One of the great things about having a website is that occasionally people send me free stuff, out of the blue. For instance, a British publisher named Harriman House sent me three copies of
The Life & Death of Rochester Sneath by Humphry Berkeley. Since I don't have a use for three copies of the book, I've decided to give the two extra copies away.
But first, what is the book about? It documents a classic British public school hoax from the 1940s. Headmasters at elite British public schools such as Eton and Rugby began receiving letters from H. Rochester Sneath who described himself as a fellow Headmaster from Selhurst School nearth Petworth, Sussex. Sneath had many bizarre questions for his colleagues. For instance, he wanted to know how to deal with an infestation of rats, how to go about 'engineering' a royal visit, or whether it was advisable to provide special 'sex ed' instruction for the school maids. Remarkably, most of the headmasters believed that Sneath was a real person and responded seriously. Of course, Sneath wasn't real. He was the creation of Humphry Berkeley, who at the time was a student at Cambridge. When the hoax was exposed Berkeley was expelled for two years. This book collects together all of Sneath's letters and the responses he received. It's very short, taking about an hour to read, at most. But if you like British humor it's a classic, because Sneath perfectly skewers the pompous self-importance of the British upper class.
So here's what I have in mind. Since the book is about a school prank, post a description of a school prank in the comments section. Perhaps something that you participated in or have heard about. I'll choose the two pranks that I find the most amusing (and original) and send the winners a free copy of the book. Make sure that you include your email address in the appropriate box (
though your email won't be publicly displayed... only I can see when people have entered email addresses, so that spammers can't harvest addresses from this site), otherwise I won't have any way of notifying you if you win. I'll let the contest run for a week before I choose the winner.
Comments
http://files.comclub.org/frankoffice/
Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of his response the next morning.
--Quentin
Well that was a challenge. The next day we pulled the map down and did not insert a picture. We taped the picture to the board behind it. He walked in and saw the map pulled partially down he smiled. He then carfefully checked each one then so noone could see. Feeling safe he then gave it a small jerk to raise it and turned away. That "safe" action then exposed the picture underneath. Since his back was turned he did not see it for a moment and we all got a laugh at his expense.
So never brag that you "have our number". We change the rules.
in addition to her perfect english, she was grouchy.
one day a bunch of my friend decided we'd had enough of her garbage and brought rope and duct tape to school.
on the day we had decided to pull off our plan, we had a pop quiz. everyone rushed her desk on cue, and we bound her to her chair and carried her off to the main office. the moment could have been a scene in a movie.
we left her in front of the door and headed back to class. after 30 minutes had passed, the school principal finally noticed her sitting there with tape over her mouth and helped her out. we never really got in trouble for our prank, she just told us that she'd get us back someday..
Posted by Zup on Sun Oct 03, 2004 at 12:17 PM"
ditto.
1: Our Computer Science teacher in HS hates smiley faces, so we made it our job in life to fill her life with them (we managed to sneak about five thousand of them into her home, but that's another story), but she also hated the computers making sounds.. you get twenty compys all going *beep beep*, it drives ya nuts.. So we carefully arranged for every Macintosh in there to play a sound file of Daffy Duck going 'Woo woo Wahoo!' at a preset time. Since the system clocks were all slightly off, the sounds played over the course of about an hour.. when none of us were there to be reprimanded.
2; We did the marble handshake thing too, only instead we had about three hundred Matchbox cars.. The much-hated new principal had a small pile of them at his feet by the end of the evening.
3: My father and his buddies, following a commercial of the time, filled a friend's locker with lemons, then went off with the school band. They later found out that after the initial amusing spill, the greatest lemon fight in the history of Balboa High took place, with the lemon juice bleaching spots on the concrete.
4: My high school has the obligitory wooden school sign out front, made of some nice bits of lumber, with big huge bolts. First day of school, the sign was removed, and replaced with one reading 'Abandon all hope'. Given that our school mascot is the Blue Devils..
Much to his surprise, one day he entered the room to find a class of very quiet students and no bell to be seen.
"Ou est ma cloche? Personne? Ou est ma cloche!"
There was a few moments of silence before a quiet voice from the back of the room responded:
"Tu est tres froid."
Then Father Haines moved towards the back of the room to find out who had spoken. As he moved, a voice near the front piped up "Tu est plus froid"
An impromptu game of Hot-or Cold pursued,(in somewhat broken french), but as long as we continued without using english, Father Haines seemed amused enough to play along!
