Keep The Change, Ya Filthy Animals

We love this guy. This is the third year he's glitter-bombed porch pirates, and he product improves every year. He totally qualifies for the term "Evil Genius", except he's actually a Good Genius.

Important safety tip for criminals: never piss off a former JPL engineer with money and time on his hands. You'll become internet-famous, but not in a good way, and it won't go well for you.

The only way to make this any better would be if law enforcement was waiting outside after the package was discarded, with a warrant and handcuffs. With a "gotcha" cam TV news crew right behind the cops, as the perp is frog-marched into custody, and actually criminally charged.

Maybe they can work on the TV show syndication proposal for v4.0, next year.

I'd call the producers of COPS, if I were this guy's agent.

Don't (Get Caught) Do(ing) Bad Things

h/t Thomas Paine, William Randolph Hearst, Donald Segretti, George Washington Hayduke, Sabo, and every current media network in existence

The hell you say. BFYTW

Reference this thread over at WRSA, regarding someone posting a strictly inoffensive poster (unless you're a triggered Trigglypuff Snowflake). Don't be that...Thing.

So, you wanna do something low-cost, high-payoff?

 

1) Bicycle.
2) Black hoodie.
3) 4-5AM is generally a very quiet time on most campuses. So is 5-7 PM-ish just after sunset, when people are eating dinner, once night classes are in session.
4) Every campus has designated Student Thought Police, whose job it is to approve all speech posted on bulletin boards. Appropriating  an exemplar of approved speech already posted gets you the template for the Stamp Of Approval; a large Pink Pearl eraser and half an hour's careful work with an X-acto knife re-creates the stamp.
Ask me how I know.
5) Have fun. Don't Get Caught.
6) Use commercial printers at a 24hr. FedEx/Kinko's, etc. Use a one-time cash card there. And hey, it's winter; wear a balaclava mask so you don't catch cold while you're printing your materials.

I say this because there are doubtless some misdemeanors on the books covering some parts of this, and there's no sense going to court for exercising free speech, and having to mount that defense. It gets expensive, even if you win. Remember, I'm saying Don't break the law. How close you skate to the edge of legality is between you and your conscience.

Bonus: look up the Usual SJW Suspect organizations in your area.
If someone were to print up flyers offering things like the latest iPhones at ridiculous prices, way-below-market cheap cars, and bullshit high-paying jobs, with handy tear-off strips with the business numbers of those folks, it'd be baaaaaad. And keep them from their usual nonsense.
So don't do that.

Also don't print out really offensive racist pro-pale color materials, and then list the organization's number as the one for the NAACP or ACLU. It might create unwelcome confusion.

Slipping a counter message into the middle of a careful dupe of some other side's fliers would be hilariously double-plus badthink. So is taking their manifestos, and then subtly changing them so they don't go where the original group wanted to go. A little forethought goes a long way, and you simultaneously make the originating group look unreliable to the hard core Leftards.
Hilarity ensues when they form circular firing squads.
e.g., having the Black Panthers come out against illegal Latino immigrants, because "Jose y Maria be takin' jobs from da 'hood rats," or "the pinche' Crips and Bloods are the ones robbing our tiendas" pays dividends you'd never get from a purely Richard Spencer/David Duke screed. And remember, truth is an absolute defense.

The goal there is subtle subversion, not pies in the face.

We won't even go into misdirecting people to the wrong places and times, for instance for any festivities this Saturday. Sending them to the local police station or federal building might pay enormous dividends.
You should already be on that.
(Hint: promises of free food, drink, free swag, and music belong there like cheese on pizza. Directing them to park in tow-away zones is a slam dunk as well. If they show, having someone handy to call TPTB to begin towing is pure comedy gold. Whether you go all-in on fake cover-up signs until your pigeons are in place is entirely up to you.)

Paying two guys named Julio to paper the cars in the student parking lot during Friday classes gives you a cut-out that can't ID you, and hits 100% of the target crowd.
College kids - as a species - are gullible @$$clowns, easily confused.
Leverage that for fun and entertainment.
It's a moral imperative.

And finally, distributing messages just a bit too on-point by real groups, like pro-pedophilia materials from NAMBLA, or misogynistic and pro-terror bombing stuff from the local Muslim Student Association, let alone racist tripe from the black and hispanic groups, and making it appear that it came from them is masterclass-level stuff. They and the SJW administration will be investigating hate-speech charges and counter-charges endlessly, and they'll all be at each other's throats non-stop.
Oh, and remember to wear your nitrile gloves. No sense leaving your fingerprints in the local fusion center's database, right?

Just imagine Don Rickles and Archie Bunker having dinner, with a scribe present, and a media relations department, and let your imagination go wild.

If you run out of ideas, pop a disc of PCU into the player:

(Directed by Ellis from Die Hard:)

Stop quaking about what the Leftards are doing, boys and girls, and start baking some nuclear yeast into their Dissent Cakes. Then stand back, and watch them reap the whirlwind.

You can play "Let's you and him fight" with half an hour at the local copy shop.

Art Class Du Jour

This was cool. When you were in kindergarten.

This is for anyone out these who thought you could get by on this exercise with a steak knife and a tablespoon anymore.

Up your game, or you don't even get to play on the porch with the small dogs.

 

 

So get busy, and entertain us.
You don't want to risk the Flaming Bag Of Poo Award, right?
Some work for you, yes, but you get to exercise your creative impulse.
Look at it this way: it's your one day of the year when it's socially acceptable to scare hell out of the annoying urchins in the neighborhood, and get a free pass on it.

