Thursday, April 1, 2010

April Fools and Social Commentary


As many of you know, I'm a regular contributor over at the great travel site Gadling.com. It is tradition over there to write April Fool's Day posts that bag on the travel industry, tourism, and so on. Today being April 1st, most of the items going up on the site are fun and playful, but not all that serious. I have to confess that I'm not a huge fan of April Fool's Day on the internet. I'm not a fan of everyone trying to pull a prank on their readers and for the most part, the stuff is fairly lame. That said, I was required to write just such a post over at Gadling today, so I took the opportunity to mix in a little thinly veiled social commentary while I was at it.

My story, which is entitled "Pregnant woman to climb Everest, fetus to be youngest ever on the summit" was obviously written with tongue firmly planted in cheek. But, with all of the recent stories about young kids going off on dangerous adventures to become the youngest to accomplish something, I felt that it was a perfect place to poke a little fun at the adventure community that seems to go overboard sometimes with these dubious records.

I've made my views on the subject of these "youngest records" well known for some time. Clearly there are some people who are pushing the floor further down, whether it is climbing a mountain or sailing the world, and I can't help but wonder where it'll all end. How young is too young? I fear we have yet to find out, but lets just hope it isn't thanks to some awful tragedy that we do.

That said, I hope you enjoy the little piece of April Foolery that I put together and take it for what it is. I had a little fun writing it. ;)

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