Via Gawker, “Scary-Good Friday the 13th Prank Is Also Terrifyingly Dangerous.” I was going to post the YouTube video, but fuck giving the guy who uploaded it additional views.
You can see it at Gawker if you’d like, but here’s a summary: Guy who fancies himself a serial prankster dresses up like Jason from the Friday the 13th slasher films and walks around town cranking up a chainsaw (with no chain, but the poor bastards he’s confronting don’t know that) and chasing random people around.
As I said, this idiot is a serial prankster, and it’s frankly amazing that no one has shot him yet. Someone in Miami almost did when he chased random people around pretending to be a zombie.
Look, I like pranks, provided they’re not stupid or abusive. The Miami zombie thing, while dumb and dangerous to the perpetrator (It’s Florida! There are lots of guns!), didn’t involve a simulated weapon.
But the chainsaw thing? Dick maneuver, prankster. You terrorized innocent people. And I couldn’t help but notice a lot of them were women and African Americans. Whatsamatter, afraid a white dude will cold shoot your stupid ass? Maybe the lack of return fire makes sense after all…
This is an open thread, so please feel free to discuss great pranks, stupid pranks or whatever. I have some good prank stories of my own, but it’s time to get back to the paying gig…maybe later.
Linda Featheringill
Friday the 13th is a day for pranks? When did that start?
elmo
I hate nearly all pranks, because nearly all pranks derive their so-called amusement factor from causing people embarrassment, and I don’t find other people’s embarrassment even a little bit funny. For the same reason, I can’t stand 90% of movie or TV comedies.
Just the way I’m wired, I guess.
RSR
In Philadelphia, it’s Friday the Firkinteenth. ~30 different craft beer firkins pouring at the celebrated Grey Lodge Pub.
http://instagram.com/p/eNOIP7NsAg/
Redshirt
I like to think I have a good sense of humor, but I hate all pranks. All of them. I hate Candid Camera and any other type show. NOT FUNNY!
Ben Franklin
Jimmy Kimmel and other publicity whores set an excellent example.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/jimmy-kimmel-reveals-behind-twerking-girl-fire-video-article-1.1450689
David in NY
Mitt Romney played pranks.
Zifnab
There was a club on my college campus – Knights of something or other – that ran around doing pranks from year to year.
They ran a Milk chugging contest, where you paid $5 to try and down a gallon of milk in an hour. The “surprise” prize was another gallon of milk.
They also followed around the Dean of the University for a day dressed in a Barney costume.
I also think a few of them streaked campus once or twice.
Pretty harmless, and it made for a bit of excitement in the middle of the day. I don’t mind that sort of thing.
David in NY
George W. Bush played pranks.
Botsplainer
My favorite prank was performed on an officemate the morning before he left on vacation. He’d been getting stupid treatment from a judge on a case involving a claim he was working on defending for a close personal friend. I mocked up a sua sponte order for summary judgment with signature, ran it through the thermal paper fax machine as if faxed, and set the damage hearing to occur midweek and to include punitive damages. I put it in his box and waited for the fun.
It was great. He was cussing and stomping around, rattling the paper and yelling about the judge. I broke the news as he was dialing the judge to cuss him out.
Villago Delenda Est
@David in NY:
Yeah, that “let’s invade Iraq!” prank was hilarious.
Especially the part where he’s looking under his desk in the Oval Office for Saddam’s WMDs.
Richard Cohen was rolling on the floor over that one.
tybee
i posted this a bit earlier and if you live east of okeechobee…be advised:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/12/dengue-fever-presenceinfloridaataprettyseriouslevel.html
dww44
I don’t know if Friday the 13th has anything to do with this, but I see no Newsmax headlines on the top right. For that I’m thankful.
Snarki, child of Loki
Yet another entry in the “Florida Man” twitter feed?
Must be something in the water.
Joey Maloney
@elmo: I’m with you. What I call “humiliation comedy” just makes me cringe, and that’s nearly all sitcoms these days.
Gozer
You know who else played pranks? [/Godwin]
Patricia Kayden
@Gozer: Obama?
srv
Maybe Putin can defuse this prankster situation.
raven
Maybe this was a prank. I ran a fairly large municipal softball, 138 teams in 18 leagues, and we had this one guy that was a total pain in the ass for the six years I was in charge. When I left there to come to Athens my head up and I colluded on great plan to have seven umpires on the last game this jerk played in my program. Lots of people showed up and hooted and hollered at this clown, it was great!
raven
On my 60th my wife flew my best friends in from Berkley and Tucson. I was working in my office upstairs on Friday afternoon when someone knocked at my door. When I opened it and saw them I almost passed out I was do disoriented. I had insisted on NO PARTY SHIT for my 60th and she totally defused me with that one!
MattF
I guess pranks are OK if the target is inanimate– but otherwise, it’s a kind of aggression. And in the case of carrying around a chainsaw, not very sublimated.
Hawes
Back before email, I’d pilfer people’s stationery and write memos in their name. I actually had some faculty convinced the school was going to DNA test their dogs and compare it to the shit that was exposed when the snow melted every spring.
