Fools

Well, isn't that nice. Maryland's governor and the two lackeys who lead the House and Senate report "progress" on another expensive waste of time to do what should have been in the regular legislative session ("Special session on May 14 looking likely," May 3). Are we played for fools or what? F. Cordell, Lutherville

Forgetting what day it was and unaware of her son's new-found love of pranks, Rodgers Forge resident Kim Morton walked unsuspectingly into the kitchen one morning and found herself soaked. "I came downstairs dressed nicely for work," she says of that April 1st. "I cleaned up the breakfast dishes and walked to the sink. Using a rubber band and toothpick, [my son] had rigged it so when you turned the faucet on, the water came out right at chest level. " A change of clothes later, Morton says she and her husband, Will, were smiling.

"Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future. " — The Steve Miller Band Allow me to offer you a few things to consider while you're laughing at Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel. If you were unaware that folks were poking fun at the former hosts of NBC's "Today" show, you are likely also unaware of a video making the rounds online. The clip, which dates from January 1994, shows Ms. Couric and Mr. Gumbel attempting to understand this new thing called ... the "Internet.

I am writing to you to voice my opposition to Gov. Martin O'Malley's extremist gun bill ("O'Malley battling for gun controls," March 22). I oppose it in any and all forms. I was in Annapolis on Feb 6, March 1 and March 5, along with thousands of other lawful gun owners, to register and voice my opposition. There is no crisis of rifle violence in this state, only a crisis of fear driven by opportunistic legislators. The governor's claim that an overwhelming percentage of Marylanders support this bill is a lie. Over 1,300 people testified against this bill, and fewer than 40 were for it. Even a recent online poll in the left-leaning Sun showed that 95 percent of people thought that the AR-15 modern sporting rifle should be removed from the banned list.

Callers outnumbered visitors yesterday at the Baltimore Zoo. It was April Fools' Day."We had over 1,300 phone calls," said zoo spokeswoman Jane C. Coyle, referring only to the April Fools' pranks.She batted off a few of her favorites: "Is G. Raff in?" "I'm returning Ellie Font's call." "Returning Al Gator's call.""One asked for Mr. Wolfman," Ms. Coyle said. "I think my favorite was Harry Wolf or Ted Bayer."The callers for the most part were the prank victims -- returning what they thought were telephone calls to them.

The Bowman Ensemble could never be accused of sticking to the straight and narrow path. Its outdoor mounting of a new play by artistic director Matthew Ramsay, "The Adventures of Old Edgar and Wilcox," is itself an adventure that frequently leaves the staging ground at McDonogh School to wander along crooked hillside paths lined with red, yellow and blue stones.Although the play quickly loses its way and audiences may well lose interest in its nonsensical turns, its premise is intriguing and the two central performances are first-rate.

Louis Malle's ''May Fools'' doesn't seem to have much point. The film, showing at the Charles, has two plots going and doesn't do much with either.Malle, who co-wrote and directed the film, said he was trying to evoke the mood of the late '60s when students radicals were trying to start another French Revolution.The fools in this instance are members of a family whose matriarch has died. Her descendants gather at the family home where they bicker with each other and tell the dead woman's son that he should sell the house and split the money with them.

Robert Sheard of Lexington, Ky., a writer for the Motley Fool, recently shared a Top Five list on what Foolish (good) investors do and a Top Five list on what Wise (bad) ones do.Fools make their own decisions on which stocks to buy. If you choose to hire a broker to do that for you, you must do your homework first and determine if the broker can do a better job of investing money than you can, Sheard said.Know how your investments do against the market, not just against indexes such as the Dow Jones industrial average or the Standard & Poor's 500, Sheard said.

"Deceived" won't fool you: It's a piece of trash.Goldie Hawn stars as an art restorer who's been married for five years to a curator (John Heard), by whom she has a daughter. Just when Hawn begins to suspect that her perfect husband is vTC not all she thought, he dies in an automobile accident.Her efforts to collect his insurance benefits lead her to discover that Heard had been using the Social Security number of a man who had died 16 years before. But during her search for her husband's genuine identity, someone ransacks her apartment several times, murdering her au pair girl in the process.

