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One origin of April Fool’s Day comes from France, where long ago it was noticed that fish seemed especially frisky that time of year. People frisked then, too, so the day and its accompanying pranks became known there as Poisson d’Avril, or Fish of April.

Sadly, I have no fishy excuses for mistakenly stating in my last column that Joshua Slocum, the first to sail solo around the world, rounded the Horn in his passage when in fact he passed through the Straits of Magellan, which lie north of the Horn.

The straits weren’t Slocum’s first choice because that’s where the pirates waited for victims, but they didn’t linger on his ship’s deck when they trod upon the carpet tacks he scattered about before retiring each evening.

Slocum was no fool, and, while I may have committed this foolish gaffe, my pranks usually aren’t intentional. They certainly don’t approach the scale of William Horace de Vere Cole. Cole was descended from a long line of de Vere’s, including Edward, the 17th Earl of Oxford, to whom the De Vere Society is dedicated.

According to their Web site, www.deveresociety.co.uk, this society “is dedicated to the proposition that the works of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.” Most authorities believe Shakespeare did his own writing, and recent revelations about his father’s covert wealth affording his son a decent preliminary education explain how a non-university man wrote so well.  One of my favorite books on the subject is “Shakespeare: the Evidence,” by Ian Wilson. He points out that Edward “skewered to death an under-cook with his fencing sword,” “was prone to the most vicious quarrels, including with his wife,” and was so ashamed at breaking wind while bowing to Queen Elizabeth that he went into self-imposed exile for seven years.

However, there’s no evidence of his literary abilities. Nonetheless, the debate between the pro-de Vere “Oxfordians” and pro-Shakespeare “Stratfordians” continues to rage with no discernible end, for as an anonymous sage once noted, “Persistency is a fool’s best asset.”

Our term “fool” comes from the Latin “follis,” which originally meant “bellows” and came to mean “windbag, fool.” The uberprankster W.H. de Vere Cole may not have been as windy as his predecessor, though there are amusing stories along those lines. However, his inveterate practical joking eventually made him appear foolish.

There was the famous “Bunga-bunga Affair” in which he dressed a group of his pals (who included Virginia Woolf) as Abyssinian royalty and toured the main British warship, all the while speaking broken Latin and saying “Bunga-bunga” whenever they liked something.  Another time, Cole purchased a number of seats on front rows for a new play. When the house lights went down the bald heads of the men to whom he gave tickets glowed and spelled out a curse word. Cole also enjoyed forestalling appearances by Prime Minister and Labor Party leader Ramsay MacDonald, who he’d impersonate at speeches and announce the laborers should be happy working for less.

And on April 1, 1919, while honeymooning in Venice, Cole brought a barge of horse manure over from the mainland so he could distribute it around the Piazza di San Marco, which was surrounded by canals and had no horse traffic.

That marriage didn’t last, and neither did Cole’s second one, to “a former scullery maid” and flapper named Mavis, who wound up having a love-child with the Bohemian artist Augustus John and seducing a prominent archeologist. Cole died poor, unhappy and unloved in 1936.

Shakespeare noted, “How ill white hairs become a fool and jester,” and though my hairs are ever whiter, I’ll still bet the ranch that the new online database Alaska’s libraries rolled out on April Fool’s Day will be enormously popular.

It’s the Small Engine Repair Resource Center, providing repair manuals for ATVs, snowmobiles, chainsaws, boat engines, jet skis and more. And it’s available for free through our library’s Web site, library.fnsb.lib.ak.us.   It’s free, readily available and easy to use, so what’s not to like? Yet some who need it will never use it.

As Mark Twain said: “Let us be thankful for fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.”