Hoax Museum Blog: Pranks

George Washington Stilts — The Idaho Statesman has an article about nineteenth-century prankster George Washington Stilts, who was a native of Boise. Apparently he was the leader of a group that called itself the "Hornique-qui-bri-niques." This was usually shortened to "Hornies" or "Horrible Hornies." This group was known for painting their faces and dressing up in costumes on July 4th, then parading through the city streets, after which they would go on a three-day bender until they had to be carried home. The article relates one of his pranks:

When Stilts was summoned for jury duty before a judge who did not know him, he feigned total deafness until the judge excused him... Of the 200 people present, at least 199 knew that Stilts was no more deaf than the judge. They were speechless at the impudence of the action. When Stilts left the courtroom, the spectators "roared with delight."

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009.   Comments (0)
UBC Prank Fails — The University of British Columbia students given the responsibility for pulling off their traditional prank of hanging a Volkswagen bug from a bridge screwed it up this year. The cabling they were using broke, and the bug fell into the water below. Kids these days! Can't they even pull off a prank properly! Link: Vancouver Sun.
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009.   Comments (1)
Public Urination Permitted — Pranksters have placed signs in various places around Nottingham stating: "Public Urination Permitted After 7.30pm".

The Nottingham City Council wants everyone to know that the signs are not telling the truth: "It is an offence to urinate in public and these signs have been put up illegally, for whatever reason."

This prank is basically the opposite of one I reported on over a year ago in which pranksters placed signs in public lavatories that read: "Think Green. Think Safe. Do you really need to go?"
Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2008.   Comments (3)
The Pimping Game — How to play the "pimping" game: Print a fake license plate on glossy paper using license-plate-like fonts downloaded off the web. Tape this fake license plate over your real license plate. Then purposefully speed in an area where you'll get photographed by speed cameras. Whoever owns the license-plate-number you faked will then get mailed a ticket.

If you really want to get fancy, make sure the car you're driving is similar to the car you want to prank.

Police report that kids are increasingly using this technique to get tickets sent to parents, teachers, and other victims. Says one unnamed parent: "This game is very disturbing."

I don't know why it's called the "pimping" game.

Link: Daily Tech
Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008.   Comments (5)
Rectal Exam Prank Caller — John Brady has been charged with second-degree aggravated harassment for calling random people and trying to convince them to perform a rectal exam over the phone. He got at least one person to do this.

His modus operandi: "I would go through the phone book and pick random numbers and make telephone calls." Then he would ask them personal questions about their digestive system, and try to get them to follow his instructions.

Prank calls of this nature (and victims dumb enough to fall for them) are definitely a recurring theme. Remember the strip-search prank caller from a few years ago? He would call restaurants, pretend to be a detective, and convince managers to strip-search female employees. There's also the Satellite Medical Exam Scam, in which a caller convinces their victim that if they stand outside naked a satellite flying overhead will provide them with a free medical scan.
Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008.   Comments (4)
Helix High Hoax — Yesterday (Tuesday) there was a helicopter buzzing around in the sky outside my window for about half an hour. I was speculating what it might be: bank robbery, accident, men in black? No, turns out it was just a local, neighborhood hoax. (I live about 2 blocks from Helix High School in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb):

A report of an armed man at Helix High School that prompted a lockdown on the campus Tuesday was a student hoax, police said.
An investigation by school staff and the La Mesa Police Department determined that the student who reported seeing a man with a gun had fabricated the report, La Mesa police Lt. David Bond said Wednesday.
The school and two neighboring schools were locked down for about an hour while about 15 officers and and a police helicopter searched the campus and surrounding neighborhood.
It is not yet known why the student lied, Bond said.

This is the same school that can boast that, within the past two years, four teachers have been accused of sexual misconduct with students. Let's hear it for the La Mesa educational system!
Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008.   Comments (5)
The Roofs of Cambridge — Pranksters at Cambridge University recently succeeded in placing a Santa hat on top of two seemingly inaccessible roof spires. Ten firemen and three fire engines spent an hour getting them down. From the Daily Mail:

The culprit currently remains a mystery, but it is thought to be a student playing a practical joke. It is also not known how anyone managed to scale the buildings, particularly the spire of Humility, which is thought to be impossible to climb. One suggestion is that the person used the famous book The Night Climbers of Cambridge, originally published in 1937, which offers a guide onto the roofs of the city's ancient buildings.

I hadn't previously been aware of the Night Climbers book. Here's what Wikipedia says about it:

The Night Climbers of Cambridge is a book written under the pseudonym "Whipplesnaith" about nocturnal climbing on the Colleges and town buildings of Cambridge in the 1930s. "Whipplesnaith" is apparently a pseudonym for Noel Howard Symington, although the book is the work of several contributors. One of them, Eric Wadhams, a choral scholar at King's, either took or was featured in most of the photographs...
The book is now highly sought after, especially in Cambridge itself where it is still regarded as one of few "guidebooks" to the routes onto the roofs of the town's ancient buildings.

