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Revenge for the Foil Apartment?
GooseKirk asks: "Just over a year ago, my apartment was completely covered in foil. For some reason, this resulted in global media attention, and ever since, people have been asking me, "what are you doing for revenge?" A few great ideas fell through for various reasons (Ron Jeremy was booked, apparently), and sadly, I currently lack access to an orbital weapons platform, so let me pose this riddle to the great Slashdot collective: if you were going to cook enough popcorn to effectively, and let's say hypothetically, bury a small single-story building, how would you cook it and how would you deliver it, quickly and quietly, say, under cover of darkness? At the least, I think it's an interesting puzzle, and other wacky ideas are certainly welcome... just remember, people, mum's the word, OK?"
Doh...
Here comes the Tin Foil Hats Trolls....
Got it check my brain implant is not giving off RF waves from my brain.....
Do the only thing worse than covering something with aluminum foil... cover it in saran wrap.
----- "All right. It was a miracle. Can we go now?"
and a big laser... and a real genius....
Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
(I'm guessing you don't really want revenge. You just want to do your friends, even better than they got you. And they _did_ get you pretty good ...)
Best pic...T 8.sized.jpg/
http://www.imagireal.com/albums/foiled/CRW_0021_R
the first thing i'dve done was not post to a news source that is read by hundreds of thousands of geeks per day.
the suprise is the best part of the practical joke.
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
Deliver the unpopped kernels to the site, cover tightly with aluminum foil, and then use a giant airborne laser to provide the heat.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
Popcorn keeps for quite a while, so the key would be to prepare before hand.
You can purchase electric popcorn makers for about £10 ($20) and a bank of ten or so of these kept topped up with popcorn should be able to produce enough in a day or so - the only problem would be the heat generated and probably melting the makers before they'd finished. Failing this, maybe some form of deep metal drum with a mixing padal and some heat guns?
As for storage, hire a cement mixer for a week, that's the only way I think you could do it. I can't think of a way to produce the volume required in a few hours for only a few hundred any other way - a specialist machine could do it but you're be talking tens of thousands to build it.
Just be careful. I'd hate to see you on the darwin awards for burning to death from an out of control popcorn fire.
Look into those large, clear box, popcorn machines theatres use. You can fill a garbage bag in 2-3 batches. It might take a week or two, but if you're really serious you can get your popcorn.
--Chris
The best option seems to be to build a large package (or net of packages) of unpopped kernels and package them such that solar heating does the popping...
Hmmm, I've spotted a flaw in that scheme...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'd rent an industrial size garbage bin or other large container and fill it with the appropriate amount of kernels and use steel tubes with holes drilled in them to work as a large scale range. Place tubes under container, hook up to propane tank + regulator, ignite. As for delivery there isn't a very good silent way to deliver the popcorn, probably the best idea would be to use a compressed air gun and front end loader to load the hopper.
Alt.revenge FAQ
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
My Dad and his friends actually did this to a guy in college using a surplus WW2 jeep. Back then (early 50s) you could buy these jeeps still in the crate for like $100. I bet that was a fun weekend
Of course, today's cars are a lot more difficult. Though I rate the feasibility of this at about the same level as pointing enough DirectTV dishes at a house full of orville redenbacher.
Maybe fill the place up with thousands of balloons. Only have the occasional balloon full of shaving cream instead of air. When he goes pop-crazy he will get quite the surprise. Rub it in his face and even provide a pin.
Actually a Chinook skycrane should be able to lift the volume of popcorn you'd need. Fabricate a large canvas bag to hold the popcorn and a quick release mechanism. Lift bag over target, release. While not quiest, it is quick enough to make up the difference. You'd probably be looking at around $2000-$5000 to rent the helicopter for an hour.
Is to sell it to one of the tin foil hat people. there is quite a market for it, just imagine, if your whole apartment is covered in foil, then you can finally take your cap off while at home.
Monstar L
Anything involving popcorn is good. When my house full of crazy geek college students got involved in a prank war with another house full of geek college students, I'd have to say the popcorn prank was the best.
Our war started simply enough. They were the pirate house, they even flew pirate flag from their roof. So one night under cover of darkness we went over and stole it. The responsed by breaking into our house and waking us all up by turn our CD player on full blast and looping A pirates life for me.
Now that is annoying to wake up too.
The hacks on our various websites got pretty boring, as did the WEP cracking, so we decided to step it up a notch.
One of my housemates worked at a movie theater, so we had him bring home all the stale popcorn at the end of the night.
We snuck into their house, filled their whole bathroom with popcorn and went home happy.
We woke up to pictures in our e-mail boxes of the enemy playing NAKED in our wall of popcorn.
So my words of advice to you, popcorn is funny, but make sure you're prepared from strange naked popcorn prancing pictures.
Ewwww, the images are still burned into my mind.
You'd have to rent a truck. You'd have to buy an off-size amount of popcorn. You'd need to build something to contain it around his house.
Another idea that is more labor intensive but less expensive might be better. Replace everything in his apartment with a paper replica? Dunno. Maybe you need to get back at him in an entirely different vein.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
NIPCO makes a liquid (disel) fuel heater that forces air with an electric fan. This can be vented through a metal container, such as a garbage can, containing un-popped popcorn and used like an air-popper. The exhaust, if properly tuned should carry popped kernels (lower density than unpopped) out to a destination. This exhaust, if enough air is applied to prevent jamming, could then be directed through a length of dryer vent tubing (think giant slinky with plastic) to the top of a home.
