Do you have a friend who always reaches for your just-opened bag of chips without asking? That person might refuse all snack offers after sticking a hand in this bag of tricks.
what you need
* A snack-size bag of chips
* A can or tub of whipped cream
* A spoon
what you do
THE SETUP
1 Open the bag of chips and empty it into a bowl. Use the spoon to fill the bag about two-thirds full with whipped cream from a tub, or use a spray can to fill it partway. Be careful not to get whipped cream near the opening, where your victim might see it.
2 Take a few chips out of the bowl and hide the rest.
PULL THE PRANK
1 Approach your victim, holding a few chips in one hand and the bag in the other. While chomping on a chip, say, “Want some?” and offer the bag. Hold the bag so it’s difficult to see inside. Your victim will jump when her hand touches the cool, moist cream instead of a crispy chip.
2 If you want to freak her out even more, try innocently asking, “Oh, no, did something die in there?”
College Pranks
If your parents haven’t already given you enough reasons for going to college, here’s a new one: College students have pulled some of the most inspired, ambitious pranks ever. Here are just a few that deserve an A+.
CARD TRICK
As far as we know, you can’t actually major in pranks at college. But if you go to the California Institute of Technology, you can come close. The school is famous for perfectly engineered pranks—which might have something to do with the fact that many students go there to study engineering. The Rose Bowl Hoax is a shining example of the students’ technical wizardry.
The Rose Bowl is a football tournament that is held every year in Pasadena, right down the road from the Caltech campus. Caltech’s team is never good enough to play in the tournament, but in 1961 a group of students hatched an idea for a prank that would finally put Caltech in the game. One of the competing teams, the Washington Huskies, was planning a series of card stunts at halftime. Everyone in the stadium would be given a colored card to hold up. Together, the cards would spell out different messages when seen from afar—or on television. A Caltech student managed to find out where the Huskies’ head cheerleader kept the master plan for the cards. While the Huskies were busy visiting Disneyland the day before the big game, Caltech got the master plan and replaced it with a new version.
The next day at halftime, the Huskies fans started doing the card stunts as a national TV audience watched. The first 11 stunts were fine. Then the insanity began: The 12th stunt was supposed to be Washington’s mascot, a husky. Instead, it was a beaver, the mascot of Caltech. Stunt 13 was supposed to spell out HUSKIES, but it read backward: SEIKSUH. The final stunt was the real winner: In gigantic letters that filled the stadium, the Huskies fans unwittingly spelled out one word: CALTECH.
During the winter of 1979, two students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, made good on a crazy promise. Jim Mallon and Leon Varjian had announced that they would move the Statue of Liberty from New York City to Wisconsin if they got elected to student government. No one took them seriously until … one day in February, rising up out of a huge frozen lake near the campus was Lady Liberty herself. Her gigantic green head and torch-bearing hand rose high above the icy surface. Mallon and Varjian told people they’d had the statue flown in by helicopter but the cable holding it broke and Lady Liberty crashed through the ice. The real story? The pranksters had the statue built from wire, papier-mâché, and plywood and then hauled it to the lake.
Visitors gather to see the sunken lady up close.
A TOUGH PARKING SPOT
Another school that is famous for producing engineers—and pranks—is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT for short). In 1994 a group of students managed to park a campus police car on top of a huge building known as the Great Dome. Getting a car onto the roof of any building is hard. But the Dome is 15 stories high, and the only way to get to the roof was through a small trapdoor that was always locked. How did the students do it? Instead of trying to move the whole car, they took it apart. Then they pulled pieces of the body up the side of the building using a system of rollers. It took them three tries before they succeeded. Once they got all the pieces to the top, they reassembled the car so it looked normal. They even made the lights on the roof flash and placed a dummy police officer in the driver’s seat. The finishing touch was a parking ticket on the windshield, because, of course, the car was in a no-parking zone.
The next day, news teams swarmed in and the hoax became one of the most famous college pranks of all time. A side note: The MIT pranksters were not the first to place a car on the roof of a building. In 1958 three students of engineering (what else?) at Cambridge University in England hauled an engineless van to the top of their Senate Building, all in one piece!
A parking spot with a view!