The book may be highly sought after, but if you do a search of used bookstores on abebooks.com, quite a few copies of it are available. Plus, the entire book (with pictures) can be read online.
Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008.   Comments (8)
Time magazine lists its favorite “geek” pranks — Time magazine offers a roundup of what it describes as "the biggest pranks in geek history" -- limited to pranks perpetrated by MIT and Caltech students.

The usual suspects are there: the great rose bowl hoax, Caltech relettering the Hollywood sign, etc.

Except, uh, some of the items in the list clearly aren't pranks. For instance, creating a program that allows DVDs to play on any operating system may be a useful hack, but it's not what I would consider a prank. And I don't think MIT student Star Simpson intended to cause a security scare when she wore her "socket to me" sweatshirt to Logan Airport.

One more complaint: Time omits one of my favorite Caltech pranks -- the sweepstakes caper in which they hacked a McDonald's sweepstakes by creating a computer program to flood it with millions of entries.
Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008.   Comments (0)
The Pranks of Horace de Vere Cole — The Daily Mail offers a short biography of Horace de Vere Cole (1881-1936), a man who made pranks his life work. His most famous prank was the Dreadnought Hoax of 1910. Here are a few of his others:
  • He "once stood in the street handing out free theatre tickets to a series of extremely bald passers-by with the result that, when viewed from the dress circle, the assembly of shiny bald heads in the carefully chosen seats clearly spelt out an expletive - complete with a dot over the 'i'."
  • He used to "wander the streets with a cow's udder poking through his flies. At the moment of optimum outrage, he would then produce a pair of scissors and snip off the offending protrusion."
  • "More adolescent pranks ranged from organising a large party where all the guests were called Ramsbottom or Winterbottom to driving around London in a taxi with a naked tailor's dummy. Whenever he saw a policeman, he would stop the cab, open the door and beat the dummy's head on the ground, shouting: 'Ungrateful hussy!'"
Odd fact: he was Neville Chamberlain's brother-in-law.
Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008.   Comments (8)
National Kick a Ginger Day — Apparently this started with a character on South Park who described redheads as "evil" and "soulless". This gave a fourteen-year-old boy the idea of starting a Facebook group dedicated to the idea of promoting November 20 as "National Kick a Ginger Day". The group soon had over 5000 members, and unfortunately some people decided to take the idea literally.

Redheaded students at schools throughout Canada reported being kicked and punched by other students on Nov. 20. One student, Aaron Mishkin (pictured), felt so traumatized that he skipped school the next day.

Things like this just confirm my most pessimistic feelings about the human race. Sometimes people really suck.
Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008.   Comments (65)
False Feces Demonstration — November 19 was World Toilet Day. In honor of the occasion, activists in Switzerland held a "false-feces demonstration" outside the Bern train station. This involved placing hundreds of fake rubber droppings on the pavement. The point of this fecal fakery was to raise awareness about sanitation problems around the world. The Sun has pictures of the plastic poo.
Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008.   Comments (5)
Berlusconi’s Cuckoo Prank — I swear this is a real news story. It's not from The Onion:

Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant Italian Prime Minister, played a practical joke on the German Chancellor today by jumping out at her from behind a lamppost when they met for an Italo-German summit in Trieste. Slipping away from the welcoming committee, the Italian leader hid behind the lamppost and emerged with a cry of "Cucu!" when Angela Merkel stepped out of her official car to enter the regional council headquarters where they were to meet. Reports said the German leader, who appeared amused, opened her arms and replied "Silvio!".

Bonus: There's video footage of this great moment in international diplomacy.
Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008.   Comments (7)
Did college students fool President Bush into giving the Shocker? — Here's the claim, with accompanying picture:



ASU Track Team Convinces George W. Bush to Give the Shocker. For those of you who don't know what The Shocker is, Wikipedia explains:

The shocker is a hand gesture with a sexual connotation. The ring finger and thumb are curled or bent down while the other fingers are extended. The index and middle fingers are kept together (touching) and the back of the hand faces outwards (away from the gesturer). The gesture refers to the act of inserting the index and middle fingers into a vagina and the little finger into the unwitting anus, hence the "shock". Because of its explicit sexual connotation, the shocker is sometimes considered vulgar. Occasionally, the thumb may be positioned so that it may stimulate the clitoris. Mnemonic rhymes are used in order to remember its meaning, including "two in the pink, one in the stink."

True? I don't think so. Yes, there is a hand gesture known as the Shocker. And yes, that's Bush with the ASU Track Team displaying a gesture that resembles the shocker. But everyone (well, almost everyone) in the picture has their index and middle finger spaced apart, which makes the gesture "the pitchfork," which is the sign of the ASU Sun Devils.


Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008.   Comments (7)
Students told aliens have landed — Strange "educational" stunts perpetrated by school authorities appear to be a growing trend. We had:

1) The Fake Attack at an Elementary School. (Students were told there was a gunman loose in the area in order to teach them how to respond in case a gunman ever really was loose in the area.)