Meanwhile, I've got work to do. There's a potluck at work tonight, and it's my turn to bring the chips and dip.

I'm thinking of bringing in some hot dogs too.

After I leave a few things around the neighborhood.

And down by the commuter rail line.

West Point Ranger Studs - STILL not faster than a speeding locomotive

Today's Lesson: Watch Your Step

Fitness model, actor and reality TV star Greg Plitt was fatally struck by a Metrolink train in Burbank Saturday afternoon. Police say Plitt was filming on the train tracks.

People who knew Plitt and fans who wished to honor the fitness guru stopped by the train tracks Sunday to pay their respects. A bouquet of roses was left at the scene.

Plitt, 37, was a top fitness model and actor. He appeared on TV shows and movies, and was on the cover of more than 250 fitness magazines just in the last eight years.

Burbank police say Plitt was filming with two other people on the train tracks, just north of the Burbank Metrolink Station, when he was struck and killed by a Metrolink train.

Witnesses say Plitt was holding a video camera when the accident happened.

"He had on all black. The train went by. I saw him stumble over the tracks. He had a camcorder in his hand," said Metrolink passenger Victor Crowell.

Y'see, train yards are generally gravel and hardscrabble, with not just tracks, but large ties ("sleepers") sticking out, along with the anchor spikes, and all matter of other detritus afoot.
So when you stumble right in front of a moving train, that's it for you.

This is why on real productions (as opposed to someone half-assing it with a couple of buddies "on-the-cheap" with a handicam) there are whole departments of people who make sure that the person with the camera is safe from such things. Now you know what a grip does.

Tragic for Plitt and his family, and no doubt rather inconvenient for the train crew and passengers. But I daresay his DayPlanner has opened up quite a bit, and 200 other would-be fitness cover boys are shedding crocodile tears.

But even if you're rough, tough, and buff, with an Academy ring, a black-and-gold tab, a five years with the Regiment, your chances against a moving Metroliner in your gym shorts and tennis shoes are about the same as if you wore a meat suit to swim with Great White Sharks.

For Mr. Plitt, lesson learned, albeit about 5 seconds too late to deliver any helpful behavioral changes. Some stuff may look easy, and making videos is: right up until you find out the parts where it's not so much the case. Like from the undercarriage of the train.

Oh well. 

Good Judgement vs. The Other Kind

Recently both a friend's experience and a recent local news story have highlighted once again the dangers of driving while tired.

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. Lest I appear to be holier than thou, I offer the following cautionary tale.

After having finished approximately six weeks of desert maneuvers in the garden paradise that is Marine Corps Base 29 Palms, we returned to Camp Pendleton, and germane to this story, on a Thursday. The plan was to return to work on Friday, clean up everything, and then enjoy a long Memorial Day weekend. Like my charges, I was to clean up, get a good night's rest, and awake refreshed and ready to confront the one-day blitz of work before a well-earned 72-hour liberty.

I, however, was invincible and immortal, and had a fiancee only a short hour and a half north in the greater Los Angeles area, not to mention friends and family in my home of record therein. The fact that I'd been awake 22 hours a day for most of that six weeks meant nothing but that I could surely make the easy drive home, enjoy home cooking and a real bed, and return early and refreshed to supervise the de-crudding of trucks, howitzers, men, and personal gear, thus having my cake and eating it too.

Thus it was that I set out, attired in PT gear and flip-flops, for a journey in sunny SoCal pre-summer broad daylight, for a trip much shorter than the S.S. Minnow's "three-hour tour", and which, in realty, was to be about as eventful.

I headed northwards along a relatively lightly-trafficked stretch of I-5. My trusty steed, a vintage Ford Escort, hummed along doing 80 in the fast lane along the center divider, and just about at the halfway point, nearly adjacent to the I-5/I-405 split, nature took its course.

I was on a straightaway, trying to stay between the inevitable clots of traffic, in the empty stretch in between two herds of cars. And then, the Nap Monster tapped my sleep-deprived tender head from wide awake to out like a light.

Probably for only a split to at most a full second, whereupon I awoke, drifting gently but inexorably towards the only other vehicle anywhere around me, the old green pickup truck in lane #2. Being as young and stupid as any 25-year-old, my brain immediately commanded a full-on goggle-eyed spaz attack, and a panic stab of the brake before I hit the truck a few feet further along.

And now, Physics made an appearance, as the rear of the car made the decision to try and pass the front end, where the engine and drive train was located, the weight therein making it slow down more firmly that the lighter rear wheels.

Fully awake now and stone-cold brilliant, I deftly did exactly what one should do, having made at least two other mistakes already: I got off the brakes, and gently steered the wheel to the right, into the skid the rear end was attempting. And by cracky, it worked! Steve McQueen couldn't have done as well as I did in arresting the skid before it became catastrophic. But being less experienced than Steve, I had mildly overcompensated, and in short order, the rear end now tried to pass me on the left.

It was less urgent this time, and I steered into that skid as well. And once again, it was working. Car still doing 75, and brains doing 190, things were looking pretty good at this point. I worked a couple of smaller corrections in, and things were settling down, but Physics wasn't quite done with me for the day.

Because all this correcting had used up the last thing I didn't quite have enough of, which was space. In this case, between my car, and the adjacent, brand new, concrete barrier rail in the center divider.

Which is when, for an incredible moment time stood still, or at least moved with glacial slowness.