Good luck!
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
I'm sure you can turn one into a large popcorn maker and deliver the popcorn just like cement using those slides. Fill it with the corn, and put a heater in, as it pops the corn floats to the top of the kernels, and out the scoop, so it would make a very nice delivery vehicle if you could get it working.
Use cardboard to build little boxes 'round the doors and windows so you only have to use a fraction of the amount of popcorn to make it look like you've filled the place.
A couple of years ago I saw a news report on a German TV station about a bunch of French farmers. These guys decided to display their displeasure about some new regulation or something of that nature. They got them selves a slurry sprayer, filled it up with slurry made from pig manure and then drove the thing around the town hall, spraying away as they went. Apparently they did this on two seperate occasions. A less liquid but no less fragrant variant of this is a common tactic among French fishermen. You get your self a truckload of fish, drive it to a remote location and let it stew in the sun for a couple of days and then dump it on the doorstep of whomevery you happen to dislike.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The best revenge is living well.
Well, there goes the surprise!
First, get your hands on a hot-air popcorn popper. Maybe several of them.
Then, modify the popcorn popper so the kernel bin gets refilled via a chute. You can drill a hole in the side of the popper and glue a sheet metal stovepipe in, for example. Then, hook the chute up to a BIG bin of popcorn kernels.
Now, mount an exit chute to the part of the popper where the popcorn collects. Set up the popper so that as popcorn is made, it naturally falls out the exit chute. You might want to create a wheeled mount for the popper, so that it's higher than the place where it's putting the popcorn. Alternately, you could mount an electrical impeller (like a mix of propeller and submarine screw) to manually push the popcorn out. You might want to rig the thing flamethrower-style, so you're holding the exit chute and throwing a stream of popcorn wherever you point it.
Open up the window into which you're going to be inserting the popcorn. Arrange the popcorn delivery device so that the exit chute points in the window, and get ready to shoot the prepared popcorn into the interior. Ensure there's a large supply of unpopped popcorn in the ammo bin.
And plug in the extension cord.
Hopefully, hilarity ensues. Remember to collect your gear and close the window!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
This can be done. It isn't as difficult as you might first think. What you need to do is make a tap into the shower's hot water pipe. Then attach a tube and a bottle of permanent ink - blue looks good. When they turn on the hot water it will suck the dye out of the bottle and apply it to the victim. To make certain to capture the victim you can add an automated or manual delay before letting the dye lose.
The worlds largest popcorn popper (as seen on Big!)
BIG! Episodes
Follow the link and click on "Popper"
~.Evanrude
Why not just melt some butter, put it in a clean insectacude sprayer and go to town. You could quickly coat all the walls with the buttery stuff. (Or use lard since cheaper) Or, maybe some instant mashed potatos. Jello could be fun. Best would be (again out of Real Genius) to maybe make it snow (or at least ice up) inside the house. On the cheap scale, collect empty soda bottles... a lot of em... and use that in place of popcorn. Not to quick but could make it easier to fill the place.
http://media.dsc.discovery.com/fansites/big/episod e/episode.html
They made a giant popcorn cart. Labeled popper at teh site above. Good luck with the quite, unobtrousive part.
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
And it took a CRAPLOAD of popcorn to do it. We borrowed several popcorn poppers and had them running every minute we were awake for about a week leading up to the prank.
We air popped the popcorn so that it wouldn't get grease everywhere, but we still got bits of corn all over. A few years after the prank, my friend's CD player quit working. He sent it in for repair, and they sent it back to him saying the problem was that a corn kernal had become lodged in the player somewhere.
IIRC, it takes about 120 pounds of popcorn to fill the passenger compartment of a 1964 Falcon, covering a building would take a heck of a lot more.
Good luck, if you can pull it off, the expression on his face when he sees it will be priceless!
Your only costs are the corn, and bags for each participant. No delivery truck, no fancy heaters, etc.
http://www.genmay.com/showthread.php?t=341438&page =1&pp=50
Safety would be the absolute top priority. I'd recommend hot air as a popping medium! Not only would hot air be safest, but there would be no lasting mess - only dry popcorn.
;)
You can pick up a hot air popper or two (or more...) for less than $15. Might as well get a fairly cheap kind since you're only going to abuse 'em...
Set up a few of them, perhaps mounted to a wood plank so they are more portable, and start popping. I'd do it in stages so you get a steady stream of popcorn. Looking around it seems 1200 watts if average per machine, so assuming 30 amp breakers I wouldn't put more than 4 machines on a single circuit. Remember that it's very likely, in a residential setting, that every outlet in the room is on the same circuit (or even every outlet in adjacent rooms is on the same circuit!)
Lesse, your average largish popper can make about two gallons (0.27 cubic feet)of popcorn in 15 minutes (one quart per minute plus cooldown time between cycles). I suppose you could modify the machines to bypass the cooldown cycle but that would be bad...
Failing that, a good quality heat gun or two would draw more electriciy but produce hotter air, so you might be able to rig up something where the hot air blows in through the kernels through a metal mesh (basically building your own hot air popper). Using a wire mesh strainer should work fine, and the popped kernels would fly out the top. You could even add more to it while it's running for a continuous flow.
