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70-Year-Old Prank Revealed
Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle a story about a prank that the Clampers (E Clampus Vitus, man!) pulled on UC Berkeley was featured. In short the Clampers faked a brass plaque that intimated that Sir Francis Drake landed in Marin 462 years ago. The Clampers are an organization known for, well, drinking and horsing around, but this kind of prank, one that spans 70 years (or more than 400, depending on your point of view) is epic and inspiring.
and 3dRealms will announce that Duke Nukem was also a hoax.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Are the Clampers related to the Clampets?
So that's what people did before they had television and the internet to occupy themselves with!
You're only as smart as your brain.
Weren't those software easter eggs pranks too ? If you end up keying in some combinations of keystrokes, you might see totally unexpected funny/interesiting stuff on your screen.
Did you miss out on this post and all the replies?
Homer: "Hello Dean, you're a stupid head."
Dean: "Homer, is that you?" (Looks out the window and sees him a the pay phone right outside the office.)
Homer: "Aaaaah!" (Runs away)
a real estate agent who tried to sell him a 200 square foot condo for $750,000.
Ah, those were the days, back when Bay Area real estate was still cheap.
KFG
I didn't know Sir Francis Drake was intimate with brass plaques.
(sorry about repeating this, I accidentally replied in the wrong place last time, which made so sense).
Wow! I read about this 70 year-old prank this morning before it was added to /., and I was actually going to
post it to my /. journal instead of the usual carefully selected geek porn.
That is a fascinating prank. What I liked the best is the psychology of what happened. The guy's friends were going to tell him what they'd done, but they opted to let the public down rather than let their friend be humiliated.
I wonder how common this is?
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Next we'll learn that smog controls were a historical prank perpetrated by E Clampus Vitus chapter 33MPG... We'll call the main part the 'ECV valve', that should clue them in. And if not, just think of all the beer they'll pay for..."
Prof Bean (taught Cal history at UCB) was quite the believer in the authenticity of the plate.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Is there any limit to the recursion on this?
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
See here (info on Norton) and here (more Clamper info in the second article as well).
-W-
-dwd-
"The Clampers are an organization known for, well, drinking and horsing around..."
And what fraternitiy worth their salt isn't???
You need a FREE iPod Nano
This book came out in 1996. Hello?
...in some Reader's Digest book of mysteries. My Brit friends immediately declared it was real, and that California belonged to them. They'd never quite gotten over the fact that the UK was now a backwater and the US was the superpower, and so they clutched at anything which might restore any former glory at all. God, I hope they are reading this article now...! :D
This fellow has decided to take Holocaust Revisionism to its logical conclusion. A lot of info on some of the great historical hoaxes.
The scientific method. Google on "N-rays."
KFG
I believe that this is the oldest confirmed story Slashdot has linked to. They knew that it was hoax in 1936...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
How do you know he's coming again? Is he in another porn flick again? I thought he quit doing that.
Reminiscent of the 1934 Nessie photograph. Even though it's been documented as a hoax, the true believers live on.
And of course, crop circles are practically a religion to some.
Any Joseph Smith fans out there want to comment on whether the Kinderhook plates are genuine?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Honestly. I just went through the comments here, and noone seems to be concerned about this. Seems that everone here thinks of it as a neat mind hack.
Someone was mislead for a VERY long time. A man's reputation was screwed up here. The fact that those who possibly put the hack together may have possibly held onto to the secret until they died is also disturbing.
In 1628, the flagship of the Swedish navy, Wasa, sank within minutes of starting her maiden-voyage (the ship was top heavy due to extra gun-deck they added in the middle of the construction).
;). The guys who pulled that off never revealed how they did it.
The ship was resurfaced in 1961 (it was discovered in 1956) . It took several days to accomplish. As it happens, there were some finnish techics-students (teekkarit) visiting Stockholm then. Teekkarit are famous for pulling pranks, and they though that this would be the perfect possibility for the ultimate prank. They went and bought a miniature copy of a statue of Paavo Nurmi (a famous finnish runner), sneaked past the guards, went in to the ship (that was still in the bottom of the sea) and placed the statue in the captains quarters. I bet the people who studied the sip after it was resurfaced were quite puzzled when they found that statue
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
That plaque has been there for ages, I just took it as fact. It's prominetly displayed on one of the busiest little thruways in Northern California-- "Sir Francis Drake Blvd". Wild!
Here is the one i found on the page:
Link?
He was on a long voyage of exploration - he didn't see a woman for months, and the men were all ugly smelly sailors... A man gets desparate.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
You haven't been reading your Robert Anton Wilson lately, have you?
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
who cares? this isnt news, nor is it interesting. stick to what you think you know.
Grad students could've known that as well...
Perhaps a more modern day version of this hoax would have the following plaque turn up in an abandoned warehouse in Nevada. We can then sit back and enjoy watching the crackpots stumble over themselves yelling they told us so...
What next - Slashdot reader reveals that before GUIs there was an OS called DOS, developed by some called Gates, that required you to type in commands and gets modded as 5: Insightful ?
Since we are told that conspiracies don't exist then this cannot be a hoax. It is impossible that the secret was kept this long.
Not that a clamper needs a reason to drink, but the next Yerba Buena 1 chapter meeting should be a meeting to remember.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offence.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5
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