I know that this isn't the greatest prank of all time, but it was one where SOME education still took place! 😉
I called the teacher over to "complain" about the problem, just to see her reaction. Just as I expected, she didn't notice I started the wrong compiler. But she did surprise me with the reaction:
"Class! Class, silence, I forgot to tell you something! Please try to avoid using variable 'i' for loops, it seems that we have a broken compiler, several people have complained about it this week!"
Guess I wasn't the first after all...
Sheer brilliance
Seniors on the football team got on the roof of the gym with a winch and winched the coach's VW Bug onto the roof of the gym.
My group of friends got into a tradition of pranking one another's lockers on the birthday of the locker owner. It started with filling the locker with trash, then to filling it with full beer bottles, the last prank was a two-man life raft put in the locker and wired so that when the door was opened, the CO2 cartridge was triggered and the raft inflated.
Second high school:
Seniors welded a VW bug body around the base of the flagpole, painted it school colors and the year of the class.
Best prank, IMHO, involved the librarian. She was an over-the-top library Nazi, she'd divided the library into zones. If you were caught doing English homework in the Math zone, you were tossed out. During the last week the libary was open, the seniors got as many students as possible to check out the maximum number of books. On the last day to turn in books, everyone brought them back on the same day, creating a huge pile of books to reshelve. I like this prank because no rules were broken and justice was served.
This contrast was epitomized in the two schools' marching bands. A&M's band was huge and wore military-style uniforms and was more known for precision marching than for musicianship. Rice, which during this period gave no band scholarships, had an all-volunteer ensemble known as the Marching Owl Band, or the MOB. MOB members improvised their own costumes and sometimes their instruments as well.
These two bands used to play frequent pranks on each other, but the most memorable happened sometime back in the 1960s, I think.
Rice was playing an away game at A&M. As usual, A&M was winning. At halftime, the Aggie band marched in lockstep onto the field for its usual big production. When it was their turn, the MOB members moseyed out and formed the letters "RICE" in the center of the field. They ran through a few simple tunes without any marching around.
What the Aggies didn't know, and what only a few of the spectators could see, was that each MOB member had filled his (I think this was before these schools went coed)pockets with rock salt, which he emptied onto the stadium turf during the haltime show. Then the band marched back to the sidelines, the Aggie team racked up a few dozen more points, and the game was over.
The next time it rained, though, the grass on the field started to turn brown and die in the pattern of the letters "R-I-C-E." This message remained indelibly written near the fifty-yard line for the rest of the season and beyond.
Towards the end of my senior year, a significant piece of campus architecture (a controversial "memorial arch" dedicated to Christian missionaries killed in the Boxer rebellion) was defaced by horrible anti-Asian graffiti (including the "g-word.") The day after this happened, the student body convened an emergency congress to pressure the administration to apprehend the perpetrators and severely punish them. When (by the following day) the perpetrators were not immediately apprehended and duly punished, the students decided to follow the time-honored tradition of campus protests and take over the main administrative building. I was there (along with some 400 other students), although I was more interested in seeing the outcome of the protest than any sort of resolution to the inciting event.
Within an hour, the dean of students (among many other senior members of the administration) had fled the premises, and news media from outside the school (including TV crews from the local stations) had arrived to cover the event. To their dismay, the protesters had by then decided that the best way to respond to the media coverage would be to say nothing and give no explanation as to why they had taken over the building. (The rational was that by saying nothing, they would better convey the gravity of their cause.) Within 10 minutes, the news crews (sensing a non-story-in-the-making) had all left. Several hours later, after intense negotiations, the students relinquished control over the facility (in exchange for the administration promising to develop an anti-Racist task force to bring to justice the individuals responsible for the desecration.)
Two days later, at a campus rally-to-end-Racism, the administration announced that they had apprehended the perpetrator. Actually, the perpetrator had turned herself in: she was a senior (Asian-american) who was working on her senior thesis in art studies. Her topic: "mass spectacle as performance art." As far as I know, she received no further condemnation from her peers, and graduated with honors.
In the 50's, you had goldfish swallowing. In the early 90's, political correctness. In hindsight, I'm not sure which one was stupider.
So one day near the end of the school year, about five minutes before the end of class, my friend borrowed a piece of chalk from the blackboard. We ran outside, I laid down on the sidewalk, and my friend drew a chalk outline around my body. We even threw in three or four little circles near the 'body', the kind investigators would draw around spent shell casings at the scene of a shooting. Then we ran back inside like nothing happened.