The left front tire kissed the edge of the barrier. Now, a steel barrier would have simply meant grinding metal, slowing, and an annoying slow-motion crunch. But CalTrans had cleverly decided that concrete barriers don't need replacing from accidents as often and expensively as metal barrier rail. And the new concrete barrier was wider at the bottom than the top, with an ever so graceful curvature to its profile.

The result, as wheel kissed concrete, was that I become the newest stuntman on the Dukes Of Hazzard Ride on the I-5. The concrete, instead of slowing me down, merely became the fulcrum to redirect that 75MPH of forward energy, and turn me into the most amazing Flying Corkscrew one could ever witness or experience first hand.

I am now airborne, still headed forward, and starting to spin clockwise.

At this point, the most glaring deficiency lighted the final caution light on my brain's Master Warning Display: seat belt not fastened. Well, FML.

No gibbering moron, I knew what that meant. Impending projectile status, followed by pain and agony, and probably a mangled end to a brief life. Because, pursuant to driving on several military posts, I'd dutifully attended and watched all the mandatory  Blood On The Pavement-esque matinee training films thrown at me, and knew with exquisite clarity my chances outside the vehicle at the speed it and I were currently travelling. Realizing at the last the magnitude of this error, I made a hasty bargain with God: He could, indeed, kill me at His pleasure, but I assured Him that were it so, t'would only be thus if the steering wheel were found at the scene firmly clenched in my lifeless hands, snapped off at the bolts from the steering column from which my trajectory had wrenched it. And so I spun onwards towards Eternity holding the only thing that mattered in a literally death-defying grip.

I'd like to say I saw everything, or that I clenched my eyes and saw nothing, but the truth is somewhere mixed between those options. But I absolutely heard every sound. And it went like this: metal-metal-metal-rubber-metal-metal-metal-rubber, as the car slid on the side, the roof, the other side, the wheels, and continued thusly, all the while as I sat, crouched over, seatbeltless, on the passenger seat, in a washing machine of broken glass and all the other items inside the car, until, after somewhere between 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 twists, we - I, the glass fragments, the debris, my belongings, and my trusty Escort, all came to a simultaneous stop.

And, Sweet Jesus, I was alive and unharmed!
Guardian Angels 1, Senseless Mangled Demise 0!!!
And the crowd went wild!

I braced, in sudden unnatural silence, for what I was sure would be the counter climactic impact with a semi truck hitting me and shattering me into a thousand pieces.
I counted to ten silently.

Then, realizing the ride had come to a full and complete stop, I exited. Upside down, I disentangled my bare feet from amongst the pedals, removed my hands from the steering wheel where, I was certain, one could find my fingerprints pressed into the very plastic to this day. And I crawled out through a much smaller than normal passenger side window to face the day. I emerged, facing upstream in traffic, to a phenomenal sight.

From left to right, there were five lanes of traffic, completely dead-stopped, about 40 feet away from my car, now resting all the way over on the right hand side. And behind each wheel of every car as far as I could fleetingly note, every driver, white knuckles on the steering wheels of their cars, and three huge black "O"s on their face: two huge eyes, and one gaping black mouth, all like giant donuts.

I should have done a quick circus bow, having survived my stunt with such aplomb. Instead, I looked down, saw the handy white line to my left, and stepped approximately three feet over, to now stand off the actual driving lanes of the freeway. I'd crossed 5 lanes in about as many seconds, and ended up upside down and sideways. Driving between packs of cars had evidently given the following traffic time to stop and watch the show without joining in.

My military duffle bag, with six weeks of nasty clothes, had been sitting in the back seat. The ruckus had strewn it across 5 lanes of I-5 for 300 yards. Out of nowhere, a pickup truck with a couple pulled up on the right. They got out, handed me a full duffle bag, and said, "We saw your stuff go flying, so we got out in the stopped traffic, and put it all back in the bag." Which they plopped next to me. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Thanks!" I said.

"Our pleasure!" they replied, jumped into their truck, and were gone, that fast.
{Wherever and whoever you are, God Bless you.}

Traffic now picking it's way around my car, after suitable gawking, I decided getting my other items was in order, so I got down, reached inside, and retrieved my wallet, keys, flip flops and Timex watch from among the glass shards now resting on the roof of the car. Everything important had stayed with the car! The Timex, which 3 years of Marine Corps service on three continents had not broken, now had a shattered crystal, finally killed in a way military service couldn't accomplish. Then I started brushing and picking glass from my hair, eyebrows, and clothing.

Less than 30 seconds post exiting, the unheard off: CHP officer pulls up, looks at me, looks at the car, and asks, "Any survivors?"

"That'd be me."

"You were driving?"

"Yup."

"Didja have your seat belt on?"

"Oh, yes, officer, that's the law!"

He looked inside to assure himself there was no other headless blood-dripping corpse inside, then returned to his car to radio for a tow truck.

Less than a minute later, the local fire truck and ambulance are there. (Nota bene this is a good ten years pre-cellphone era.)
They look at the car, look at me, and ask "Any survivors?"

"Me."

The paramedics see to me, make sure I haven't suffered some hidden calamitous injury.
Learning I'm an off-duty Marine (the high-and-tight haircut, and red and gold PT gear with obvious EGA emblem sort of let that cat out of the bag) "Are you sure you don't want to go to the hospital? The base is right there." And they point to MCAS El Toro over yonder, from which the occasional jet is taking off and landing nearly overhead.

