It is precisely because issues – medicine, politics, accountancy, the rules of Mornington Crescent – are complicated that readers turn to the Guardian, or the BBC, or the Lancet, or my old papers Fish Selling and Self Service Times, expecting to have them made simple.
Hanging in the center of the vast two-story dining room is an iridescent mobile of glass, metal, coral and paper fish, with shimmering disks that reflect light.
From noon to 2 p.m., children can make bubble wands, color and stuff paper fish and receive patriotic tattoos (unlike Popeye's, they're temporary).
In France, as in several other countries in Europe, 1 April is historically "April fish" (poissons d'avril) rather than April fools, with the traditional prank limited to children attaching coloured paper fish to unsuspecting adults' backs.
As part of a corridor display about 100 ways to get to 100, children used shades of nail polish, cutouts of shooting stars, toothpicks and a school of 100 paper fish.
In France, for example, the fooled person is called poisson d'avril ("April fish"), perhaps in reference to a young fish and hence to one that is easily caught; it is common for French children to pin a paper fish to the backs of unsuspecting friends.
Aided by a percussionist who hooked a paper fish onto it and enlisted an audience member to run back and forth with the fish — the man in the first row was surprisingly game — Mr. Hatakeyama, after much fanfare, reeled it in.
Within the past five years, Ms. Giunta has made inroads into that canon not only through her own work but also by helping to revive the fortunes of two critically acclaimed novels by Italian-American women that had gone out of print: "Paper Fish" by Tina DeRosa and "Umbertina" by Helen Barolini.
We learn that the oldest complete version of the Latin Vulgate weighs about the same as a Great Dane, and that the pages of the Gospel of Saint Augustine tend to "curl up alarmingly," recalling one of "those paper fish one used to buy in joke shops, which you placed on the warmth of your open hand and which then curled to indicate whether you were in love".
Tidbits of the ubiquitous holiday's history seem like jokes in and of themselves; "In France and Italy, children and adults traditionally tack paper fish on each other's back as a trick and shout "april fish!" in their local language ("poisson d'avril!" and "pesce d'aprile!" in French and Italian respectively)." And this brings me to my point; The Internet has killed April Fools'.