If you do all the popping on-site, I think the better part of this revenge would be his electric bill!
=Smidge=
...You're talking about burying the EXTERIOR of the building, not filling the interior volume.
A bit of basic math to calculate the volume required (keep in mind I'm a poli-sci major, not a math geek):
The minimum dimensions you'll be dealing with for a "a small single-story building" would be about 60' x 60' x 15' which gives you an exterior WALL AREA of 54 000 square feet. This is NOT including the roof. Just the exterior WALLS of the building, I'll get to the roof in a second.
For the sake of simplicity, and my own poor math skills, we'll assume your friend has a FLAT roof. That's another 3 600 square feet.
You're now dealing with 57 600 square feet of exterior area to cover with popcorn. Assuming that you want to be able to provide at least 6" of popcorn on top of the whole house and assuming you will have a way to KEEP the popcorn IN PLACE (i.e. not just pile it up) you're looking at 57 600' x 0.5' for a total of 28 800 CUBIC FEET of popcorn.
If you are EXTREMELY liberal in your calculations you can assume that about two bags of microwave popcorn will create one cubic foot of the stuff. Thus, 57 600 bags of microwave popcorn. I'm not quite sure how to calculate how much bulk popcorn you'd need, so I've put it in microwave bag terms to give you a rough idea.
If you actually need to PILE the popcorn up around the walls I suspect it would be reasonable to double this number for an approximate volume requirement. 57 600 CUBIC feet, or 115 200 BAGS of of popcorn is a FUCKING LOT of popcorn...
---------
Now, if you were talking about FILLING his house with popcorn...
---------
We'll assume a basic 1-bedroom single-story residence with kitchen, bathroom, living room, dining room, hallways, NOT including closets, and NOT including garage.
The layout of the house could DRASTICALLY affect the overall volume, so these are excessively rough estimates.
Bedroom: 20' x 20'
Kitchen: 20' x 20'
Living Room: 20' x 20'
Dining Room: 20' x 20'
Bathroom: 15' x 10'
Hallways: 35' x 5'
All Ceilings at 9'
(4)3600 + 1350 + 1575 = 17 325 cubic feet inside the house. Refer to my previous calculations regarding microwave bags / volume and you'll come to about 35 650 BAGS of microwave popcorn to accomplish this.
After all this, I seriously doubt you'll be able to do this on the kind of budget that I'd imagine you're on. Perhaps going for just your friend's bedroom / car / home-office would be a more reasonable thing to try?
--Nic
to distribute it evenly..get out through a fire escape
Pile up some popcorn. Maybe half a meter high. Now measure the angle at which the sides naturally fall. Now calculate how large a cone you would need to cover the house (just measure the outside dimensions, presume that the roof is 3.5m up at the wall caps, and multiply). Subtract the volume inside the house. You'll probably need of the order of ten tons of popcorn for a small house, which will most definitely not fit into one cement truck. You might also collapse the house, if this isn't snow or cyclone country where houses are designed for loads like that.
Also, for making the popcorn, can I recommend an oil drum mounted at an angle over a barbecue and slowly, constantly spun? You'd feed the raw corn in through a pipe at the top and you'd have to stop every so often to clean (shovel) out the duds. The easiest way to both mount and spin the drum is to bolt it onto a suitably angled car axle and heat the side of the drum rather than the bottom to protect the bearings. Bolt a pulley to the other end and hook up the motor from a washing machine, suitably geared (well, pullied) down. If you want to get fancy, choose a hollow axle and feed the raw corn in through it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
In the mid 80's I was a teenager and my younger brother was a child actor working on a TV show in LA. On the same lot, a couple sound stages down they were filming a movie called "Real Genius". I remember getting to tour that sound stage and seeing what looked like a small house built entirely within the sound stage (It seemed off-scale to me - perhaps it was 3/4 scale...). There were also two gigantic machines that to me looked like oversized washing machines that had ductwork coming out of them. Now, I can't remembr if the ductwork went to the house, or to a large reservoir,.. but I distinctly remember popcorn everwhere - so much in fact that everyone (and I mean everyone) on the lot was walking around with bags of "free" popcorn that they got from that set. I also remember someone telling me that they had been making popcorn continuously for many days. I had completely forgot all that... thanks for the memory!
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
This is definitely the place to post something that you want to keep "quiet".
...
Unless
Aha! I get it - you intentionally want your roommates to think you're up to something, when in fact you aren't!
They "get word" that you're cooking up something major, and they get on the defensive.
The joke is on them, however, because they're constantly on the defensive waiting for something to happen - that never will!
Much like a prision escapee, they live in fear 24-7 just waiting for their crimes to catch up with them.
Brilliant play!
"Sometimes the best revenge is implied retaliation."