2) Your classmate has died -- but not really. (Students were told that one of their classmates had died in a drunk-driving accident in order to teach them about the evils of drunk driving.)

But a stunt recently played on kids at Edgware school goes to the top of the list for weirdness. The Harrow Observer reports:

Children from an Edgware school were made to believe aliens had landed in their playground by teachers and police.
After spending this morning bewildered by the unusual hoax, pupils from Stag Lane School in Collier Drive, quizzed police officers brought on to the site during a press conference to make the event seem more realistic. Forensic examiners had earlier analyzed an 'alien claw' they had 'found' on the site.
The aim of the day was to stimulate the children's minds and help develop their story writing skills.
After lunch the pupils were informed by the school's headteacher Elena Evans that it was all a stunt.

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008.   Comments (6)
Eye of Sauron Prank — Pranksters at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently added the Eye of Sauron to the McFarland Memorial Bell Tower. The tower looks like it was designed to host it. The Daily Illini reports that those responsible for placing the Eye on the tower remain unknown.
Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2008.   Comments (7)
Mystery Coffin — A woman walking her dog in the Welsh countryside recently found an empty coffin sitting in the middle of a field. The coffin had a note in it: "Jump in, you're next."

No one knows who put the coffin there, but the likely suspects are local students since it's freshman week and there have been other pranks in the region, such as "a tree full of knickers and a young driver sticky taped into his car." Link: North Wales Chronicle
Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008.   Comments (4)
A Prank Renaissance — The Wall Street Journal's Ellen Gamerman has written an article about the resurgent popularity of pranks. But the pranks aren't aimed at making fun of anything. Instead, their only goal seems to be to introduce an element of the surreal into everyday life. Examples include:
  • "Freezing" events: people pose like statues in public places.
  • going pantless in subways
  • staging impromptu musicals in malls
  • pretending to be zombies and roaming city streets
  • crowds of people dancing to music no one else can hear.
  • identical twins on subways mirroring each other's actions

Not everyone is taken with the new pranks. Old-school prankster Joey Skaggs is paraphrased as saying, "the stunts lack a subversive, anti-establishment edge. Because of that, people are less likely to stop and think about what they're seeing -- or even care. 'The bar's been really lowered,' he says. 'There's a lot of junk out there calling itself pranks.'"

And then there's the inevitable attempt by corporations to co-opt the trend. For instance, Mr. Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere, was hired by Taco Bell to stage a "freeze" in one of its restaurants:

The stunt was later used in a viral marketing campaign for the restaurant's Frutista Freeze drink, and a video of the prank has been viewed 500,000 times online, says Taco Bell spokesman Will Bortz. "We thought it was brilliant," he says.

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2008.   Comments (10)
Confused Prankster — MSNBC reported a case a few days ago of a confused prankster. A delivery woman showed up outside the house of Joe Biden with a pizza:

After determining that no one inside had placed the order, the officer placed a call to "Chris," whose name was on the tag. "It's a prank?!" the officer asked incredulously. He then walked out of range of reporters to get some information from the pizza villain. There was a credit number on file, but no telling if it was valid. Or why anyone would target the Delaware senator at this time.

What "Chris" apparently failed to understand is that if you've paid for the pizza, it's not a prank to send it to someone's house. It's then a gift. I'm happy to accept all free pizzas people want to send me.

Related posts:
• Pizza Delivery Prank Goes Wrong.
Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008.   Comments (3)
Art Object Prank — Small, round, orange stickers are appearing on objects all over downtown Appleton, Wisconsin. The stickers are stamped with the phrase "art object" and a price (ranging from one cent to $10,000). They're appearing on park benches, fire hydrants, store windows, etc. No one seems to know who's responsible for the stickers or what their purpose is. From the Appleton Post-Crescent:

Police Lt. Steve Elliott said putting stickers on public or private objects without the owner's consent falls under the same local ordinances governing graffiti. "Definitely, it is against city ordinances. If we were to see someone doing it, we would cite them under the graffiti laws," Elliott said Friday...

"They are also supposed to clean up the stickers and residue or pay for the cleanup," Totzke said. Elliott said police have not received eyewitness reports of people placing the stickers.

Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008.   Comments (2)
26 Cheerleaders Squeeze into Elevator — Police responded to an emergency call to find 26 cheerleaders stuffed inside an elevator:

The group of 14- to 17-year-olds was inspired to test an elevator’s maximum capacity while attending cheerleading camp at the university, The Dallas Morning News reported. When the elevator stalled en route from the fourth to the first floor, several girls panicked. The girls “managed to wiggle a few cell phones free to call for help,” the paper reported. Police and fire crew responded, but it took an elevator repairman 25 minutes to extricate the squad.

The fad of telephone booth stuffing (which this stunt evidently was inspired by) peaked in 1959 in the States. It was followed a few years later by a fad for stuffing people into Volkswagens. (Info from the Bad Fads Museum.) I didn't know kids today still did stuff like that. They're lucky it didn't end up as a case file on the Darwin Awards.
Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008.   Comments (8)
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