I'm really hoping my husband NEVER looks at my Wikipedia searches because "songs about sex dolls" might be hard to explain. So let me try it out on you guys.
I saw this article today and my head nearly exploded. Felony charges? For an eighteen year old kid who played a prank? A misdemeanor, fine, but a felony? His mother talked about his desire to go to college and I really hope she has an educational IRA for him because a pending felony charge could disqualify him from Pell Grants and other forms of student loans, all because he put a blow up doll in his high school. Holy Sense of Humor Failure, Batman! Between this and the kid who was banned from his prom my gast is flabbered. In solidarity with Tyrell the Not So Merry Prankster here are a few of my favorite pranksters of all time who DIDN'T GET ARRESTED!
Caltech
I would NOT want to mess with Caltech. Luckily, Caltech has no problem messing with everyone else. They have their own Prank club, for the love of Mike. From the gold standard prank at the Rose Bowl in 1961 to the other gold standard prank at the Rose Bowl in 1984, you can't keep a bunch of geeks contained. They've even taken on the Hollywood sign.
MIT
Not to be outdone by Caltech is MIT. Their intercampus pranks are legendary but every once in a while they team up (Lord help us) like their recent effort to hoist a full size TARDIS replica on to the roof of Baxter lecture hall at Caltech. No word if it actually works but would you put it past them? MIT uses the term hack instead of prank and you can find boston.com's favorites here.
Oliver Wendell Jones
Fine, it's a fictional one, but it's still pretty funny. Oliver Wendell Jones was "Bloom County's" resident computer hacker and he and his trusty Banana Junior 6000 struck fear in the hearts of Wall Street and Pravda alike. He intended to change Pravda's front page to read "Gorbachev Urges Disarmament: Total! Unilateral!" but he had a little trouble with the translation and instead it read "Gorbachev Sings Tractors: Turnip! Buttocks!" If I remember correctly he wasn't arrested but he did get a stern lecture and a spanking from his dad. Last anyone heard he was being bussed into "Family Circus."
Megan Jasper
Sometimes the best pranks aren't the well planned ones but the ones that just kind of come up and you roll with. Such was the case when Megan Jasper got a phone call from The New York Times asking about slang used in the Grunge scene. The media twenty years ago worked overtime to try to turn Grunge into a youth movement but it really was just a music scene. Rolling Stone called Seattle "The New Liverpool" and Nirvana struck back with Kurt Cobain's infamous "Corporate Rock Magazines Still Suck" t-shirt. The NY Times decided it would get to the bottom of it all and called Jasper on the wrong (or right, depending on your perspective) day. She made up a list of slang terms on the spot and The NY Times dutifully published it without question but not without snark; they claimed that these words would be "coming to a high school or mall near you." Then they got busted by The Baffler who laughed long and loud at them for buying such nonsense. The Times made it even better by then demanding a retraction and an apology. Harsh realm, dude. They're such cob nobblers.
I won't make you sit through the Bryan Ferry song I creatively edited up there. Instead, enjoy a group Howie Mandel called "MIT's marching band."
Everybody's worried about a lawsuit now, I guess. My big high school prank was to wheel a piano into the physics lab and sing a mean song (with three of my friends) to the teacher, the last week of school. He was angry. Wonder what would happen now.
ReplyDeleteGreat list of pranks, though. I always like coolness pranks -- the "do you get it" ones.
The "do you get it" ones are normally the ones I walk right into, LOL.
ReplyDeleteMy parent used to belong to the "prank squad" of their college, which I think was how they met. They had assembled a crack squad of pranksters from different departments so that the administration could not target one social group. They pulled the usual disassembling the professor's car and disassembling it in the library, with the added twist of the Kinsey Report on the front seat as the professor had been rather pawsy with the girls. Candy-striped the flag pole and the other usual gags. Dynamite on a timer (always invite the engineering students to your party, they are the only ones that bring explosives) in the middle of the football stadium during Winterfest when most of the group was in the quad where the chancellor could see them.
ReplyDeleteTheir piece de resistance, however, was a masterwork in elegant simplicity. In pairs, the ran around campus one night and, with one standing on the other's shoulders, unscrewed the walkway and parking lot lights one quarter turn.
The university dug up three hundred feet of cable before they figured out what the problem was.
Oh, Bloom County, how I miss thee!
ReplyDeletehttp://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=505751
The chemists normally have a decent supply of things that go boom, too. The story about my husband that made me fall for him was the time he blew his eyebrows off trying to make a rocket launcher out of a bicycle frame.
ReplyDeletejazzbaby1 (who again can't log in)
See, Geeks just have more fun than anyone else. :D
ReplyDeleteAnd if they can't find fun just let 'em loose in Radio Shack and they'll make their own fun.
ReplyDelete