-Chris Bergeron
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
omg, imma go dl that movie RIGHT NOW!!!~
The heat generated by a pile of popcorn this big (ever hear of sawdust fires? how about haybails incinerating themselves?) will be large. All it would take is his heating equipment, a hot day, or something left on and you just burned down the guys house.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Actually, I was thinking that this post was a sad attempt to draw attention to himself. Think about it: if he was *really* going to exact some revenge, why would he post *anything* about it on such a high-traffic site? He'd want his buddy to forget all about it, or at least think that he had forgotten about it. This Ask Slashdot submission reeks of "Hey everyone, remember me? Remember the wacky thing that happend to me? Remember? Here's a link to the story about me in case you forgot! Take a look at it and think of me! Let's talk about me and what happened a year ago."
i suggest removing the magnetron from a microwave (or purchasing a magnetron, whatever's easier) to pop the kernals. most efficient (i think) would be to put the kernals in his apartment and pop them there. it would take a long time (depending on how you decide to power the magnetron, personal experience advises against batteries) but it would be pretty easy. you can likely get popcorn fairly cheap at costco or whatnot, and google yeilds 50 lbs for $20. prolly best to team up with a few buddies with the magnetrons...
man id like to see that done... lazers are fer wusses, im all about the ray-guns.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
It shouldn't be hard to produce sufficient popcorn, I could devise several different hot-air popper machines, it doesn't have to be particularly elaborate since the popcorn doesn't have to be edible. But delivery is a little trickier.
Go to a rental shop and rent a truck or machinery used for installing blow-in insulation. These are usually mounted on the back of a truck, it has a big hopper where you pour in the insulation (which is usually a sort of crumbled up paper fibers). That's hooked up to a motor-driven compressed air gadget, sort of like a vacuum in reverse, the insulation is propelled down a corrugated plastic hose about 6 inches in diameter. The machine is designed to have enough force to blast the insulation through enough tubing to reach from the truck out front, through the house and up to the 2nd or 3rd floor attic, which you then fill with a layer of insulation about 6 inches deep.
My neighbor ran an insulation business, and I've seen the machines in action and it delivers an astonishing amount of material in a short time, it shouldn't take long to fill up a house with popcorn using one of these devices. But you're going to need a HELL of a lot of pre-popped popcorn. I leave it to you to estimate the volume required, but somehow I have a vision of two or three 18foot rental trucks filled with popcorn.
Christmas wrapping - with a big bow on each door. Scatter around a whole bunch of huge, empty carboard boxes (refrigerator boxes, television boxes, etc.) wrapped and bowed. Do the same thing with all the appliances (except the stove; and make sure that you unplug everything).
Has anybody broke a bean bag chair? Like when you jump on one and it pops and the little pellets fly every where. This is what you do, fill a trash bag with the pellets or finely broken up strafoam. Then slip the open end of the bag under a door and jump on hte bag. The pellets will either a) stick to every thing behind the door, or B) the bag will burst and you'll be covered with pellets.
Silly string.
Rent a portable construction garbage bin and fill it with popcorn and then blow it in with an insulation blower.
or
Buy about 20 bales of hay and fill it floor to ceiling with the stuff
or
rent 10 cotton candy machines and fill it with fluff.
I'd have also suggested finding about a hundred chinese refugees and giving them a nice place to stay, but I hear that's not PC anymore.
Coating a room with petroleum jelly has already been done.http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg ?articleid=28242
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Gas-powered industrial popcorn popper, about $2000: http://www.concessionstands.com/items.asp?CartId=9 021705K-EVEREST-BOLO449&Cc=36GASPED&tpc=
include $sig;
1;
How much are you willing to spend and how many mouse traps do you think that will buy? You could simply cover all his counters, cabinets, sitting areas, and floor with them.
One of my good geek friends was recently working on a release system for helicopters dropping multiple payloads... so surely he has some connections there. It isn't exactly stealthy, but boy, I bet that's what it'd take to be effective...
Hop to it. That's a good start, but c'mon, start talking more about ME! ME! ME!
some images of something that happened to a friend of a friend. FYI, air poppers prob won't help out much as they are (obviously) much too slow. - cceddie
Bear in mind that they'll really get into *everything*, however, so if you're able, you should probably seal up any of the more expensive pieces of equipment in the building - TVs, stereos, ovens, etc - so your friends' have merely an exasperated dislike for you, rather than an intense hatred after they have to complete refit the entire building.
Also works just as well with a single room (and a lot easier). Then the victim just gets greeted by a sea of foam when they open the door.
That remembers me when I spreaded one of my baby's diaper with Nutela then showed it to my wife and taking a taste of it.. The look on her face was priceless.
One of my friends is pretty good for those pranks. He's the kind of guy to open his passenger door of the car when you're driving pretty fast, or taping the sink hose's trigger so when you get for some water it sprays directly at you, sniffing flour or powdered sugar making you think it's cocain, renting (kid) movies and dubbing them with p0rn, borrowing your car and coming back with only the radio or a wheelcap in his hands, throwing eggs through a sunroof at a good speed, gearing reverse at a good speed but not clutching in, coloring water the same blue or green as windshield washer in a windshield washer plastic can and drinking it, and lots, lots, lots more. You just can't get bored with that kind of guy.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Assuming:
100g of popcorn fills 1/4 cubic foot
Popcorn makes a pile at 20 degrees from vertical
House is about 800 square feet
House is a rectangle
Then I get 13.5 METRIC TONS of popcorn! That amount will almost cover the house; leaving the upper corners and roof exposed.
You will have to move the popcorn unpopped, probably by one of those 18-wheelers (although I do not know if they are big enough).
You will have to pop on site. I suggest modifying a gas dryer (removing thermostat, and tilting it back so the opening faces mostly up. You may need more than one, and I hope your friend has a natural gas line to his house already.
Turn off everything in the house so no fire starts. Start popping on the roof.