{Why yes, off course, sir. Please take me to the El Toro Base Naval Hospital, thus insuring that I'm in trouble there, and with my CO once he's informed at the speed of telephone that I elected to drive home, crashed my car, and was in all probability going to drive about 20 miles beyond the overnight liberty limits for my post, because I'm not only a lousy driver, but stupid, and I'd like a court martial to go along with my wrecked car, and soon to be jacked insurance rates. Because hey, since I can't drive anywhere, I might as well get a bust in rank and a pay cut plus a gratuitous kick in the junk to go with my misfortune, right?}

"Uh, no thanks sir, I'll be fine once I get the car towed away."

He looked really disappointed not to be able to help me, then his eyes lit up. "Hey, you're bleeding."

I had, in fact, acquired about a 1cm scratch through my t-shirt onto my right shoulder, barely skin deep, as I crawled out of the shattered glass passenger window. Still refusing the hospital ride, he wordlessly rummaged in his jump bag, handed me a band-aid, and an alcohol swab, and the fire department departed.

Now I was left to consider my car. All four wheels folded in flat against the undercarriage, it was, clearly, deader than canned tuna. And in looking at it, I was the one-in-a-million guy: if I had been wearing my seat belt, I'd have been belted upright in a car where the roof was now smashed down to about my collarbone level, and I too would be as dead as the car, and still happily strapped right behind the wheel, with my head helpfully folded out of the way down to the shoulder blades. Kids, don't try this at home!

The tow truck was in reality one of those flat-bed things, that lowered the bed, winched the dead car carcass onto it, strapped it down like an upended turtle, and proceeded to the nearest wreckatorium.

The drive over surface streets was what really drove home my great fortune in being alive, as pedestrians would stop and do a triple take, then stare at us as we made our unescorted procession to the car cemetery.

I finally got to a phone. My fiancee was relieved, because she'd heard there was a terrible accident on the I-5, and she knew how much I hated being stuck in traffic.

Breaking things to her gently, I told her I had good news and bad news. She elected for good news first, so I asked her, "You know that new car purchase we've been thinking about after the wedding...?"

In total, there were anywhere from 3-7 different highly improbable circumstances involved, which having been the recipient of, I have no shyness about calling miracles.
I should have been dead, then and there, several ways.

Instead of laughing about it at home a couple of hours late, as I did my laundry, ate pizza, and arranged to borrow a car to drive back in the morning.

So please, learn from my then-stupidity: If you're tired, pull off the highway and take a nap, or do whatever you need to do to be more awake. Don't drive tired, because it leads to dead with incredible rapidity, and it's just pointless. I don't ever risk it now, because I figure I've used up my share of miracles for one lifetime.

Things Not To Do

Okay, I admit, I could give you easy ones.

Things like:
Don't buttrape the Bill of Rights.

But we've had two probably at least fourteen presidents who say otherwise, so I'm taking a different tack.
Sailing across the wind, rather than into it, is exactly what tacking is, after all.

Let's note, for the record, that the NSA isn't collecting telephone cell records under a court order.

They're collecting them under a large farm of antennae in Maryland, connected to enough raw computing power to crush diamonds, and use Chinese calculus as your log on password. Which they've done since pretty much the day after Marconi invented their stuff.

So rather than get all unpatriotically down on their activities, or throw some hysterical histrionic fit, I'd rather make a few carefully chosen observations.

I note, purely for informational purposes, that you can log on to Google Translate, type in any words, for instance, either a meaningless string of terrorism "alert" words or actual fully-formed sentences laden with those little DHS/NSA sphincter-puckering Easter Eggs. You can also use Translate's player to read the results back to you out loud, record the Siri-like voice(s) as an mp3 that wouldn't match your own voiceprint, get a couple of "burner" phones bought and maintained with cash, and send the resulting canned conversations back and forth at will from, say, Phone A live to Phone B voicemail, and vice versa.
If you're an even sneakier little $#!^, you can use the power of Google translate to convert your English (or whatever) words into Arabic, Pashto, and any number of other high-interest dialects, play those live conversations around, and for nothing invested beyond boredom and keystrokes, invent an entire fictional terror cell, complete with dialog.

Of course, purely for research into your unpublished Clancy-esque novel.

You'd want to take the batteries out of the phones except when you were actually sending yourself a message, and drive somewhere far away from your house or office when you send. *I* can't help it if you drove over to the cell tower nearest the local federal building, or international airport, and I'm certainly not responsible if you sent such a conversation to, for example, a US Embassy where the odds it's being tape-recorded in real time are about 100%.

But I will remind you that making discernible terrorist threats is a crime, and that security cameras record facial features and license plates, which a halloween wig and sunglasses, public transportation, and half an hour reading spy-biz tradecraft from a Barnes and Noble book generally thwarts.

And don't, under any circumstances, send Arabic conversations containing key phrases to voicemail accounts at places like the Southern Poverty Propaganda Center, See B.S. Nudes, Handgun Disarmament International, or the American Criminal Liberties Union, on the weekends, or at 3AM, when no one's going to be there to answer their phones in person. Because sending the dung beetles to investigate terror cells among those groups would be...baaaaaaaad.

Don't do it! Never ever ever.

And while we're on the subject, don't Google half a dozen truly awesome German Enigma emulation websites, translate similar alert-word laden conversations from English into actual Enigma alphanumeric cipher groups in spy-approved blocks of 5 letters/numbers, and then text those coded messages back and forth between the burner phones either. Because you wouldn't want the NSA and DHS goons to waste their precious time cracking obsolete WWII-era encryption, and find a bunch of coded tweets revealing a massive imaginary conspiracy to do nothing but waste their time. So please, I'm begging you, don't do that.

