After the AFD dust's settled

‘When the dust has settled.’ Dictionary.com says this idiom means ‘when matters have calmed down’, and it uses ‘dust’ in the sense of turmoil or commotion – a usage dating from the early nineteenth century [1]. Three days on, it’s reasonable to think the dust’s settled on April Fools Day 2011. In last Friday’s post I sallied forth with a brief AFD rant, rating its humour somewhere between adolescent and undergraduate. I didn’t take a huge amount of notice of AFD 2011, but to the extent I did, I feel vindicated. Gizmodo wrote of ‘The most diabolical pranks of the year’ [2]. I found none of them remotely funny. Or clever. Then GigaOM had a go – starting with a bit of interesting AFD history and then seguing into its ‘Favorite April Fools’ Pranks, Japes and Tomfoolery [3]’. They’re all tech oriented, and to me slightly funnier than gizmodo’s offerings. But still pretty feeble. Each year Google Chrome’s blog comes up with an AFD post. They usually show imagination. This year’s was no exception [4]. Titled ‘Improving finger dexterity for faster web browsing’, it starts seriously as if trying to fly in under the reader’s radar. But line-by-line it gradually degenerates into overt farce. It didn’t cause me to chuckle, but my face muscles did move slightly towards a smile. Also I found the Wikipedia ‘Words per minute’ link fascinating [5]. So that’s AFD for 2011. My final verdict? I think this guy’s right on the money [6].

List: '10 technologies that will change the way you drive’

Today’s ‘List Friday’. No doubt today many bloggers will put up April Fools Day [AFD] posts. But not me. Yeah yeah. I know it’s important to put fun into your life. And I try to, even though at heart I’m a serious introvert [1]. But I find AFD humour adolescent at worst and undergraduate at best. My dad was much more of an extrovert. As I’ve written, he spent all his work life in the motor trade [2, 3]. He loved cars. No, he adored them. Maybe this is why so many Farmdoc’s Blog posts are about cars. I don’t know how many because I haven’t put a specific ‘car’ tag on each such post. But whatever the number is, today it’s one more. Today’s list, courtesy of the Age, is ‘10 technologies that will change the way you drive’ [4] The writer, the aptly named Age deputy motoring editor Barry Park [5], calls them ‘our top-10 projections on the technology on the horizon that will change the way we drive’. (I hope his driving’s smoother than that sentence.) ‘On the horizon’ means, I think, all 10 technologies are available now but not widely so. Or hardly at all for airless tyres. Thus this list’s hardly a time capsule of fanciful ‘what ifs’. But I agree with Park that all 10 are likely to become increasingly prevalent. And they should change the way we drive – for the better, making motoring a safer and more pleasant activity. Here’s hoping.