My pal Jon Mark Beilue has established an April Fool’s Day tradition at the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked for 17-plus years.
This man is a master of putting one over on readers.
He does it intentionally once each year. He did so again today with this masterpiece about a proposed location for the Barack H. Obama Presidential Library.
He once spun a yarn about film star/heartthrob Matthew McConaughey moving to Amarillo; he once told a tall tale about the late Stanley Marsh 3 establishing an art museum inside an abandoned grocery store building next to Interstate 40. There have been others; those are two of my personal favorites.
I’ll just add this point before asking you to enjoy it as I have done already today.
The beauty of this kind of writing, which Jon Mark does better than anyone else I know, is that it tempts you to suspend your disbelief when you read it. You actually start to believe it could happen that, somehow, it’s not a prank.
Well, obviously it is.
Most of us in this part of the Texas surely are glad that it’s all a joke.
Others of us, well, might think differently.
Still, this is brilliant.