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College Pranks Go Commercial
Anonymous Coward writes: "The MIT/CalTech prank rivalry is legendary. Who else could put a cow
on a domed roof? And it inspired the Geek Classic Real Genius.
Apparently the folks at RPI are into
it as well, as evidenced by the DropSquad.
What caught my eye was the commercialization. They're selling
mousepads with photos
of various objects that have been subjected to 'gravitational
modifications'. When this hits MIT, I want a Cow on the Roof coffee
mug!"
But would it kill you guys to search for "dropsquad" before you post? It was cool the first time it was on /.... in 1998. /., but even I have my doubts sometimes...)
~luge(I love
IAAL,BIANLY
I went to RPI from '93-'97, at the end of the time of the Drop Squad. What makes the Drop Squad legendary was not their "prank" -- dropping things from high places is old -- but their stupidity.
The building where they dropped their burgers, Christmas Trees, and the like from, was the Center for Industrial Innovation, RPI's tallest building. The Drop Squad, in a fit of drunken stupidity, not only dropped material from the top of the building, but they also videotaped themselves doing so.
When one person (who is called the F**k on the dropsquad.com web site) turned himself in, he also turned over the video tape. The video tape had the pictures of all of the drop squad members. The campus police had no problems finding the members of the drop squad, and at least one member was kicked out of RPI.
The moral of the story: If you're going to do something illegal, don't let anyone videotape you.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
Why is this Stuff that Matters? I'll tell you why.
Slashdot is a community of hackers. Hackers are not only programmers. In this case, we call them Building Hackers. These are not just the college pranks where one school steals the other's mascot. These are college pranks which require ingenuity to pull off.
I am not a building hacker. The reason? I have no fucking clue how to get a cow on top of a domed building. I have no clue how to build a full replica of a police car, cop inside, eating a donut all in the space of a few hours of time. I have no idea how to fit a cadillac through the doors of a lecture hall that is designed only to admit the average student body.
These "pranks" are not just pranks - they are hacks in one of the truest senses of the word. That's why it's stuff that matters - we can all learn something from, at the very least, taking awe in what someone else has done with a little bit of ingenuity.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Fun prank, no damage (except for the sign we had to steal), we had the sign up on sat night, was there all day Sunday and Monday, the students loved it.
Atticka
No sig here...
Yeah, but this is old and not horribly creative.... I was @ RPI from 95-99, and this was all over well before I ever set foot on campus...
I know a few people still there who have been far more creative... I almost found my car inside of a residence hall lounge... that would have been pretty good...
personally, the IOP was always the best thing going... did they have any entries for GM this year?
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Oh, yeah, and MIT hacks are clever. Many involve an aspect of "how the heck did somebody get up there/pull this off without being seen." Dropping stuff down a stairway then making a janitor clean it up is just immature. When people drop things at MIT (like pianos, TV's, various exploding chemicals), they clean it up themselves and take safety precautions.
Visit http://hacks.mit.edu/ for a gallery of real hacks. Don't condone stupid pranks like what the RPI kids did; they are just perpetuating the idea of spoiled rich kids abusing their college opportunity. They should get some manners and some class.
magic
Anyway, there were better hacks on campus than dropping things down the nine story stairwell, and these were two of them:
The JEC engineering building had a walkway around the Northern side, and during my Freshman year, workers were resurfacing it by placing large tiles (red and grey) on the walkway. The tiles were raised above the surface to provide drainage, but were not cemented in place. Only plastic spacers kept the tiles in position. While a bane to any women wearing heels, it was obvious that a strong but narrow bar could easily pry these tiles up, after which they could be rearranged. So, myself and about half a dozen friends sketeched out a plan to reposition the tiles from the red and grey strips that the workmen had laid down to a big smiley face, approximately 8x8 tiles. Then, one morning at about 2 AM, we ran out, moved the tiles, took a picture, and went back to our dorms.
The impressive feat about this prank is that while the workmen broke countless tiles laying down their regular pattern with real tools, we preserved every one we moved. We also posted guards at both ends of the walkway to guard against Public Safety and passerbys. I think one of our guards wound up going home with a passerby she tried to dissuade... Anyway, the next day, there it was, the RPI Smiley Face, for all to see.