When the bell rang, we stood on the stairs ten yards away from the 'scene' and watched about a hundred students notice the chalk outline and get the strangest expressions on their faces. The best part was that no one stopped; they all kept walking, like they didn't want to get involved. We left before any faculty showed up.
I walked back to check on it after the next period, and it was already washed away like nothing had ever happened. (Which means the staff got the janitors on the job very quickly.)
There were some grumblings about smart-assery and chalk-drawings heard throughout the rest of the day, but no trouble came of it.....
methylene blue (used to color plant slices to see cell division) ... we added it to a batch of brownies. Letting our "friends" have homemade brownies the next day...only to find that the added ingredient goes through the body undigested making the unsuspecting person urinate a wonderful blue color.
Then there are all sorts of conversations that can be made up to atttribute to blue urine, that when discussed within earshot of a brownie eater can make even the "toughest" person a bit paranoid.
Eventually, all of the blue is peed out and the body system returns to normal.
In my year we couldn't do much, due to a heavy thunderstorm. But my brother's class put the entire school up for sale. They got a number of For Sale signs and put them up, with the switchboard phone number in front of every school building and on every school vehicle - apparently the school got a tremendous number of phone calls!
The prank has been chronicled at http://southcarolina.theinsiders.com/2/76514.html
In high school, a bunch of sophomores filled a trash can with water and poured it down the stairs. It smelled bad.
Do I win a book now!
And given the trust that I lend
I'm certain that I shall win a book too
For being a great supporter of you!
However, the fact that your stories are lame
Is the main reason why I need you tame
For else, no matter what you should cook
My little self will not win a book!
It all started when my Criminal Law teacher told the class a story about a field trip to a prison farm. It was the typical
1) He sat on the seat of a toilet which built up it's own pressure, lit a cherry bomb, stood up and threw it into the flushing toilet, then made a quick get away. It burst the pipes on the second floor of the school.
2) He put itching powder in all the jock straps belonging to the football team. (One hell of a practice that evening!)
3) He cut the tips off of the bras in the girls locker room while they played dodge ball.
4) For a revenge prank he put itching powder inside and outside of a condom belonging to his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend. Rolled it back up and put it in the guys glove box. Made for an interesting evening he heard later!
5) On a school field trip to a beach, he and two other guys warmed up tubes of glue in the sun, and would walk up and talk to girls who were sunning their backs while another glued the hooks of the girls bras together. The girls had to cut their bras off to get out of them.
6) On another field trip my husband and a couple other boys picked out a victim. They micky'd the poor victim's water canteen with a bit of a sleeping pill, while the boy was sleeping soundly they glued his penis to his inner right thigh. When he came to my husband handed him a playboy magazine. Then all three left the tent, suddenly the monitors came to the tent to investigate the howling and carrying on by the victim. Poor guy!
18 years of marriage to this man has been an adventure indeed!! :lol:
Another year, we played a bit on the radioactive paranoia, starting going on and on on security procedures, evacuation plans and so on... then we enacted a "radiation emergency" with the aid of top-sided cart with liquid nitrogen, agricultural pesticide suits re-branded as NBC contamination suits, and an electric "emergency bell"... It was a big public success... 😛
The highlight of the football season if you live at College Station is the annual Texas A&M versus U.T. game. Whoever wins this one rubs it in the losers' faces until they meet again. One year, Texas A&M won 13 to nothing.
A year passed. The day before the archrivals were to meet again, the chearleaders at U.T. made a very unpleasant discovery. Their mascot was a real steer, not someone dressed up in a cow suit. The Aggies had slipped unnoticed into its pen, armed with a branding iron. Much to the horror of the U.T. students, the mascot now had "13-0" seared into its skin as a graphic reminder of their last game score.
The had to do something. But it's not easy to cover up a brand, and there's nothing much in the way of make-up for cows. Finally, inspiration struck and the U.T. animal handlers made their own improvised branding iron to cover things up. The day of the game, they were able to tell everyone they had given a name to their mascot, and branded it into his side - BEVO!
Did this really happen, or is this yet another college hoax? You decide...
The whole press release is at http://www.dafyd.me.uk/docs/yearbook/pressrelease.pdf
When one senior returned, his room appeared untouched. He went inside and found his brand new Porsche sitting there with the engine running!