''Fools of Fortune'' means to be epic but is much too choppy and murky to achieve that status.Based on the book by William Trevor, the film covers two decades in the life of a young Irishman who, as a child, sees his home burned and his father murdered by a member of the Black and Tan, a British force sent to Ireland to subdue the urge for independence.Willie (Iain Glen) and his mother (Julie Christie) move to Dublin where she eventually commits suicide and he has a night in bed with Marianne, well played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar - another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: COXCOMB Some words pop into the language and then flicker out, while others fade over a long span. Given the abundance of conceited fools among us, it is a pity that a fine old word for them, coxcomb , has fallen into disuse. It was originally cockscomb (pronounced CAKHS-com)

The past few days, we've been wowed in the network news that since the Newtown, Conn. shootings, the NRA has recruited 100,000 new members. Impressive! Until you look at a few real stats: The number of NRA supporters is being touted as 4.2 million. I looked up the U.S. Census figures. The nation's 2012 population was 311,591,917. Those under 18 comprised 23.7 percent or 73,847,284. That means the total U.S. adult population is 237,744,633. If 4.2 million of those adults are members of the NRA, that means that 233,544,633 adults are not members of the NRA. That is, 98.2 percent of all U.S. adults choose not to join the National Rifle Association.

The best and worst of the volunteer fire and ambulance service in Harford County were on full public display over the past week, bringing into sharp focus exactly what is at stake as the county moves ahead with plans to evaluate the way fire, rescue and ambulance services are provided. Last Friday, when a tornado ripped through the part of Fallston near the intersection of Belair Road and Route 152, volunteers were out in force securing roadways, cordoning off dangerous areas and beginning the process of cleaning up even as lightning was still in the sky and the weather remained unstable.

Well, isn't that nice. Maryland's governor and the two lackeys who lead the House and Senate report "progress" on another expensive waste of time to do what should have been in the regular legislative session ("Special session on May 14 looking likely," May 3). Are we played for fools or what? F. Cordell, Lutherville

The shad, America's founding fish, has started its annual run up the Chesapeake Bay and into the Susquehanna River, and here in Maryland, Land of Pleasant Living, there's been a run of foolish facts, too. My email box has been full of them lately, a sudden spring run stirred to life by recent columns on Maryland's many millionaires and the wild idea that they should pay income taxes at a higher rate than the rest of us. "Your commentary this...

April Fools' Day is Sunday. So we asked: Which prank would you consider cruel and unusual punishment Sorry, Tyler Perry. Getting one of Baltimore's (now infamous) exorbitant water bills. Luke Broadwater, reporter, The Baltimore Sun If someone made another "American Pie" movie. Wait. What? No ... Anne Tallent, editor, b Someone once told me Shamrock Shakes were going to be available year-round. That friendship was nice while it lasted. Wesley Case, reporter, b Handing someone a strawberry milkshake - made from pink slime.

With headlines declaring that Columbia's Oakland Mills High was changing its colors, getting a Subway sandwich shop in the cafeteria and adding badminton to its sports lineup, the school's latest student newspaper appeared to scoop everyone, including major media. The news sent a Board of Education member into a minor panic - until she turned to Page 5 and was let in on the joke: It was an April Fools' Day edition. "You got me," Courtney Watson, the school board chairman, wrote in an e-mail to The Scroll's staff Sunday night after picking up the paper.

If you believed everything you heard or read yesterday, presidential candidates would settle their race in a bowling alley, a cat park would be coming soon to a vacant lot in Annapolis, and a new e-mail service could send messages back in time. From cyberspace to outer space, April Fools' Day pranks ran rampant yesterday. And in addition to the phony news releases and crank phone calls, corporations continued a recent trend of jumping on the hoax bandwagon. Among yesterday's corporate ruses was Google's debut of "Gmail Custom Time," a service that enables users to send e-mail messages with time stamps from the past.

Viewers of WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh were stunned this morning when anchor Todd McDermott reported that long-time Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward had signed with the Ravens. A few problems with the "signing": No free-agent signings can take place until next Tuesday at 3 p.m., and the Steelers haven't officially released Ward. The joke was a spoof by BroCouncil.com that WPXI fell for. The fake post even has Ward in a Ravens uniform. Not sure who would be stunned more if it turns out to be true next week: Steelers fans or Ravens fans.

Mother Nature is in the news of late, and she doesn't seem happy. Monsanto, the Great Satan in the eyes of the environmental movement, is making headlines with huge profit increases and yet another David-versus-Goliath lawsuit in Manhattan filed by organic and family farmers who fear the health consequences of the company's genetically modified food crops. Scotts Miracle-Gro, a lesser Satan in the garden, tried to polish its image with an arranged marriage with the National Wildlife Federation, only to have the nuptials hastily canceled when Scotts pleaded guilty to knowingly selling tons of bird seed tainted with pesticides.