blogspot.com for Ridley’s Believe It Or Not—This Day In History, poems to inspire, touch, emote, elate and enjoy and poems on breaking news items of importance or go to Ridley's Believe It Or Not for just This Day In History.          

© April 1, 2016, Michael P. Ridley aka the Alaskanpoet 
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