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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!mcnc!decvax!mcvax!turing!haring!jaap
From: jaap@haring.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: Re: USSR on the net
Message-ID: <242@haring.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Apr-84 07:41:33 EST
Article-I.D.: haring.242
Posted: Fri Apr 13 07:41:33 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Apr-84 07:36:36 EST
References: <919@drufl.UUCP>
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 33
Apparently-To: rnews@turing.LOCAL

>... April Fool's Day is, admittedly, an American institution, but it
>seems to this writer that one desirable side effect of the net
>is that national peculiarities may provoke the thought of people
>in other nations. ....

Everyone here learns the following riddle:

	Op een april verloor Alva zijn bril.

(Before everybody spends to much time looking for his dutch to english
dictonary, translation:

	On the first of april, Alva lost his glasses.

Of course glasses is the translation of bril).

What happened a couple of centuries ago was, that Dutch patriotic freedom
fighters (Geuzen*) overtook the place Den Briel on the first of April, using a
kind of Trojan horse trick. (Alva was the Spanish supervisor, trying to
rule the Low Lands (De Nederlanden) for the Spanish king).
So this small event in history is always explained to me as the
starting point for april fool's day (een aprildag).
It might be a nationalistic view, but patriotism is a peculiar thing.

To place this into some historic background, New York was still called
Nieuw-Amsterdam, and if the republic of the Low Lans didn't lost this
war against England, so had to give swap Nieuw Amsterdam to (like it
is called now) Suriname, you would probably have learned the same in
school, and I wouldn't need to translate the Dutch to you ... :-)

Jaap Akkerhuis

* See net.wines about Geuze