The Reichsicherheitshauptamt told me, if I see something, say something.
But they didn't tell me what to say, so this is what I chose.

April Fools is too precious to only celebrate once a year. So don't do that.

Chaos, panic, disorder. Don't do that either. My work here is done.

They can't stop the signal. So let's absolutely not do that.

That's What Friends Are For

In the period between high school graduation, and getting a life, I had several guy friends I hung out with, pretty much like everyone else back to when cavemen had teenaged offspring.

We liked to sample the local restaurants, both to give Mom's cooking a break, give our fledgling wings of independence a little stretch, and the most important reason of all for 20-something males, to check out waitresses.

One member of our little whitebread posse was, however, shy to the point of painfulness. He would happily check women out with abandon, but was more tongue-tied than Dr. Koothrapali on "Big Bang Theory" when actually in their presence.

But he was a decent guy, and we figured he ought to get a chance to replicate his DNA at some point before senility, so we decided to jump-start a romantic component to the best years of his life. So we had some helpful hints printed up. We came upon two foolproof means of delivering them.

The first was, the next time the weekly youth group newsletter was being sorted for mailing, we volunteered to help out. After carefully stapling our little hints into all the issues being sent to the women in the group.

Phase Two was vastly more simple: my other friends and I made it a point to collect the funds for the check on our field trips into various dining establishments, and just leave one of our little gems along with the tab and tip.

And they were blisteringly simple and straightforward:

Dan Brackett
Eligible Bachelor
(123) 456-7890

It took about four days for the local mail, and we made sure to enjoy a number of nights out on the town, but within about 5 days, Dan had a vague feelilng something was up. On about our fourth dinner out in as many days, he let us know.

"I'm getting calls...it's freaking me out. I don't know why..."

"Whaddya mean, "calls"?

"You know, phone calls. From women. Women I've never heard of."

"Just a second...lemme get the bill sorted out. Everyone kick in."

And we ambled outside to the parking lot, having just hooked Dan up again.

"So, Dan, what's the problem? Don't you like girls?"

"Of course. But my dad answers the phone most times, and he's...a little weird. And I don't know any of these girls."

"Well Dan, we were going to just write your phone number on the check, with "Call me", but we wanted to hook you up with something classier. Take a look."

We pointed Dan to the dining room just as the cute waitress who'd been our server bussed the table. Then noted her looking at our handiwork, followed by running to the server station, and gathering 3-4 other waitresses around to look at what they'd found.

"I don't understand." said Dan.

So we pulled out one of the cards and handed it to Dan.

Panic stricken, he started to lose it.

"Guys! This isn't funny guys! You can't do this to me! You have to stop doing this! I mean it!"

"Well Dan, that's gonna be a problem. Y'see, we put out at least 50 of these in the youth newsletter, so every college age girl in the group got one yesterday or today.

"NO!"

"Sorry, but yes. And we've been dropping a couple of these off with the cash at every restaurant this week too, which probably explains the phone calls. Some of those waitresses were pretty cute, Dan."

"NOOOOOOOOOOOO! You guys better stop. You HAVE to stop! I really mean it!"

"Actually, Dan, you need to consider the fact that we've only used up about 100 cards so far, and we have another 400 left. So if I were you, I'd start thinking of ways to not make us come up with new places to distribute them. Like at the mall, or maybe on the quad at the local university."

We didn't have any more dinners out with Dan for a couple of months. It seems his social calendar got kind of busy, and he had a couple of new girlfriends for a while.

The Cask Of Amontillado

Don was a nice guy, but he liked to taunt people, he thought he knew everything, and he was a freshman. Which is a fatal trifecta in college life.

I forget what started our little go-around, but for whatever reason, Don got on my list.
Not in a malicious, time to go into witness protection way, just sort of a watch your back sort of thing.

And unfortunately for Don, I was not only a fan of Edgar Allan Poe (whence the title reference) but also of Walt Disney; in this case, Cinderella.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. So some weeks later, come Halloween, Don went to a big costume party. And being Don, he did what he usually did, which was drop his keys into the big glass bowl at the front door. Which is why experienced spymasters tell people that predictability can get you killed. Or, in Don's case, worse.

After he dropped off his keys, my wingman kept lookout, and I moved Don's car about three blocks over, then hoofed it back. When I returned, the cones went out, and Don's little orange VW bug got...transmogrified.

Then I dropped the keys back where they'd been, and we rejoined the party, to await the after-party we knew was coming.

Don, of course, was having a great time.
I, dressed up as a magician, complete with stuffed white rabbit in my top hat, at one point told Don he'd been bad. Very, very bad. I took out my Official Magician Magic Wand, told Don to think on his deeds, and said "Poof!"

"Nothing" said Don. "Just like always. You never do anything."
And Don laughed, and went back to his fun.

But, just like in Cinderella, all parties have to end.

So, when it was time to fo home, as usual, Don grabbed his car keys, and headed across the street to drive home.

My friend had his watch on stopwatch mode.

Exactly forty-seven seconds elapsed before Don, breathless, flushed, and diaphoretic, came running back inside.

"My car's gone!"

"Gone?" said everyone. "How?" "Why?" "Who'd touch your piece of crap beetle?" And best of all, "Where did you park it?"

"Right over there!" whined Don.

