This breakfast prank works best on someone who drinks orange juice every morning. Prepare the prank juice the night before, using your victim’s usual glass. Then set it on the table in the morning. It will wake up your victim much faster than coffee.
what you need
* A box of lemon gelatin mix (Jell-O or similar brand)
* Water
* A bowl
* A spoon
* Orange juice
what you do
THE SETUP
1 Ask an adult to help you with the first step of the gelatin-making process—the part where you add one cup of boiling water to the mix and stir. Once you have done this step, stop!
2 Instead of adding cold water to the gelatin mixture, add one cup of cold orange juice and stir.
3 Pour some of the mixture into the glass your victim normally uses for OJ. Put the glass in the refrigerator and leave it there until it is completely solid. You need at least four hours, but overnight works best.
PULL THE PRANK
1 In the morning, put the glass of solid OJ on the table when your victim isn’t looking. Watch her freak out when she tries to take the first sip of the juice and it won’t budge from the bottom of the glass. If you’re drinking OJ too, you can say, “Weird. Mine is fine!”
Outdoor Art Pranks
Take a walking tour of outdoor paintings and sculptures with a sneaky sense of humor. These works of art aren’t meant to be pranks, but they trick you and make you laugh the way a prank does!
SHARK ATTACK!
A house in Oxford, England, looks like it was attacked by a flying shark, thanks to sculptor John Buckley. He created a 25-foot shark out of lightweight fiberglass in 1986, at the request of Bill Heine, who owned the house. Buckley took his inspiration from the sharks he had seen on a trip to the Red Sea in Egypt. They reminded him of missiles used in wartime. He decided to have his shark plunge through the roof like a missile. Scary stuff! Back then, people either loved it or hated it. These days the shark mostly makes people smile. In 2009 it was even nominated as an “Icon of England.”
John Buckley’s fish out of water.
TURNING ART ON ITS HEAD
Visitors walking for the first time past the statue of Charles La Trobe on the campus of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, probably do a double take: La Trobe is balancing on his head, and the “stone” pedestal that should be supporting him is pointing straight up at the sky. Did some campus pranksters flip Mr. La Trobe over during the night? No. The “prankster” is sculptor Charles Robb, and he designed the sculpture upside down on purpose, using lightweight plastic and fiberglass painted to look like bronze.
When the statue was first installed in 2007, some people thought it was disrespectful toward La Trobe, who was the first governor of the Australian state of Victoria. But the artist explains that he was thinking about the role universities play in helping people see things in new ways, “turning ideas on their heads.” He certainly gave La Trobe a new view of the world.
German artist Edgar Müller and American artist John Pugh paint 3-D scenes on pavement. Called trompe l’oeil (that’s French for “trick of the eye”), this style of painting tricks your eye into thinking the scene is real. Müller created this Ice Age crevasse on a pier in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, in 2008. Watch your step!
Edgar Muller’s icy crevasse.
It looks like there is an ancient colonnade inside this “damaged” building in Los Gatos, California. In reality, it is all the work of John Pugh.
John Pugh’s ancient trick.
French designer Benoit Lemoine created tape with a zipper pattern on it. He puts it on objects like trees and streetlamps and suddenly, they look like they need to be zipped up.
Benoit Lemoine’s tree zipper.
Brazilian artists Anderson Augusto and Leonardo Delafuente transformed a manhole cover on a street in São Paulo, Brazil, into a giant watch.
Anderson Augusto and Leonardo Delafuente watch where they step.
Mark Jenkins makes sculptures of people out of packing tape. Then he dresses them and puts them in public places, doing unusual things like sticking their heads in walls.
Mark Jenkins’s hidden head.
