April First Has No Meaning When Reality Is More Horrifying

I don’t pull stuff on people on April 1st.  I do it all year, in subtle ways.  So really, I’m not fooling when I tell you that there’s a Second International Cat Video Film Festival coming to Oakland this year.  That means they’ve wanted to do it twice…

“When it came to this year’s festival, Walker got requests from around the world for permission to hold the next festival, but they decided that The Great Wall of Oakland was the best fit with the event,” The Great Wall‘s executive director Issabella Shields told The Register. “We’ve got a similar mission to run innovative arts events.”

The Great Wall group organizes a monthly arts gathering in Oakland, and another incentive might also have been the physical Great Wall itself: a 100ft-by-100ft screen, powered by a 15,000 lumen projector. Onto this the festival-goers will watch a specially selected 70-minute film showing the best of the year’s cat videos.

“Most people watch cat videos alone, so we think it’s fun that people can get together and watch them as a social event,” Shields explained. “At the last festival some people even brought their cats along as well.”

I hope with all my hope that there’s no government money going into this, but that hope is a bleak one.

There’s a joke wandering around that fits here… What if you went back 1000 years and told people that we’d have in their children’s lifetimes a device that would put all the world’s information in the palm of their hand?  What if you then told them we’d use it to argue about cats?

Technology is a wonderful thing, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done in the last 25 years or so to make the realities of today happen.  Even if it’s going to involve cats, I guess I’ll support it.

Happy April 1st, even if sometimes reality is better than pranks.