This is an abbreviated version of OffbeatEarth’s DIY how-to instructional for embedding a keyboard and mouse in jello.

(more…)

Submitted by Steve Lambert:

Zachary Feinstein has declared for the NBA draft
He has no actual basketball experience!

From Zach’s Web site:

The short story is that I, Zachary Feinstein, have declared for the 2008 NBA Draft. As a 5′8″ 130 pound Caucasian, I am the perfect candidate for professional basketball. Also, I do not play basketball.

You see, I am not currently on my college’s basketball team (Division 3 just for reference) nor did I try out to be. I was at no point on my high school’s basketball team nor did I try out to be. I was at no point on my middle school’s basketball team nor did I try out to be. The last time I was on a basketball team was before Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down.

So there you have it, I, Zach Feinstein, am in the 2008 NBA Draft.

If you do not believe me, go to: draftexpress.com or nbadraft.net for proof (under “unknown players”).

Support Zach Feinstein in Getting Drafted into the NBA
Read through my site, and let’s create a campaign to get the worst player ever to declare for the NBA Draft into the NBA.

I would like to thank everyone for their support, and I will be updating this site periodically.

thanks Michael

From 5min.com: A one-stop shop for instructional videos and DIY projects.

via GracefulFlavor and swissmiss

[Editor’s note: Like the idea of creating your own coffin or urn? You may be a candidate for The Final Curtain, Joey Skaggs’ Disneyland-like memorial theme park for the dead…]

Buried in a tinny: US man shows eternal devotion to beer
Livenews.com.au
May 5, 2008

An American man loves his favourite beer so much, he’s had a coffin made to look like a can of the brew.

Bill Bramanti got a local sign company in Chicago Heights to make it look like a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in its signature colours of red, white and blue.

“I actually fit, because I got in here,” he told Associated Press.

The 67-year-old has thrown a party and filled the coffin with ice and his favourite brew.

Bramati’s daughter at least sees some method to her father’s apparant madness.

“Why put such a great novelty piece up on a shelf in storage when you could use it only the way Bill Bramanti would use it?” she asked.

image: 2news.tv

Editor’s note: Finally a dean with a sense of humor. The perpetrators did NOT get expelled or arrested!

College Prankster Puts Zebra in Emory Campus Building
by Charles Molineaux
MyFoxAtlanta.com
April 23, 2008

Oxford, Ga. (FOX 5) – Emory University was investigating the appearance of a zebra on the third floor of a building on its Oxford campus Wednesday. Somehow, someone got the animal up there Wednesday morning.

Right in the middle of the crunch before finals, students at Emory Oxford got an impromptu wildlife show, courtesy of a prankster with a sense of tradition.

The sight of an 800 pound zebra stunned students as they watched Newton County Animal Control coax and drag the animal out of Emory Oxford’s historic Seny Hall.

“And everyone’s jaw dropped and I’m looking up and there’s a zebra in the window, tapping its head on the glass. It was ridiculous,” said Emory Oxford Andrew Wilkinson.

Somehow, someone got the zebra, named “Bar Code” up onto the third floor of the building where security guards discovered it Wednesday morning.

The animal’s owner said Bar Code was lured away from his farm, about a half-mile away from the school. (more…)

Iowa pranksters get just desserts: 3,000 forks in their yard
1010WINS
April 16, 2008

Dubuque, Iowa (AP) — When known pranksters Rick and Marilyn Jones left town for a wedding, neighbors seeking payback eyed their property and decided to stick a fork in it - a few thousand forks, in fact.

Tom and Paula Tschudi planted 3,000 white plastic forks in the Jones’ yard and dangled more from the roof, fence and garage.

“We just wanted to do something funny to them, because every time we leave, they pull some prank on us,” said Paula Tschudi, who promised to help pick up the forks.

Over the years, the Joneses have strung beer cans like holiday lights around the Tschudis’ home, put a for-sale sign in their yard and strung yellow crime-scene tape around chalk outlines of bodies on the sidewalk.

As the Tschudis, their two children and another neighborhood family planted the forks Sunday, one passer-by asked what they were doing.

