April Fool

I've been trying for days to remember the significance of April 1st. I remembered May Day, the idea that a guy like me was supposed to be able to get a girl to kiss him if he snuck up to her front door and dropped off a basket of goodies and then went and hid somewhere nearby. That never did work for me, but then again, I never tried it. May First is also the celebration day for the world's labor class, red independence day, I suppose you might say.
I suppose today isn't a good day to post anything I might want taken seriously by my readers. It's a great day, though, to ponder the near-meaningless, like maybe the Pope's health or the notion that Terri Shiavo was an inspiration to the world, a brilliant woman.
Here in the highlands of Maine, we started out the day with a short snowstorm. This weekend is supposed to bring potential floods from two days of heavy rain. I'll be spending as much of the weekend as possible indoors!
This morning I began reading a book I found in the town library, Party of the People: A History of the Democrats, by Jules Witcover. At 732 pages this book should take me awhile, but I am already enjoying the author's style of writing and am finding it very pertinent to present-day politics. It is easy to relate to the common man's plight in US politics. But there is an undertow in modern US politics of a larger force, a force that I think is represented by what this book is describing as the Federalist aristocratic position in the drafting of the Constitution, represented in the early US government under Washington by Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton represented the banking elite, a group which felt deeply threatened by the notion of democracy. Hamilton was pro-British. His chief foe, Thomas Jefferson, who became the founder of the "republican party" which then evolved to become the Democratic Party, was claimed by Hamilton to be pro-French. Ring any bells, anyone?
It seems like ever since I signed up for Verizon DSL, my computer has been wracked by demons and daemons, blue screen lockups, background dribbling of the hard drive, adware and spyware, and now a dramatic slowing down of the Internet during the daytime, and nothing I do will stop it including twice starting all over again with a freshly formatted hard drive. Is there anything I can do to prevent this? Is it just me? Is it my old version of Windows Me? What is it? Is it MSN Messenger which today is inoperative? Grrrrrrr.......
Anyway, off to my weekend of hibernation. April Fools!!!