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Canadians Hang Bug Off Golden Gate
Strider- writes: "Early on the morning of Feb. 5th, a group of Canadian Engineering students from the University of British Columbia accomplished their annual prank: hanging a Volkswagen Beetle off of some structure, usually a bridge. However, to celebrate the 20th aniversary of this annual event, they went for the creme de la crem, la piece de resistance: They
hung the Beetle off of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge."
What? When was the last time MIT students traveled halfway across the hemisphere into a foreign country, risking their academic careers (A jail + court stint can really cut into your class time!) and preformed an [illegal] engineering feat? MIT almost always stays on their home turf, and pulls from a student base signifigantly larger than UBC's. I have undergrad engineering friends here at Lakehead (a northern Ontario U) who know that UBC will be the toast of all the engineering conventions for the rest of the year, and the year's just begun. Nothing like having the canuck's invade your soil to put you in defense mode, eh?
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
Another good HUT prank involved park benches in Helsinki. I don't remember what year this was, but the story goes somewhat like this:
First off, students at HUT (and other Finnish universities) have distinctive coveralls which they (we :) wear when they want to distinguish themselves as students during various student-
oriented occasions. These coveralls have different colors, and Finns are quite used to associating people in colored coveralls with "a bunch of students doing some weird student stuff. This is not something that students wear as everyday wear, mind you, it's reserved for certain occasions.
Anyway, during this caper some students went out and (with great difficulty) purchased a park bench from the city/park authorities. They got a receipt, and then proceeded to carry this park bench across town. It didn't take long for some police to stop them, with the assumption that the guys had stolen the bench. The students showed the police the receipt, and complained that they were getting stopped by the police all the time and could the police do something about it? Finnish police being generally quite helpful, the policemen radioed out a notice that there were a couple of students (in coveralls) carrying a legal bench across town and that they should not be harassed.
Naturally, as soon as this was done a lot of students in identical coveralls proceeded to grab most of the park benches in central Helsinki and carry them to a pre-arranged location. Rumor has it that they managed to stack up hundreds of park benches into an "artistic" formation before anyone else got a clue that something strange was going on :)
One of the major factors of any engineering design is resource management; in these case how to accomplish their goal with as little work as possible.
So what was their goal? To safely hang a VW from a bridge in a manor that would receive media attention. To do this they would have to choose a bridge that was seen by the world. This means they had very little access to the bridge and very little time to accomplish their task. Also they had to design a system that was difficult to undo or the authorities would have quickly pulled the car back up the way it went down.
If any hick could do this why don't you tell us of a system that meets all of these criteria. Remember that how their hang was implemented is still a mystery; even to those who could directly observe the results. If you can't understand the skill that went into successfully pulling off such a caper then you aren't the type of person that engineers are trying to impress.
Try typing in BLAMECANADA when you play the next version of Flight Unlimited, Flight Simulator or Pro Pilot and then fly under the Golden Gate. The developers might pay tribute :)
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Anyhow... rumorville says that in the past years, they have managed to get a VW onto the bridge towers back home -- which is more impressive, IMHO, then tossing a car off the bridge.
The rumours are true. In our proud 20 years of E-week stunt history, the UBC Engineers have placed beetles in all sorts of places:
Other pranks of note:
Happy E-week everybody! ERTW!