Laugh, I thought I'd cry

It happens every year, without fail: Someone pulls an April Fool prank, and no one thinks it's funny at all, and all hell breaks loose, when all along, it would have been better to leave the "joke" undone.

This year's Big Fool Of The Year is Akis Tselentis.  Akis is a well-known Greek scientist. As I'm sure you know, an adroit sense of humor is a prerequisite for achieving prominence in science, and what Akis thought would provoke gales of laughter was posting on Facebook a warning that a sizable "funnel" might form underneath Santorini Island.

I'll wait until your paroxysms of laughter have subsided before going on to tell you that Tselentis is the head of Greece’s Geodynamic Institute and Tsunami Center. Just after April Fools Day, he put a picture of himself on Facebook that simulated a mugshot with a sign that said, “guilty of April Fool’s hoax.”

“We live in a country where humor is persecuted,” he added.

This is the post on Facebook that got him in hot water in the first place:

“Unfortunately we are not doing well as far as Santorini is concerned. Since October we have been monitoring the island with 20 additional seismographs and we have noticed that since January we have had a gradual disappearance of the magma under the volcano. At the same time, on the opposite of the Earth, another volcano, the well-known Tripanteco, presents the opposite phenomenon according to the Japanese Institute of Volcanology. In other words, magma is rising.

“Recent measurements made by a team of Japanese volcanologists show that there is a high probability that all the magma that was under Santorini is moving towards the Tripanteko volcano in Pinokistan creating a huge funnel under Santorini.

 

“If this happens we will have the absorption of the waters of the Aegean which will turn into a lagoon with what this entails for tourism. Of course, this has its advantages because we will now be able to go to many islands by road! The probability of this happening is not at all negligible and exceeds 30%,”  

Now, a prosecutor has ordered a preliminary investigation to determine whether the false news Tselentis spread actually qualifies as being false news that he spread. 

I think so.

 

And he didn't help his case an iota (Greek word!) by claiming to be "selectively targeted." 

“Should I laugh or cry? I should probably laugh. We are in a country where jokes are criminalized,” he said.

Then he went on to say that no one is doing anything about other scientists who were seriously predicting earthquakes.

And this challenge to prosecutors everywhere:  “I wish I will be prosecuted, it will be great publicity for me.”

But he said he is sure that the prosecutor will come to understand how funny a gag this was, perfectly fit for April Fools Day.

I have known and worked with my share of prosecutors over the years, and I can't tell you how many of them loved to recount the myriad tales of prank calls and April Tomfoolery that they laughed at and decided not to prosecute.

April Fools! That doesn't happen.