The second, smaller scale prank, occured on April Fools day about a year later. Because some rooms were always being closed due to the endless campus contruction, we printed up some room change signs and ran around in the early morning posting them on various classroom and lecture hall doors. Of course, they all directed students to the same room, which in some cases was completly across campus. This room of redirection happened to be where I had a recitation later in the day, and it was quite amusing to see students sitting outside the occupied room, stating "But it said to come here!". I think we even got one professor...
Anyway, these were great pranks, because nobody really got hurt, nothing was destroyed, and people looked back on them and laughed. It was also a nice diversion from drinking, studying, and wondering why the hell we had decided to come to Troy, NY for a higher education...
All sweepstakes after the McDonald's prank have restricted entries to "hand-written", but that
;^(
didn't stop Caltech-ers from trying it again with a KROC contests between southland (LA area)
schools for a private oingo-boingo concert.
Supposedly, the college that submitted the most entries won a free concert (oingo-boingo was
supposed to give a free concert for the school). So a bunch of us got together and filled in a
whole bunch of hand written 3x5 note-card entries and beat out UCLA, USC, CSNR, CSLA...
However, even having beat the other schools by more than 2x entries, oingo-boingo refused to
give caltech a concert... So the caltech law dept helped the students write a few nasty letters,
but to no avail... no concert for us...
Moral of the story, having the administration on your side sometimes doesn't help (although if
potential jail time is involved, it certainly helps, but that is another story....)
I've heard an unverified rumour of a prank like this. Unfortunately this didn't go nearly as well. Guys from the all-male dorm called Leonard at my University (Queen's) snuck a cow high up into an all girl's dorm McNeill.
Unfortunately getting the cow out wasn't as easy. The halls and stairways were very narrow so the cow couldn't be turned around. The cow would not back down the stairs, and there was no other way to get it out. So unfortunately the cow had to be killed and butchered inside the dorm and brought down in pieces.
Oh well, most of the other pranks worked much better.
The reason that pranks worked as well as they did in the past is that the people who did them
took a chance. I doubt the legal climate is that much worse today than it was when the pranks
were done...
IMO, the problem with pranks today are really a function of two issues...
The first issue is that the current crop of pranksters are far more destructive than their
historical counterparts...
For example, the original rose bowl prank (the card flipping prank) was entertaining. The second
rose bowl prank (the scoreboard) was educational (the original software didn't have lowercase
letters). The hollywood sign was at least promotional...
Dropping pianos, stealing statues, doing DOS attacks on ebay and etrade are a bit more
destructive than the typical prank of yore...
The second issue (this is somewhat of a cheap shot), but I think the average college student of
today is a bit more fearful of having a police record and spending a night in jail than the
students of previous generations... Witness the massive decline in student rallies/protests from
the 60's 70's 80's to the nearly non-existant activism of the 90's up to today...
I'm not saying pranks are akin to protests, but I think the aversion of today's student to legal
troubles is a growth trend of the last few decades. Today it seems the limit of testing the
boundaries of the law is restricted to downloading a few MP3s...
When President McKinnley was attending Allegheny College (Pennsylvania) in the mid 1800's, as a prank he stuck a cow up in the bell tower of Bentley Hall, the first building at Allegheny College. The administration eventually had the cow taken down and sold to a local butcher. McKinnley's fate was a little less severe, he got caught for it and ended up getting in a lot of trouble, but then later became president, so now the story is retold with a little pride. It has become a classic piece of Allegheny Lore.
the "cow on dome" thing was first done by UVa students, on their Jefferson-designed dome. The guy who did it is now chairman of the American Stock Exchange, IIRC. So... probably drunk and stupid, but not necessarily by stupid people. I mean, the school still has no idea how the cow got up there, and they had to tranquilize it to get it down...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
As far as stuff on the Dome, the cow was OK, but my three favorites have been
Ah, the good old days....
While on campus pranks are fun and good, they usualy don't measure up anywhere close to the humor and coolness of pranks pulled against entities ouside the university (the Hollywood sign for example.) Being at a place like Caltech makes me part of a proud heritage that I can even read about in the bookstore now. But if I wanted to add to it, I'd have to think twice.