“We told him we were aerating their lawn,” Paula Tschudi said with a laugh.

photo: abcwholesale.com.au

NY Yankees Remove Buried Red Sox Jersey
by Karen Matthews
1010WINS
April 13, 2008

New York (AP) — A construction worker’s bid to curse the New York Yankees by planting a Boston Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled Sunday when the home team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot.

After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the concrete Sunday and pulled it out.

The team said it learned that a Sox-rooting construction worker had buried a shirt in the new Bronx stadium, which will open next year across the street from the current ballpark, from a report in the New York Post on Friday.

Yankees President Randy Levine said team officials at first considered leaving the shirt where it was.

“The first thought was, you know, it’s never a good thing to be buried in cement when you’re in New York,” Levine said. “But then we decided, why reward somebody who had really bad motives and was trying to do a really bad thing?” (more…)

…the promise from a new book by Todd Robbins called The Modern Con Man: How to Get Something for Nothing, a hardcover, 250-page guide to scamming your way through life.

Here’s a tease from the author: check out “Screen-Savior”. If you need a few extra minutes to read an article or talk on the phone when you’re at work, you’ll find something that will help make it seem like you’re waiting for your computer to do… something. And if anyone catches you not working, just shrug toward the screen and say “the system’s so slow today…” It can buy you a ten-minute timeout.

Would-Be Pranksters Warned Against April Fool’s Calls
English.Chosun.com, Korea
April 1, 2008

The Seoul Metropolitan Fire and Disaster Management Department on Monday warned pranksters could face a fine of up to W2 million if they make bogus calls on April Fools’ Day (US$1=W990). It asked people against such pranks, warning callers can get easily be located with advanced technology. Thanks to state-of-the-art equipment, the number of prank calls on April Fools’ Day has dropped from 68 cases in 2002 to 10 in 2007. The department said prank calls cause waste the time and energy of firefighters and rescue workers and delay rescue work for people who really are in danger.

image: Legal Juice

Submitted by Paul Krassner, written by Michael Dare for Dareland,
March 26, 2008

The true story of the biggest April Fool’s Day Prank of All Time

Lies To Get You Out of the House

None of this is my fault. At least not all my fault. There are plenty of others to blame. For instance, there’s the Bhagwan . . .

I start out 1985 at the Bodhi Tree, a multispiritual bookstore on Melrose with incense and herbal tea. I am looking for nothing in particular, which is when you stumble upon the most surprising things. I am skimming from section to section, belief system to belief system, from Asimov to Zoroaster, when there in front of me is an entire wall of books by someone I’ve never heard of. His name is Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and he is not famous yet. He has not yet moved to Oregon, started an ashram, collected Rolls-Royces and gotten thrown out of the country. But he will be equally responsible for the Biggest April Fool’s Day Prank of all time. If I had not opened a random book by Rajneesh, turned to the first page and read the first paragraph, none of this would have happened. Here is what that first page said:

Beyond the boundary of this room is the unbound, open sky. You have never seen it. I can talk with you about the sky, about the freshness, about the sea, about all that is beyond this room, but you have not seen it. You do not know about it. You just laugh; you think I am making it up. You say, “It is all fantastic. You are a dreamer.” I cannot convince you to go outside because everything that I can talk about is meaningless to you. Then I say, “The house is on fire!” This is meaningful to you; this is something that you can understand. Now I do not have to give you any explanations. I just run; you follow me. The house is not on fire, but the moment you are outside you don’t have to ask me why I lied. The meaning is there; the sky is there. Now you thank me. Any lie will do. The lie was just a device; it was just a device to bring you outside. It did not cause the outside to be there. Every religion is based on a lie device.

I immediately dig the guy. Here he is, right off the bat, admitting that he’s lying to me. I buy the book and never finish it, but I do end up carrying a phrase around in my head for days, like a hit song with a killer hook. “Lies to get you out of the house.” I write it down at the top of a piece of paper, sure that something will come.

It does. (more…)

Do not fall for this, it is a scam!

Let all your loved ones know about this.

Tell your friends and relatives!

