Happy Liberation Day!

How will you celebrate?

Hello, hungry people …

Today we’re following up on one matter of old business and anticipating another.

The first was a hoax. So is the second one.

But where the first hoax was intended for laughs, the second one is just another turd in the ongoing shitshow we’ve endured for the past 72 days.

***

For those of you who dropped by Bob’s Diner yesterday, yes, the offer of Free Wonder Melon Seeds! was a joke.

I couldn’t help myself.

Throughout my 20-some-odd years in the newspaper business, I resorted to writing an April Fool’s Day column on exactly one occasion. It appeared in the April 1, 1990, edition of the Orlando Sentinel and it received more response than any other column I ever wrote.

It validated my “Dark Suit Theory” of column-writing, which maintains that you can do a ton of research about a serious topic that is crucial to the well-being of our world and when it appears it’s like wetting your pants while wearing a dark suit. You get a nice, warm feeling. And no one notices.

But write something silly about, oh, fake watermelons, and the floodgates open.

Hundreds of letters and phone calls came in from readers back then, all of them wanting free seeds so they could grow the miraculous 100-pound, fur-covered watermelon created by the poor Russian immigrant Olaf Prolisady.

I offered plenty of hints that not all was as it seemed, including:

• The generic name of the watermelon, A jeukonyew, translates as “A joke on you.”

• The natural insecticide in its rind that gets rid of cockroaches is called D-Onbleevitol (don’t believe it all.)

• And Olaf Prolisady’s name is an anagram for April Fool’s Day.

***

I knew I might succeed in foisting this preposterous story on an unsuspecting public when I turned in the column to my editor, whom I don’t want to embarrass and will identify here by a pseudonym, Steve Vaughn.

“This is one helluva story,” said Steve. “How did you find this guy? And how do we get a photograph of him?”

For the record, Steve is a very good sport. When I told him the truth, he decided not to fire me on the spot, a decision he had many occasions to regret.

My mother was also a very good sport. On the day the column appeared, she called me before 7 a.m. wanting to make sure she was among the first in line to get the free seeds. Mom has since gone on to that big watermelon field in the sky, but I’m sure she still gets a chuckle out of it.

Just as I did yesterday after deciding, what the heck, let’s see how this April Fool’s joke plays 35 years after I tried it the first time. I ran it here, almost word for word and without any disclaimer.

***

Several careful readers dated themselves by pointing out that they remembered the 1990 column and weren’t falling for it.

Another, E.B., from Tallahassee, wrote: “Sign me up for the Prolisady seeds. I’ll plant them next to the field with bean seeds from our friend Jack.”

And then there were readers like:

• T.D. from California who said that while her backyard didn’t contain the sandy soil in which Big O watermelons thrive, she would do her best to find some if only I would send her the seeds. Of course, I told her, I’d get them in the mail right away.

• R.W., who has a home in the North Carolina mountains and was hoping the watermelons would grow there. Yes! Of course they will. But the bears might eat them.

• And E.C. of Groveland, Florida, who said she would like the seeds to plant on her farm because “they would be better than pumpkins.” Yes, Halloween watermelons! I like it, E.C.

Anyway, it was fun. Thanks for indulging me. I (almost) promise it won’t happen again.

And here’s a photograph from the pseudonymous Steve Vaughn that hangs in my office and explains a lot. Check out his other work. Good stuff.

***

And now for the second hoax.

Later today the VSG¹ will strut out to the Rose Garden and officially reveal his plans for placing hefty tariffs on all those countries that have pissed him off.

Full disclosure: In addition to being one of the 340 million Americans who will bear the brunt of these tariffs, I run a small business, Story Farm, that publishes books for hotels/resorts, chefs/restaurants and artists/museums.

As much as we would love to print books domestically, most printers of high-quality books in the U.S. have either gone belly-up or charge more than we can possibly afford. That’s why about 80 percent of our books are printed in China. The rest are printed in Canada.

So, yeah, I’m really loving what is about to go down.

The VSG² is calling April 2 “Liberation Day.”

He says it’s because we’ll be “getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave to other countries.”

And that leads us to TODAY’S POLL!

1. Very Stable Genius

2. Vindictive Slimy Gargoyle