"Let's go look for it!" said everyone.

And in a matter on moments, they found Don's car.
Except where had been a beat-up 1960s orange VW bug, was now a 1980s large orange pumpkin. With 4 large plastic toy car wheels, just like Don's custom rims. And 4 white plastic horses, attached by leather shoelace reins, and driven by a small white cat toy mouse. With a coach whip and a little paper top hat.

Stacy saw it, and bent down to examine the pumpkin. "What's your license, Don?"

Don repeated his license plate number.

"They match" said Stacy.

"Why Don," I said, "it appears that somehow, your car has magically been turned into a pumpkin."

"That's not funny!" he protested.

"Oh yes it is!" said someone in the crowd.
"You shouldn't have stayed past midnight." said one of the other girls.
"Your fairy godmother's going to be pretty pissed at you." said one of Don's friends.

This was going even better than I'd hoped.

"Seriously, dudes, where's my car??" begged now-frantic Don.

"Why Don, I was at the party all night. And you know me. I never do anything, right?"

"Okay, well...maybe I was...mistaken."

"Maybe? Don, you should know never to mess with magic powers beyond your understanding. Bad things can happen."

"Now let's go inside, and see what we can do about finding your car."

And, once again, Don dropped his keys into the glass dish in the hall.
Whereupon wingman scooped them up unobtrusively, retrieved the car, re-parked it, and hid the pumpkin and accessories.

He got back just as Don was finishing his phone call to his parents, explaining he couldn't find his car. It was hard to look sad along with him without laughing out loud.

"Don, I think you've learned your lesson. So I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to tell you how to find your car."

Don was a broken almost-man now.

"Close your eyes. Click your heels together three times, and say "There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home."

"That's stupid! Where's my car?!"

"Don, haven't you learned yet? Don't mess with the magic. Just do it."

Click. Click. Click. "There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home."

"See how easy that was? Good night, Don."

And Don went outside, and found his car magically restored, right where it was supposed to be.

And he ran to his car, and almost hugged it. Then he drove home.
For the rest of college, whenever Don would get too full of himself, all we had to do was flash him a postcard picture of a fat little pumpkin and 4 plastic horses. Thank you, Dr. Pavlov.

And Don was always good, and never questioned the Magic again.

Christmas at College

College is obviously a time of learning and serious study.

But studies of primates have repeatedly demonstrated that the higher the intelligence, the greater such a mind finds need for play. Not just because they can, but that the mind needs play breaks in order to maintain its sharpness in the same way the cook's knife needs to be stropped on the steel from time to time in order to carve cleanly.

With that need in mind, and lest these lessons forever fall out of group knowledge, a couple of examples from my earlier visits to the realm of higher education.

Lesson One: Snowman

I attended college in Santa Barbara. Consequently, snow was a rare commodity, and many of my fellow students missed the seasonal joys, such as making snow men. But, clever minds can always find a way through a problem.

First, get the largest envelope you can find. Not a letter envelope, but something more like one of the overnight things used by the USPS or FedEx: large, square, shiny cardboard contraptions. Or at least, the biggest manila envelope you can locate. As long as it's less than 30 inches wide, it will suffice.

In fact, for this reason you can get two or three of them.

Second, you need to locate someone studying. Not studying just anywhere, but studying in their dorm room. This is key. Ideally, they should be 1) alone, and 2) not able to run as fast as you. This point will become clear in a moment.

Third, and probably most important, you need a few bucks cash to buy several cans of men's shaving cream.

Once you've assembled your components, the rest is relatively easy.

You then squirt the contents of the shaving cream can(s) into your envelope(s) until they are full to oozing. Surreptitiously creep to the door of your intended snowman (or snowwoman). Slide the envelope(s) under the edge of their dorm room door - without going past the inner edge, as this will needlessly tip off your prey. This should all be done with the silence of a cat burglar.

Now, with great alarcrity, pound the living daylights out of their door. Do NOT speak. If they call out, merely continue to pound. If you've ever had your door "cop knocked" by the local constables, you know the fervency of door-knocking to which to aspire.

When you can hear them approaching the door, and ideally, before they open it, jump, stomp, or drop heavy books (that aren't yours) on your envelopes.

Now, RUN.

Because your prey is now covered head to toe in shaving cream, which has spewed forth under the door, and sprayed upward and inward with wild abandon.

If you can arrange to have any number of persons handy to record the scene by photo or video for you, and who are innocent of the crime, and thus not likely to be pummelled, so much the better.

The pictures are guaranteed to be hilarious.
And very snowman-like (minus the corncob pipe and two eyes made out of coal).
And the shaving cream cleans rather simply - once it dries, in a day or so.

Obviously, if someone subsequently pounds the daylights out of your dorm room door, DUCK.

And if you try this in reverse, on passersby while you are inside your own dorm room, you're on your own.

Lesson Two: White Christmas

The dorm I lived in had an upright vacuum cleaner for use by residents, and to vacuum the hallways.

However, if you can gain access to someone else's room while they are, say, studying in the library, you too can help them enjoy a snowy day.

First, unscrew the overhead light fixture.

Replace it with a chain pull-operated socket (about $3 at Home Depot) that screws into the fixture, and replaces the bulb.
Do NOT replace the bulb.

Plug the upright vacuum cleaner into this overhead fixture - with the light switch off - after opening/removing the collection bag. Test it to make sure it goes on when the light switch is flicked on.