Filling the house would be much easier: the 18-wheeler should be able to hold all the popcorn (unpopped), the dryer, and the blow-in insulation machine.
If you would like my spreadsheet calculator, I can mail it to you.
Good luck
Makes me wonder if a couple of old clothes dryers could be modified for the job. Thanks for the idea, and the cool story.
But the next poster also brings up a point... what would be the best way to dispose of such a massive volume of popcorn? Haul it to the dump or what?
My brother had a suite at Michigan State. His dorm room shared a bathroom with the dorm room next door. They always played pranks on each other. The weekend after spring break, my brother returned early ... for his newest prank. He drove around campus and collected all the campus newspapers from the dorms. For hours on end, he crumped each page up into a ball and threw it across the bathroom into his neighbor's dorm room (thankfully, they forgot to lock the door which was typical). Hours later, he had completely filled the room with crumpled up newspaper. It was a sight to be seen (lucky for me, he had a digital camera).
[insert lame joke here]
How to cover a neighborhood with popcorn:
1) Pile large amount of popcorn in central location.
2) Position a device to deliver the greatest downdraft possible right over it.
3) ????
4) Profit!
The obvious solution is to use caramel corn....
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Fill every toilet in the house with said fetid mixture.
Much better than popcorn.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Did you look that up, or did you already know that off the top of your head?
Another suggestion would involve creating a web of twine in the house. Start at one corner and work backwards. Plug a webcam near the front door to watch how he handles it. Leave a cheap pair of child-safe scissors wrapped around the doorknob by a small piece of string.
Something we actually did once was collect a heaping load of those mail-in inserts from magazines and put them randomly in a person's office. Inside a book here. Inside a file there. Taped to the monitor. Cut into pieces and stuck to the keys so it looked like an insert. I've heard from guys who still work there that he still finds them two years later. (No, the employment change was not due to the gag.)
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
to cook enough popcorn?
I'd say go for midgets!
Super Glue all of his furniture etc to the ceiling....
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
While the popcorn idea sounds like fun, logistically speaking, baloons give a bigger bang for your buck.
1. Get an air compressor or 3 from your local equipment rental store.
2. Get a cylinder of helium.
3. Get a funnel.
4. Get some glitter.
5. Get some confetti (I prefer cross-shreded paper).
6. Get some shaving cream.
7. Get shit-tons of cardboard.
The basic theory is to use the air compressors to fill the majority of the baloons. A survey of the house and some simple math will give you a volume. A few test baloons will let you know how many you'll eventually need. Use the cardboard to block off the doors to the various rooms so you can fill them to the top.
The helium makes annoying baloons that are hard to get at.
The glitter and confetti make a fucking mess.
The shaving cream is for real revenge.
The big trick is to only fill a few with the goodies. Make every "pop" a real surprise.
BTW, to make the process more effecient, come up with a better way to seal vice tying. Most party stores have plugs you can use, but it might get expensive.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Covering the outside by sticking the popcorn to sheets of something and covering the house is probably not too hard-- termite extermination companies routinely completely cover rather large houses with tarps in less than a day (for 2-3 guys) so they can hold the gas in.
The amount of popcorn is formidable, but plausible--my ~1600 ft^2 roof can get pretty much completely covered with leaves a couple times in a month from the oak trees above it. The trees never seem to be missing any leaves, but there sure are a lot on the roof. If I put down tarps and spread glue on them I could probably supply enough leaf covered tarps to blanket a reasonable house in two to three months.
A more creative solution is to set up a "popcorn wrap" manufacturing plant. You would make large sheets of dimpled plastic, where the dimples were pretty close together and about the right size for an unpopped kernal. They get spread with an adhesive that will stay slightly tacky when it's hot, and then covered with unpopped corn. Then each kernal gets a small magnifying lenslet glued to it with a special adhesive (this is the hard part) that won't stick at the velocity of the "popping front" of the popcorn so that it won't start a fire after popping. Then you make large rolls of the stuff, and unroll it on the victim's house. The sun then pops each kernal individually, hurling the lenslets into a sparkly pile on the ground and encasing the house in fluffy white popcorn.
I'm sure if you set up such a plant you could make millions from people wanting to play pranks on their friends. The only barrier to getting rich on this is picking the right adhesives.
...covering the entire floorspace of the victim's dwelling.
I see a big deadly fire, and a google news page saying 'house burns down killing 3 in prank'.
DiscLa1mer! nice idea, not original, but read the disclaimer... oh you did...
I say don't do anything conspicuous from the outside, but perhaps ONE styrofoam piece on the porch... inside, empty... open a door........argh!
how to do it? What you will need are:
Large supply of styrofoam pieces from a company that makes them (a packaging company who wants free advertising?)
Some trucks with tail-gates or open top trucks... big ones, about 10 (or do some runs).
Industrial air moving machine for blasting the pieces.
A house (medium sized, with windows)
Open the windows in all doors leading off from hall. Then close the doors on the way out, make sure you can push the windows closed if needs be.
Place the nozzle of the large machine thingy, and plast through the window until room full. Draw curtains, clean window sill, close window. (anyone trying to break in will have a suprise.
Repeat for all other windows on ground floor, and then do top floor if needs be. Make sure toilet seat is up when you do this, hahah, bastards.
Let marinate for 2-3 days until your friend comes back and dies shortly after from suffocation and ingestion of foam pieces.