The unfortunate fact, is that it is much more dangerous to do pranks today. Things that would have annoyed some people before, today bring on leggal repercusions and lawsuits. The tendancy of people nowdays to sue first and ask questions latter has a really chilling effect on outside pranks. While the administration has made legal counsel and support available to students, they are not abble to fully protect us from those who took the prank too seriously. (Immagine if the FCC had gone after the students who used a radio transmitter to control the scoreboard at the Rose Bowl game.) Or how bout some company suing for deffimation?
While it is possible to leave no traces of who did the prank, the honor code calls for everyone to leave a note explaining the prank and who did it. This avoids wrongfull retaliation (counterpranks) as well as requiring you to help clean up any prank you do. So I expect that there will be no major CIT/MIT type pranks for a while to come.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
It was never supposed to be a hack... these were just a few dumb, drunk guys. Whoever submitted this (very old, even previously on /.) story doesn't get it, and it's creating some big backlash.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
If memory serves correctly, the drop squad guys didn't drink. That was bad, dropping Sparcs on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable. I'm not sure though, I went to RPI 95-96 before transferring out, so I'm basing this on a 5 year old memory of the story.
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The traditional object of prank at SFU is the VW Beetle. Every year a Beetle ends up in some bizzare position (attached to the Lion's Gate Bridge, Either side of a wall in Stanley Park(appearing to have crashed through it), On a roof, or wherever). At UWO a brick wall appeared accross the bridge which provided the only access to a parking lot ate one campus.
This might have been somewhat funny when Letterman first did it, decades ago, but it isn't now, and it sure isn't much of a prank.
Removing someone's door and plastering over the opening, that's a prank.
Replacing the card section at a football game, that's a prank.
Bankrupting the Soviet Union with vaporware, that's one heck of a prank.
Not telling the refugees in your attic that the war has been over for 40 years, that's a heck of prank.
Dropping stuff down a stairwell? Boring.
George
Says "HACKS" across the front, and has a photograph of a huge balloon inflating in the middle of the Harvard/Yale football match, as well as a diagram of the device they built and burried in the field to inflate the balloon. Across the top it says "MIT 1, HARVARD-YALE 0".
You can get all kinds of stuff like this on MIT campus.
Pranks living on in the commercial world isn't quite a new thing. Here's a classic: Mozilla vs. IE. This one started as a prank by a bunch of Microsoft cronies - but then backfired the next day.
Joseph Elwell.
The MIT Gallery of Hacks
I dropped a whole big mess of bouncy balls down it one day out of the curiousity of 'what *would* happen if you did that?' definitely worth the five bucks for the bouncy balls. One thing to note though... make sure the stairway is clear before you drop, there was somebody on the second floor who I owed a beer after they got nailed with one of the bouncy balls on a rebound.
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Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Great Post! Indeed this is a valuable story, but I question whether it is truly "Stuff that matters"
if college pranks get you off, go here. It covers college pranks across the country including MIT and CalTech.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
These pranks are usually pretty funny. I've seen some where the students of a rival school modified the latin motto on the walls inside the school. These types of pranks are really the best in my opinion because they could be up for days and very few people would notice. Putting a cow on top of a dome is pretty dumb IMO. Who the hell would have thought to put a cow on top of a dome? Seems like there was a group of lazy ass college kids sitting around playing nintendo tripping on some bad acid. Then one said "dude lets put a cow on top of the dome at the school!" WTF is up with that?
This just goes to show that the rise of the web has brought an end to all interesting college pranks. The idea is to be clever and offbeat, not predictable. An amusing part of college was always watching the new guys try to pull the same set of "hilarious" gags every year.
There are in fact things like mugs and mousepads and hats and T-shirts sold to comemmorate famous hacks at MIT. They're sold by the MIT Museum Store (http://web.mit.edu/museum/). Their web page says they will have an online catalog up sometime this summer.
1) Phone the police and tell them that there is a bunch of students dressed as workmen digging up the road at such and such location.
:)
2) Go to the (real) workmen and tell them that there will be a bunch of students dressed as policemen coming in a short while to give them hassle.
3) Retreat to a safe distance and watch the ensuing mayhem.
heh heh
orlando...
-= This is a self-referential sig =-