Place the sucking end of the vacuum into a large box full of flour. Two bags are better than one. Point the vacuum's exhaust outlet as you see fit.

Optional: plug in a tape player cued to the opening words of "White Christmas," such that flicking the light switch turns on the vacuum and the tape simultaneously.

Lastly, if there is a hallway light, unscrew it, to make the room even darker. Do not attempt this trick in daylight hours. Duh.

Await your mark's return.

They will typically open their door, flick on the light, and hear "VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"
Sometimes, they will do this two or three times. It's far funnier if they also hear Bing Crosby crooning "White Christmas," of course, but that may not always be possible.

3-5 seconds, let alone 10-20, from most decent vacuums, will cover everything in a 15x15 room with a thick layer of flour powder. And I mean everything.

Which they will discover, once they turn off the overhead switch, and blindly stagger to a desk lamp or what not.

Merry Christmas.

And may all your Christmases be white.

Barking Mad

I don't dislike dogs, but I've never owned one, and was not raised with one as a family pet.

Frankly, I see this as no fault, much as I admire such loyal and faithful companions.

Why can best be explained by a lesson in my formative years. It was a balmy Southern California evening, with nothing much on TV, and little constructive I felt like doing.

What follows may help to explain the ancient Greek adage: "Beat your child once a week. Even if you don't know why you're doing it, he will."

I went and found my baby brother (who stopped being my little brother long about 4th grade, when he began to outgrow me) and we headed out to the back yard. Then we climbed up the barred window of my father's workshop, and onto the garage roof. It was the one place where we knew no adult would ever be, and our parents had long since stopped trying to keep us off of it, usually warning us only to avoid falling off and killing ourselves.

This night, it was a stage. Because we had cats, whereas nearly every other neighbor had dogs. I'd never been to their houses or yards, but I knew this was so.

I demonstrated this contention to my baby brother thusly:
"Watch this."

Whereupon I began, rather convincingly, to bark, yap, and woof. Like some scrappy mutt, I kept at it, growling, barking, and generally annoying the bejeezus out of the neighbor's two hounds. So they started barking back at me.

BB thought this was cool, but I was just getting started.

Walking to the opposite corner of the roof, I barked some more. In no time, I had the other neighbor's faithful yard patrol barking back at me.

I barked more. Louder. More frequently. Soon the dogs beyond each neighbors' house began barking back, which only intensified the dogs nearest us. I continued.

In a matter of 2-3 minutes, I'd succeeded in getting every dog in a 20-house radius to bark their fool heads off, each in turn aggravating their fellows all the more.

Then, I stopped, sat down, and basked in the cacophony of canine commotion I had ignited.
It was raucous, terrible, horrible, and glorious. It completely drowned out my laughter and that of my brother.

In another eternal 2 minutes of howling madness, porch lights began snapping on, spreading down the block like ripples on a pond, and owners' voices could be heard shushing, yelling, and berating their pets roundly and scathingly.

The din ebbed, and I immediately began egging them on, quickly rousing one and all to full voice once again.

Porch lights snapped back on, and now owners could be seen and heard going out and corraling their animals.

At this point, exuent myself and my padawan brother, having successfully killed almost 15 minutes at no cost to ourselves, with a form of entertainment whose price was above rubies, as we returned inside the only house in the neighborhood shrouded in a cocoon of blissful peace.

Impala tsunami

It never rains in California, except when it pours. For days.

During one of those interminable bouts of November downpour, one of my best high school friends came over, and off we went in search of mischief. This is what juvenile semi-delinquents, and most other teenagers, do when faced with the prospect of a boring Saturday.

We left in my friend's venerable old Imapala station wagon, late 60s model IIRC, a testimony to the true utility of a V8 engine and 4000 pounds of steel. It was a gloomy day, but not raining as much at the moment, and so we went out and about to look for something to truly put the Impala through its paces. A wet empty lot to do spin outs, or such like.

As fate would have it, we were cruising along a main boulevard when I, riding shotgun, spied two kids up a side street, probably about 10 years old, out walking in the momentarily halted drizzle of the day.

Two things sealed their fate:
The side of the street they were on had water up to the curb.
They were approaching a 200' stretch of sidewalk next to a brick wall with no exit.

With the reflexes of Richard Petty, my friend downshifted, slowed, pulled a 180 and then a quick left, and pulled over to the right curb to await our quarry enterring the trap. Lions in Africa aren't this cunning, or half as ruthless.

In a matter of seconds, our two oblivious pigeons toddled, bundled up as best as their moms would allow, from coats to rubber boots, into the kill zone half a block in front of us.

As they approached the midpoint, we tightened out seatbelts, and I turned to my friend and said "Ramming speed!"

He gunned the engine, and 400+ cubic inches of Detroit powerplant went from a gentle purr to a roaring din.

Halfway to our target, physics took over. The sound waves reached the prey. They were on the left side of the street, but no matter. Laws are for other people. My friend swerved across the narrow sidestreet, and put his left side tires right in the gutter mere inches from the curb.

We hit the puddled gutter water with a thump, and immediately, a left-side bow wave 8 feet high began to WHOOSH up, across the sidewalk, and into the cinderblock wall.

Realization dawned on our two pigeons. It was comedy gold. One of them, certainly the fat one, pivoted like a ballerina, and began to waddle as fast as his little legs could carry him to the end of the brick wall. It was pathetic, and utterly hilarious, because a cursory glance at our inexorable progress showed he never had a chance of escape. But at least the little guy was game, and not going down laying there.