Have a laugh about it in prison with your new friend Bob, who used to read slashdot until he decided he liked touching young boys. Have fun!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
First of all you roll up your sleeves, because you are determined to succede or die trying.
;)
You would best:
1. Plan to make the popcorn at the house
2. Fill the house interior
3. Use 2-3 days to get the job done.
4. Get an insider to cooperate.
The logistics of transporting several tens of thousand cubic feet of popped corn is too expensive. Transporting the corn unpopped is much less conspicuous. Same reason for filling the interior. He probably has neighbors who would call the cops, so you need to do this inside the house so everything looks fine from the outside.
Imagine his face when he opens his front door and finds a wall of popcorn. It's no fun if he saw it a mile away and you didn't get to see the reaction.
It would probably be a good idea to do it while he's away for a weekend or some such time. That would give you plenty of time to set up your gear and pop the corn. This creates a need for an insider who knows his travel plans, a brother or mutual friend. I'm guessing that you already have a copy of the house key to get in...
I'm guessing that both a hot air popper and a microwave are too slow and/or messy.
I think a 200 litre oil drum as a pot (maybe cut in half) over a gas heater in the back yard is best.
You will need to have an efficient way of emptying the popcorn and putting more corn into the pot without the popcorn burning in the meantime.
Some sort of air suction device could be used to empty the popcorn from the pot. Something like the insulation blower someone else mentioned. That way you also have an efficient delivery system you could use to fill every crevice of every room with popcorn. Perhaps a leaf blower and wheelbarrow is sufficient (cheaper).
The unpopped corn should be heavy enough to stay at the bottom where it will eventually pop and be sucked out. I will leave it up to you to figure out what to do with the kernels that don't pop...
There you have it, a complete, DOABLE, plan.
Hope you post the pictures for our amusement...
If you freeze a can of shaving foam in LN_2, you can remove the metal of the can leaving a frozen brick of foam and propellant.
I've been told that on a hot day, 2cans will fill the average family car.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Corn is about 56lbs/bushel (popcorn might be a bit denser, but I couldn't find any good numbers)
A bushel is 1.24 cubic feet
56 lbs = 896 oz.
M asJ:dspace.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/118/ 4/Popcorn.PDF&hl=en
Now if you look at concessionstands.com they have 48 oz poppers that will pop 48oz of popcorn in about 3 minutes.
The volume ratio of popped corn to un-popped corn is pretty variable - but google provides thishttp://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:6MLAWvN-
that shows a "good" batch should provide 38 to 1 ratio.
So taking that information all together we get
896oz / 48oz/batch = 18.67 batches
18.67batches x 3 min/batch = 56 minutes to pop a bushel of popcorn
1.24 cubic ft/bushel unpopped x 38 = 47.2 cu ft popped corn
From this you can see that you can get about 50 cubic feet of popcorn per hour. That is from a multi-thousand $ machine.
A small bedroom (10x12x8) is 960 cubic feet. Thats about 20 hours to fill that one room. They do have dual popper machines and I think one that went as high as 66 oz of popcorn per batch - but even so that is A LOT of popcorn.
Call some concession businesses in the yellow pages and ask about getting 100's of pounds of popcorn popped. A lot of the places will think you are nuts (you are) but one of them will probably be able to point you to someone who can or does do that kind of volume of pre-popped corn for stadiums, etc. Another avenue might be to find someone who works for a snack food
OK, not styrofoam, but the corn-starch-based environmentally-friendly ones. They're sold in industrial size bags, and are quite light to move.
You might look into those landscaping trucks with the gun which shoots hay to cover bare ground before hydro-seeding. It would probably shoot the peanuts as well.
One thing I did in college involved ducktape.
One of my roomates pissed me off one day so me and the guys got together and went down to the local wallyworld and bought a whole bunch of ducktape.
Then we proceeded to ducktape all the doors and windows to this guys room. We also made it point sticky side in so he would stick when he peeled it off. We covered every window and door, even the bathroom door.
We also had a plan to superglue a tinfoil hat to his forehead but we couldn't pull it off and were scared of waking him up. So we just decided to go with the "big" joke.
---
Another fun thing to do is stick playdough into the ignition key hole of a persons car.
You can also put a bumpersticker on the side of a persons computer, ie: for bushbashers put a "George Bush 2004" bumper sticker on the side of the computer and for a Republican put a "Kerry 04" bumper sticker, this will piss them of. Especially if they are about to head to a lan party or something.
Also if a person is not "computer literate" then you can change their startup screen to a dirty picture and then they will forever be embarrased to turn on your computer. Especially in public.
In my high school there was a rumor that 3 pigs were obtained and left in the school. They had the numbers 1, 2, and 4 written on them. The adminitstration closed down the school looking for number 3.
"Anonymous Coward" discloses his identity.
He understands the difference between "square feet" and "cubic feet", unlike the original poster.
When I was in college, a group of guys saved newspapers for the entire semester. At the end of the semester, they carefully took the newspapers sheet by sheet, crumpled it in a ball and threw it in a room. As far as I can remember, it took less that 8 hrs to fill a room the size of the inside of an 18 wheeler's trailer. The best part was afterwards. The victim just shoved the newspaper out the door into the hall. Just like outhouses, the shiat flows down, even when you are on the 3rd floor of a dorm. There were 2 sets of stairs with extra landings 1/2 between each floor. The newspaper covered each of the landings enough to, unfortunatly, protect the heads of the dumb-as^h^h^h^h^h^h guys swan-diving head-first from landing to landing. Another neat feature was that everyone was coated in a fine black dust and we sneezed black for a few days.
