A High Pranking Official

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for April is called, "Lifelong Memories." It's certainly true that both songs and smells can bring back childhood memories. Now let's see if a song about memory can bring back childhood smells.

Hey, Reader. Did you hear that they changed the calendar so that today is March 32nd? I'm not kidding. I swear on cemetery-full of dead relatives that I'm telling the truth!

Not.

Oh, Reader, you're such a gullible dope. We're all pointing at you because you fell for the oldest prank in the proverbial eBook. You've got so much egg on your face, guests have started asking the chef at the omelet bar if they could get theirs with a human nose, too.

It's actually April 1st on the Gregorian calendar, and that means you have the opportunity to pay it forward. Here are the 15 freshest japes to try out on your naive friends and co-workers before midnight.

ONE
Hide a baby monitor in crawlspace above the ceiling and transmit recordings of medieval battle through it.

TWO
Gradually replace all the framed family photos in the house with pictures of Laura Bush.

THREE

Convince warring medieval tribes to have an actual battle in the crawlspace above the ceiling.

FOUR
Put a note on someone's car that says, "I'm sorry about the meteorite damage."

FIVE
Write a co-worker's name on the waistband of some underwear and bury it in an undisclosed location in the woods while the co-worker is wearing it.

SIX
Replace someone's deodorant with a deck of cards and watch them flip out as they rub the cards up and down their armpit over and over.

SEVEN
Superglue a quarter to the sidewalk and when someone bends down to pick it up, superglue their hand to the sidewalk, too. Now superglue another quarter to their butt and wait for the next gullible passerby.

EIGHT
Lean over the parapet and pour boiling oil on to your enemies. Shout, "April Fuels!"

NINE
Offer to teach your friend the world's best palindromes, but instead, teach him or her phrases that only sound like palindromes, such as:

• Banana moms bomb Panama
• A dog appendix in Nepal is a pagoda
• Acrobats stab acorns and an orca
• Trick a new anus? I won, Ma. Or is it Mom? Mammy? Or are we now Nana? Christ.

TEN
Cut the main power line to your city so your friend's CPAP machine stops working. Now the snoring will keep his wife awake half the night.

ELEVEN
Cover the sensor on the remote control with a piece of clear tape. While your kids are tied up with the frustration of not being able to turn the TV on, cover the sensors on the fire alarm and the carbon monoxide detector.

TWELVE
Tape a piece of paper with the phrase, "Patient voice activated only" to one of the ventilators in the ICU.

THIRTEEN
Pour out the ketchup and replace it with fish blood. Serve your friend some French fries while they are in shark-infested waters.

FOURTEEN
Hand someone a newspaper and tape the following over the headline: "Authorities Determine April 1st to be Renamed February 60th."

FIFTEEN
Water down someone's food coloring, which will make their own April Fools pranks modestly less effective.

With warmest regards,
Zach

The Sun is Flat

Dear Friends,

    Has anyone else noticed that if you take the 'ac' out of 'Hard Taco Digest,' you're left with 'Hard To Digest'? You know what else is hard to digest without the AC? My car! And my house! It's turning into a real scorcher out there this summer and I don't know where I would be without modern urban amenities like temperature control.

   You know, when you're a hard working rock band on the road, one of things you really notice is that different motels have different air conditioning units. We always stay at Red Roof Inn, primarily because their Member Rewards rooms used to come standard with the Friedrich Quietmaster SL35J30. There's nothing like the comfort and peacefulness of a noiseless split system AC unit when you're feverishly trashing a motel room in a drunken rage.

    That's how it used to be, anyway. This last year, Red Roof downgraded their AC's, and it's changed things a bit. First of all the whole band quit drinking altogether. In fact, we usually just make the groupies stay on the bus after the show, because the low hum of the new units is such a killjoy we all just feel like sitting around and watching TV. Sometimes we'll play Uno, but even that seems unnecessarily demanding with all that low-grade white noise in the background. The room temperature is fine, I guess, but being cool doesn't make you cool, as they say.

     Speaking of being uncool, you know who is number one on my "Forget You!" list this week? Weird Al. That guy doesn't have his finger on the pulse of anything.

    This month's song is called "Flatness," and it's a tribute to stubborn reactionaries everywhere. Those of us who ask ourselves if the Earth is really round, and come up with the only logical conclusion... Yes! Round like a pizza. The sun is also flat, by the way.

With warmest regards,

HT