His partner, probably the smarter of the two, just stood there. He'd done the math, and realized his fate. No way forward, and too far back, he watched the tsunami approach him, water arcing like snow from a snowblower, his little lower lip in a fatalistic pout, his eyes big as salad plates, and his feet rooted to the spot. Looking daggers at us, and utterly bereft of mortal hope he awaited his certain doom.

He was hosed in a split second, water pouring into every crevice of his clothes from head to toe.

Fatso was just ahead, mere seconds from a chance at freedom to the left, when the wave hit him too. Water pummeled his body and head, and knocked him sideways. He stumbled, bounced off the bricks, and slid to a stop in the muddy grass of the parkway, 10 yards short of his goal.

As the sight of two very soggy 10 year olds screaming every shrill curse they could muster receded into our rear view mirrors, we motored off into the grey oblivion, having meted out the day's dose of Fate to the unwary, and our hearts were glad.

A Little Night Music

I attended a small liberal arts college in Southern California, and the dorms were coed in the sense that one floor was inhabited by men, and the other by women. We all shared the kitchen, activity room, TV lounge, etc.

Back in the day, when first constructed, it was an all-female building. The office (now the Resident Assistants' office) was next to the lounge (now the TV lounge). When a gentleman called to visit a lady, the office had an intercom system that connected to every (female's) room in the dorm, and the lady would be informed that so-and-so was waiting in the lobby to see her.

Thirty years later, and all that was quaintly passé. But much of the hardware was still mostly intact, a fact which bears greatly on what follows.

The dorm, by my occupancy, was confirmedly and overwhelmingly the "freshman" dorm, other than a bare few holdouts and the junior and senior-level R.A.s, one of whom had the duty in the office each night, to check out keys to the small kitchen, loan out ping pong paddles and such, and adjudicate disputes when they infrequently arose over what TV program should be watched.

Occasionally, this would require the R.A. to leave the office, as would the necessity to use the bathroom, get a book from their room 1 or 2 floors up, or settle loud music complaints upstairs, etc. So, the R.A.s would be only too happy to trust the few upperclassmen in residence to mind the store for them on those infrequent trips away from their duty post.

Foolish, foolish mortals.

Because the year I lived there as a new freshman, two of the upperclassmen were Jeff and Steve. Jeff and Steve were, in a word, nerds. Geeks, in fact. The honestly hyperstudious, pocket-protector wearing, slide-rule toting ubergeeks of lore and legend. Super-nice guys, if rather socially challenged. The kind of person who could actually build their own C-3PO, at least partially because they needed the company.

So naturally, they were, more often than not, asked to mind the store when one or another R.A. was momentarily called away for one emergency upstairs or another. Being the inquisitive sort, they soon discovered the 1950s era intercom console tucked under the counter in the office. And they'd seen the presumably useless speakers in their, and every other dorm resident's room. Then their inate techno-geek combined with being just disreputable enough to be truly evil geniuses.

They experimented.

Over the course of one and a half semesters, they trouble-shot the sytem, and worked out the arcana of its functions. They replaced tubes, rewired transistors, and generally brought the large metal box back to full life.

Then, the night before spring mid-terms, they struck.

They put a timer and a top-drawer amplifier and tape deck under the cabinet, wired to the intercom system. But importantly, only for the speakers on the 3rd (women's) floor.

Set for 3:30 AM.

'Twas the night before midterms and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

Then, at the tic of an LED at 0330 hours, the first faint strains of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture (with cannons) began to filter into every darkened dorm room on the 3rd floor. Gradually and inexorably it built in volume, enhanced to get even louder by Jeff and Steve's tape, as it whirred quietly under the 1st floor counter of the R.A. office, where they'd surreptitiously placed it earlier that evening.

Jeff and Steve knew about the reaction, because they sat watching on the hillside opposite one side of the dorm, bundled up, waiting for Chaos.

One by one, lights on the 3rd floor clicked on, until they were all on. The culprits heard the screams, shouts, and wails. They heard women pounding on the previously unhated speakers. And they heard the roar and boom of taped cannons.

Joy warmed their hearts.

Unbeknownst to them, a mob was forming. Three score of enraged pajama-clad women formed an ad hoc lynch mob.

Unfortunately for himself, meek and mild freshman Alex was just returning from an all-night cram session with friends from another dorm. He had just alighted the landing to the 2nd floor when the leading edge of the mob spied him, up and about, as they descended from the floor above.

"There he is!" rose the accusative cry. "Get him!"

Alex had a defining moment. Faced with a wall of homicidal women, he ran like the wind. Down the hall. Into his room. Locked the door. Pushed the dresser in front of it. "What the @$#@?" asked his roommate. Then the thunder of approaching teenaged fury. Then the pounding on the door. The screams. The frenzy. The utter angst.

Other dorm room doors opened. Insults were exchanged. Flash bulbs went off, as photos were taken. Laughter ensued as the plaintive story unfolded. R.A.s sought to reintroduce the rule of law, and eventually, the unsatiated mob returned sullenly to their bedrooms. Where they methodically ripped and clawed every last now-silent speaker from their decades-old homes in the walls.

Jeff and Steve basked in the glow of the Chaos they created. The next night, they quietly removed their equipment, carefully unwired the intercom box so it couldn't be used on their floor in retaliation, and crept back into oblivion, their perfidy undiscovered.

They revealed the origins of the stunt the following fall term to a select few former dorm residents, including this writer.

They are, and ever shall be, prank gods.