I would recommend those spiffy face masks that you see asian people wearing in the news all the time and some latex gloves. This is so that you stay your normal color and don't sneeze black crap all over the victim when they are trying to figure out if you had anything to do with it or not.
Ok now the suggestions:
if you are bound on the popcorn here are a few shortcuts (I have used some of these in a previous 'incident'. If you are going for the exterior:
If you are going for interior:
Ok that covers the popcorn. One other idea that came to me while reading the other comments... If your friend is going out of town for a few days (not to many as rain will ruin this one) convert his house into a gingerbread house. Prefab out of cardboard sides, doors, window frames, candy canes, candies, etc. You can get large pieced of cardboard from appliance shops for free usually. When your friend is out of town, attach your prefabricated panels to the outside of his house. Don't forget the eaves, etc. Just look a some good gingerbread house pictures for ideas. Attaching can be done with wire, stapels, clips that fit under vinyl siding (if the house has it), etc. Just don't get caught by rain or heavy wind.
More 'teste
If he wanted to start something kitchen related..... I used to manage a restaurant, you could raise the ante by going to film, no not 35mm, but cling! wrap it up dude, house, car, moped, fat girlfriend, computer what ever, for even more rub, wrap a few things in foil then in cling film. get kinky!
Sig Hansen?
for more than 5 seconds.
This is brilliant. He gets them twice! They have no idea what, if anything, will happen, and some of the ideas (the crickets for instance) are bound to be absolutely diabolical.
Now, gentle reader, one must understand that this depends on the level of revenge desired.
;)
1) Acquire a large farm animal (cow, horse, etc.), feed it several loaves of bread, leave it in the offending parties domicile. Note, do not leave out the step of feeding it several loaves of bread as this has interesting effects on the digestive system but is otherwise not harmful to the creature of your choice.
Pro: Quite interesting
Con: Hard to get up the elevator
2) Sneak up on the slumbering victim with the handy tube of Crest toothpase. Squeeze the tube until empty up the offending party's nostrils.
Pro: Cheap and Simple and victim is minty fresh for weeks, has been known to solve some halitosis problems
Con: Usually requires chemical intervention to keep subject still during the process. Coaxing subject into injesting large quantities of cheap booze is the preferred method
3) Anything involving superglue. A few drops in a door lock can be priceless. Gluing specific artifacts to an immovable surface in a natural looking position. Briefcases to the floor. Keys to the counter. You get the idea.
Pro: Cheap and simple
Con: Can be hard to pull off and can end up with fingers glued to tube which is dead giveaway
4) Shaving cream can be useful. Find the largest plastic bag you can. Fill with shaving cream. Insert the top of the bag under the door. Secure an item to hold the back of the bag in place.
Pro: Cheap and Simple
Con: Wierd looks from the check out lady when you purchase 37 cans of shaving cream
5) Take photos of their vehicle or some other prize possession. Post ad on ebay offering to sell item. Arrange for victim to find ad.
Pro: Also cheap and simple
Con: Waste of all that good feedback when you don't actually sell item
6) Take a few photoshop tutorials and strip victims head into embarassing/compromising photo. Mail to significant other.
Pro: Cheap and simple
Con: Can be very destructive to personal relationships
7) Variation on #6 - print photo and post with victim's pager or cell phone # at local gay bar.
Pro: Cheap and Simple
Con: Same as above
8) Learn Unix. Write cron job that will randomly message victim's cell phone with various requests to call things Dial-A-Prayer, Ask-A-Nurse, etc.
Pro: Cheap
Con: Can be traced
9) Obtain some sticky paper or platic which you can print on. Create a custom bumper sticker and apply to victims car. "Ask me about my penis enlargement" is my favorite.
Pro: Simple to do and can be attractive with the addition of some appropriate art work - like the Enzyte logo
Con: Relation is to be expected
That's all I can think of for now.
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
You should have made those pictures the basis of a new catagory of porn, and sold access to pay for more popcorn.
I have a two story house that used to be 3 bedrooms and it's 1200 sq feet interior (not counting the unfinished basement)
A "small, one story" house could be 700 sq feet, which is about half the size you listed.
A full bathroom must be about 6x8, not necessarily bigger. Most small places don't have a seperate living room and dining room - many don't even have a separate living room and kitchen. A place like that might have 6 feet of hallway... you don't run around the rooms.
This description almost perfectly describes a spacious 1 bedroom apartment I'm familiar with, and I've been in smaller houses.
And most ceilings these days aren't 9', they're 7'8" I think. Less than 8'.
That said, I'm all about the cardboard window boxes mentioned by some other poster.
To respond to another child post - MOST houses sit on much LESS than an acre plot. A "standard" suburban plot here is about 50'x120' and this is suburbia, not the density of the big city. I admit that NEW houses are usually built where they knocked down two old houses, but that's sillyness.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
A O L C D s
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
A short blurb on how they did the popcorn house in Real Genius can be found at:
.
http://www.vkn.com/movies/realgenius/science.html
Scroll down to #15
http://chrismetcalf.net
Rent a 24' uhaul. Make a screen mesh wall at the back with a hole at the top and a hole at the bottom.