This is a medical scam!

thanks Jon

Submitted by Rose Fox:

Man said ‘wombat rape’ led to accent change
by Nick Squires
Telegraph
March 28, 2008

A New Zealand man who claimed he was raped by a wombat and that the experience left him speaking with an Australian accent has been found guilty of wasting police time.

Arthur Cradock, 48, from the South Island town of Motueka, called police last month to tell them he was being raped by the marsupial at his home and needed urgent assistance.

Cradock, an orchard worker, later called back to reassure the police operator that he was all right.

“I’ll retract the rape complaint from the wombat, because he’s pulled out. Apart from speaking Australian now, I’m pretty all right you know. I didn’t hurt my bum at all.”

He pleaded guilty in Nelson District Court to using a phone for a fictitious purpose and was sentenced to 75 hours’ community work. (more…)

Submitted by Tim Jackson:

Harvard alum pulls the prank of his life
by Joseph P. Kahn
Boston Globe
March 2, 2008

When the Harvard class of 1959 gathers for its 50th reunion a year from June, they’ll chat about global issues and grandchildren, postretirement pursuits, and the inevitable health concerns. At some point they’re also bound to discuss a subject few thought much about until recently: classmate Arthur Lemay and why he tried to fool them all into thinking he was dead.

In a ruse Mark Twain might have concocted, Lemay, a retired management consultant from Northern California, circulated his own obituary on a Harvard ‘59 e-mail listserv last month, then sat back and watched classmates’ reactions. The faux obit followed scores of right-wing polemics Lemay wrote and distributed over the years, e-mails that tweaked and often infuriated his more liberal-minded classmates, virtually none of whom remembered Lemay from their college days, but upon whom he’d managed to make quite an impression recently.

“Arthur knew he was dying as early as September of 2007,” began the death notice, which was signed by Lemay’s wife and posted in late January. Ascribing his death to kidney failure while vacationing in the Caribbean, it contained descriptive touches such as: “He loved to play roles: the agent provocateur, the crazed right-winger, the insane bomber…” And: “He was actually a very reasonable person, not given to extremes. Had you met him, you would find him quite reasonable, sympathetic to liberal views, personable, interesting, and full of information - some of it quite esoteric and obscure.” (more…)

From Charlie Todd:

Kids get detention for a harmless cafeteria prank involving paying with pennies!

Punished After Buying Lunch With Pennies
29 N.J. Eighth-Graders Get 2 Days Detention After Forking Over Nearly 6,000 Coins
by Christine Sloan
wcbstv.com
March 1, 2008

Readington Township, N.J. ― Got pennies! It’s plastered on their shirts and these eighth graders wear it proudly because on Thursday they pulled a prank at the Readington Middle School, paying for their lunches entirely in pennies.

“At first it started out as a joke, then everyone else started saying we’re protesting against like how short our lunch is,” student Alyssa Concannon said.

Several lunch ladies who had to do the counting didn’t think it was funny, even though some of the students put the coins in rolls. They’re not authorized to put in their two cents but school officials say they felt disrespected and other students didn’t get to eat lunch.

“There are ways to express yourself that are not disruptive to other kids and disrespectful to staff,” said Readington Superintendent of Schools Dr. Jorden Schiff.

Eighth grader Jenny Hunt said in hindsight, the prank may have been a bad idea.

“Maybe we should have thought before we did it,” Hunt said. (more…)

Submitted by Steve Lambert:

Longmont Potion Castle is the pseudonym of a prank caller based out of Texas that puts out some of the most bizarre and hilarious material I’ve ever heard. He uses audio effects that speed up and slow down his voice, disorienting the caller on the other end, sometimes even repeating back what they’ve just said. One of the tricks he uses is calling retail stores asking detailed and mundane questions about a specific item he never actually names and always staying friendly (referring to people as “partner”) and sounding reasonable.

Click here to listen. Track 2 is my favorite.

Here’s a video of the subjects of his calls as he’s making them.

Also, speaking of bizarre, hilarious, and prank calls, here’s one from Tim and Eric where they call iPod Tech Support because they’re having problems with microphones:

(more…)