By now, you've probably heard of the proposal from the White House to abolish April Fool's Day as a national holiday starting in 2015. Some in the comedy community are upset at the end of an old tradition and a day devoted to what we love.

But it's time to face facts. It's just not working any more. When I was a kid, April 1st was mostly a day of physical pranks or very short gags. You would replace the sugar with salt or put a white powder in an envelope. But the internet changed it and made every gag global.

The key to a good gag was the person believing in the gag and then suddenly remembering what day it was. If you were lucky they didn't clue in and you could exclaim "April Fool" for much hilarity.

It was common in days past for people to forget what day it was. One of my best pranks came decades ago, when I posted in Science Fiction forums on April 1 that Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" novels were a rip-off of the fine original Battlestar Galactica series. Over 70 different people posted rants about how stupid I was, and a serious fraction of them pointed out that the Saberhagen books long predated Galactica, and said things like "why don't you check the dates on what you read?"

Now, nobody is surprised. Google has 13 different gags up today, including one on the front page. Every major web site has a gag, many have long traditions. Perhaps somebody is briefly surprised by the first one, but generally everybody knows what day it is and nobody is fooled.

Some have proposed that the national Fool's day be moved to a random day each year, with not much promotion done about what the date is. People who were funny (or thought they were funny) would make sure they knew the date. I am not sure that's enough -- it would help make the first gag a surprise but soon the tolerance would build up.

A bit better is the proposal from then National Comedy & Gag Association to have a different day in each state, as proclaimed by the Governor, or even every city. This would allow surprise because when you read jokes from other geographic regions, you might see only half a dozen on any given day. You would then have to research the location of the joke and check to see if that location is having its local Fool's day that day.

Can anything restore the sanctity of this holiday? It may be that this is one thing the internet has destroyed.