Get some ventilation duct like they use for sewer work and a strong fan. Connect one piece of duct to the back of the fan for suction and one to the front for delivery.
cover the bottom hole and fill the truck with the fan aparatus. Once there, reverse the connection and suck all the popcorn out through the bottom hole (may require getting in and sweeping it into the intake)
Flaming bag of dog shit on the front porch?
Just let a jar or can of oysters rot for a while and place them in a hard to find place. For those with a weak stomach the smell will cause vomiting. >:]
Good luck.
Much of this would require access to the home in question.
:) And you can put everything back just like it was with fairly minimal effort - the paint being the biggest issue. But hey, maybe they needed to paint the living room anyway.
Needed: 1 Actor/ess the mark doesn't know as the 'Host'
1 Cameraman (needs professional *looking* gear)
1 Sound guy (boom with a dustbunny-looking mike on it)
1 Producer. Optional, but would add to the realism.
1 Designer. Optional, but could be a very fun part for someone to play. Coked out, drunken, wearing thrift store castoffs, whatever.
While the mark is at work/out of town/whatever, do a 'remodel' on the living room. Carefully remove & store all their furniture. Proceed to create the 'Gallery of Ill-Advised DIY'. Watch a lot of the designer shows on HGTV & such for inspiration.
Produce a godawful paint scheme - bonus points for poor application of same. Find the absolute cheapest fire-sale irregular $.12 per yard vinyl sheet flooring you can. Bonus for Avocado or Gold. Put it down before painting, it'll even protect the (real) floor!
Produce a large variety of craft projects (could be done far in advance). I'm thinking of branches from the backyard hot-glued together into a shapeless "Sculpture". Make lamps out of things that shouldn't be - Keyboards, a 7 watt night light that weighs 80 lbs (dead monitor?), that sort of thing.
Find consignment shop furniture that looks as much like theirs as possible. Paint it. Apply glitter. Do whatever nasty things you can think of to 'improve' it. Make them think it's the *original* furniture beneath the burlap-and-pinecone treatment.
When they come home, the camera, sound, and host ambush the mark. Have signs for your imaginary show "Ambush Home Makeover!" or "Dirt Cheap DIY" - have a network 'affiliated' with it - DIY, BBC47, Public access. Think Low, low, low budget. The host actor would have to be good, introducing them to the show & concept, talking about all the work their friend (you) put in to it...before doing the big reveal.
The best part is that you get the reaction on film if you keep them from guessing the truth
Investigate the cost of *HUGE* quantities of flourescent pink tempera paint. You would absolutely *have* to have something water soluble and NON STAINING!
While the Mark sleeps, mix up tempera & paint the cars, trim on the house, roof, Lawn, *EVERYTHING* pink. Leave the sidewalk alone for contrast. I suspect the pink lawn would be horribly frightening all on its own.
My suggestion would be to go out and rent a high-volume propane dryer/heater. You then want to get the air volume down, and the propane volume up to the point where the gas coming out of the thing is about the same temperature as comes out of a hot air popper (I don't have one, so I can't do the measurement for you -- those cheap oven thermometers that you can get in some dollar or grocery stores should do a good job of this).
Once you've tuned your dryer, then you need to pump the air from it thru a reasonably large drum with a mesh bottem nailed onto it. The mesh needs to be fine enough to hold popcorn kernels in (obviously). I'd suggest that you also weld some metal rods to the bottom to help keep the mesh from sagging, and a yard or two of piping between the heater and the popcorn bin, to keep open flame from any popcorn bits.. At a quick guess, you should be able to pop around 10 pounds of popcorn at a batch and get some number of cubic feet/minute.
some trivia:
Dunno how I did it, but I have a reasonably high-rated site on "making popcorn" (as opposed to, say "popping popcorn"). This goes well beyond what my site addresses.
Popcorn is used by some companies as a packing supply, so I don't think that it's going to be that highly flamable.. That having been said, It's far from flame-resistant. If you're going to do something like this you would probably be well off to make sure that the pilot lights on the furnaces and stoves (etc) are turned off.
The flame war over the flamability of popcorn got me curious, so I did a quick test. I did a batch of (oil-popped) popcorn, and tried lighting a small sample. It wasn't trivial to light (took a few seconds with a match to get it to light), but once lit it produced a growing flame. I'd suggest keeping a loaded garden hose nearby when you do this.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The proper link for my site on popping popcorn
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
To deliver balloons: First freeze them in Liquid Nitrogen. They'll shrink to a fraction of their original size. Drop them off frozen. As they thaw, they'll expand...
Make sure the doors open outwards!
1) Wait until your mark goes away for a week or so, gain access, get a friend/neighbour with a passkey who's in on it and sow all their carpet with lawn seed. Apply sprinkler. You get the picture ;) I guess that'd work best in spring or summer, or if they had central heating on in winter...
2) Shove raw prawns into each end of any curtain rods you can find there. Works best in warm conditions, for obvious reasons, and they'll go NUTS trying to track down the precise source...
3) This one is a work in progress: I love the popcorn idea, but I have been trying for ages to think of a good practical joke app for ooblick. It's fun to make and play around with, but surely there's a _fun_ way to share the joy around?