Today is April 1. It is often known as April Fools’ Day.

Now I admit that I do not know the history of April Fools’ Day. I don’t know it’s origin. I don’t know why this day was chosen as *THE* day.

What I do know is you can’t trust anyone on April Fools’ Day. Every questionable news headline should make you sit back and really use a discerning thought process to try to determine if it is real or satire.

When I worked in radio more than a decade ago in Chadron, Nebraska, we played a joke on our listeners with the help of a relatively innocuous new story we had on our website. Now you have to remember that this was 2004 or 2005. Cell phone usage was still a very minor thing. And most cell phone users probably still had landline telephones. We put a story out there that told our listeners that at a certain time of day, they needed to take their phone off the hook and hold the receiver up to an empty plastic bag, like a grocery sack. We told them that the telephone company was doing a one-time cleaning of the phone lines, blowing a high-strength burst of air. Your plastic bag in the end was meant to catch the dust that inevitably would be expelled. Without the bag, you’d have dust everywhere.

We got a lot of angry calls about that. I guess some people can’t take a joke.

Another popular April Fools Joke that I had nothing to do with came from my friends at Corn Nation when they claimed that Creighton University was finally adding football, thus relieving the dreaded Jayskers of their split fandom.

It’s still one of the more popular posts on that site.

I’m not very good at April fools jokes. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back or anything, but I’m not that good at trying to fool people. My wife can always tell if I’m up to something suspicious. I have a bit of a tell and then I can’t get the stupid grin off my face. It’s a wonder I was ever able to play poker at all.

I come from the Stone Cold Steve Austin school of thought-DTA. Don’t trust anybody.

You could say that on April Fools’ Day, I turn up my DTAdar to 11 and don’t believe anything anybody says.

Let me ask you this, on April 1, are you the jokester or are you the gullible one?