Fuel

 April 3 Word of the Day: Fuel

 

April fuel jokes abound, come thick and fast in recent days, gush in fact, keeping gush in the vocabulary. Gush is at risk of vanishing from use. Gush is at a standstill. Plans to purchase a horse or two, now that the car will soon be off the road for months, preoccupy our minds temporarily as we sit in peak hour traffic, wondering unconsciously if peak hour traffic itself will become a thing of the past. These conjectures never get as far as thinking about the amount of fuel required of a horse. It would return us to a time on the Heidelberg Road before motor vehicles, where we chat now idly amidst plenteous other and ravenous idling cars, checking stations for the rising cost of a litre of standard. Artificially collaged images circulate online. A bus with a tea clipper fastened to its roof, sporting over thirty sails, provides the best in wind power. Convertibles converted into coaches, BMWs into buggies, Toyotas into troikas – graphics whizz past on a production line, good for a laugh. Dependence on crushed fossils meets dependence on why-oh-why wi-fi. The days when fuel was simply the wood collected for the hearth fire are found in books. We have arrived at a pretty strait. Still, as we know, April fuel jokes have a short lifespan. Strike a match, the potassium and sulphur quickly flares then burns out. The import of the joke is understood and quickly forgotten, given its shared universal meaning: fuelishness is a joke on us all. Fuelishness is a tank of petrol, here today and gone tomorrow. What’s fuel for the goose is fuel for the gander. There is no fuel like an old fuel. A fuel and their money are soon parted. It is said that a practical joke is the lowest form of wit, and if it wasn’t before it is now. Only who is the joke on, the object of the joke or the teller? Newsfeeds deliver them and commentary explains them, until this form of humour needs be put to rest. The bigliest April fuel joke though is the one about the man who started a war without telling anyone and then expected them to join in and finish it.