The Jungle

The title comes from here.

Supplies: Raw meat, preferably nast already so you’re not wasting fresh stuff. Ideally, you’d be able to hit a supermarket deli around 7 p.m. and talk about whether they throw out their meat or not. I would be giving this same tip if this blog was ‘I love feeding hungry people’. Masking tape or duct tape if you feel comfortable about it not taking the wall with it.

Execution: After you’ve fed some people who need it with the tons of unnecessarily discarded food [grr America], save a pound of meat for your victim. Tape half a pound of meat in semi-obvious places, using strips about the length of your hand. Two lengths of tape crosswise should hold them. Then go for difficult spots – the ceiling in the closet, under a laundry basket, to the underside of dresser drawers, lampshades. Hopefully, they won’t be completely thorough in their search and forced to find some by smell, as I believe Double Cee was.

The above painting is titled 'Rotting Meat', and it's by Cindy Wright.

Difficulty: Rather low. It’s about stretching resources. Ten minutes for the semi-obvy meat chunks, twenty for the hard-to-check places. Not much damage to your calendar or wallet, and it can be pretty annoying for the prankee.

NOTE: Make sure your victim and your meat match; you don’t want to be mushing pulled pork against an Orthodox Jew’s wall.

Pranking Paralytics: The Prank Within

Double Cee has been just running me lately, with an assist from everything else in my life. But that’s no excuse. ILBP is fun, and I’ll update more. Especially with some fun ones forthcoming.

One of the oldest [and most rural] high school pranks is to let 3 good-sized animals [pigs or cows, traditionally] into the school building, labeling them 1, 2, and 4. There you have the essence of what can make pranks ingenious: the stretching of resources to extend the prank.

It’s why, for the first time ever, I was actually a little disappointed in Double Cee’s execution in the glitter prank. In the five[!] hours I spent cleaning my room, I would expect to find glitter in certain places, and then would be crestfallen when there wasn’t any in, say, my retainer case, or my pillows. Admittedly, it was still quite the prank, and I probably had that reaction only because I’m a prank-weary veteran.

Sigh.

There’s a passage in the prank-based young adult book Matilda about how the antagonist principal Ms. Trunchbull gets away with her excessive abuse of students. Paraphrased: “the key is to go whole hog, to do something so ridiculous that no one would ever believe it if you told them.” While we’re not trying to destroy lives here, more than a few acquaintances are surprised when we mention the time, effort, and dead animals that have gone into this thing.

And once you know your rival -and establish some ground rules- push the pre-pranked envelope.

See the above post for an example of a low-material, low-expense prank within a prank.

My Pranking Cup Overfloweth

This post is dedicated to Catherine!

I've decided to take matters into my own hands. Therefore, the ensuing post will be out of its originally designed context. That is to say, I'm about to explain how to defuse a prank that Tyler Jimmy has not explained how to execute.

I am not patient.

I had an advantage in disassembling this prank: I knew it was coming!

You could say that I metaphorically caught Tyler Jimmy with his pranking-pants down. I happened to walk into the room while the cup-sculpture was under construction. I assumed cups were made for filling, and when Tyler Jimmy didn’t show up for class Thursday night – I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody spilled… the prank.

(I’m not apologizing for that.)

Sure enough, I arrived home to find the image to your left. I contemplated the cups around my room, cursing and shuffling. It occurred to me to drain the cup by puncturing the bottom and maneuvering the cup over a plastic dish. Yeah, that doesn’t work! You’ll dump as much water onto the floor from the connected cups as you empty.

(Insert Act Two here – including dramatic build up, choreographed dance competitions and a team of Alaskan snow dogs.)

The de-pranking muses graced me right around this time, and here’s how I did finally get the construction apart. Using an exacto-knife I cut away sections of the cups, slicing under the staple when the water level was below the level of the said fastener. You’ll have to finagle. I used a tray to carry the sections to the sink where I dumped them out. Doing this it took me about an hour total to get the cups cleaned up (including some spilled “water.”)

I would go on here about how the smell of nutmeg and dish soap brought back memories of my dad in his bachelor days (when he’d just started working for McCormick Spice Company) – but this post has gone on long enough. And my dad doesn't prank me.