MomSense
@Snarki, child of Loki:
see comment#11
raven
A congressman, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), once lost an arm-wrestling match against Russian president Vladimir Putin, and now he has told the world about it. TPM’s Igor Bobic caught the interview on California radio.
A Russian delegation including Putin was visiting Washington in the early 1990s. Everybody got to drinking. Then:
“So we got down to these arm-wrestling matches and I ended up being paired off with Putin!” he continued. “And he’s a little guy but boy I tell ya — he put me down in a millisecond. He is tough! He just – muscles were just unbelievable.”
gbear
I used to carpool to the U of M with a woman who was deathly afraid of a wooden slat bridge that we used to cross to get over a busy street on campus (Washington Ave). Once when we were at the crest of the arched walkway, I dropped to my knees, threw my hands in the air and let out a holler. I found out that wasn’t a very good prank.
schrodinger's cat
I did this when I was in grade school, in my school we had those old timey desks. I tied the pigtails of the girl who sat ahead of me, to the wooden backrest of the bench. It was hilarious when she tried to get up. I was a bad kitteh!
Another Holocene Human
Remember when Universal’s Halloween Horror nights were “really” scary with people jumping out of corners and people goosing the marks until some folks sued and they had to get all “tame”?
There’s a point where you’ve crossed the line from joke to assault, and everyone’s lines are different.
I learned that in elementary school when we were supposed to be decorating the basement for the Halloween haunted house and I found out that Hitler rising from his grave was not the kind of scary they were going for.
BethanyAnne
Well, there’s a classic casket prank: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YXb7kdnDsEU
schrodinger's cat
Another prank in high school, we dusted the chalk board with talc. It is invisible but when you try to write on the board you can’t. We did this to a substitute math teacher, she was in tears when she couldn’t write on the board.
scuffletuffle
@gbear: That is pure awesomeness! Did she ever see the humor in it?
El Tiburon
Dick move for sure.
Pranks like this are fun because they do scare the victim but it is so ludicrous that it can only be funny.
Also, not sure if this one is real, but it is genius.
gbear
@scuffletuffle: She was too high strung to think that it was even remotely funny. I’m lucky she didn’t start crying.
Another Holocene Human
@Hawes: Now that is a funny prank.
One of my coworkers had an ex-supervisor (oh, there’s a reason it’s “ex”) convinced one day that his boss had put a tracker on the supervisor vehicles to check on their productivity–no idle threat as this guy liked to fuck off home to watch football on duty.
Another good one was when my shift supervisor pranked the morning guy when we did close every night. The morning guy would turn up early and try to get us not to lock up (uh… really?) and would also jump up and down about all the changes to opening procedure, like really over the top. So my shift supervisor pulled the real change list, photocopied it, and added a bunch of stuff to it and left it where the real one should be. Like clockwork, morning guy turned up an hour early, chatting, irritating us, then he saw the change list. He freaked the ___ out, where ___ is what a super christian says when he wants to cuss up a storm but has promised himself he won’t. The truth was revealed and he had pretty good humor about it.
Mnemosyne
I am not at all fond of pranks, probably because I have four older brothers who loved them, so I was a victim way too many times for me to find that funny anymore. I don’t mind pranks like the one Jimmy Kimmel did because he was hoaxing viewers, not innocent bystanders who then had their reactions recorded on camera for everyone else to mock.
I guess I like hoaxes, but not pranks. Is that too narrow a distinction?
ranchandsyrup
Many spanish speaking countries and Greece believe that Tuesday the 13th is unlucky. In Italy it is Friday the 17th (for the older generations).
Jay S
@Linda Featheringill: This was put up on You tube on the 12th apparently in anticipation of the 13th. I haven’t watched the video but it sounds like it might have been staged.
Another Holocene Human
@Joey Maloney: Same here. Always hated it, even as a child.
Also, I hated that guy on Sesame Street, the muppet prankster who is always laughing hysterically. He seemed evil to me.
Fort Geek
In my Web Design class one of my classmates and I pranked each other. My favorite one was taking a screen-cap of his computer desktop, setting the resulting jpeg as the desktop wallpaper, then hiding the real icons. Took him a few minutes to figure out why clicking on stuff didn’t do anything.
His response was to “adjust” my network settings so my computer couldn’t go online. Would have been funnier, but that night I wasn’t working on anything that required Internet access.
Another Holocene Human
@tybee: There is no tropical disease outbreak in Florida. There is no tuberculosis outbreak in Florida. There is no HIV outbreak in Florida.
scav
Altering peoples’ .cshrc files if they forgot to log off were the best I remember. Changing the ls list command to list the directory above was one of the better ones. The one they got me with was the message “Paper Quantity Exceded” when I tried to print. Upside? Everyone in the lab eventually got good at remembering to log out and knew what a .cshrc file was.
Betty Cracker
When we were kids, my sister and I used to stage fake séances and scare the crap out of other kids in the neighborhood. We’d invite them over for a séance and set up scary things to happen before they got there. For example, we’d balance books on the edge of shelves with a piece of ice so the book would fall down when it melted. We’d tape a baggie of dried, crunchy leaves under the table and then crush it with our toes when “summoning the spirits” so it would sound like footsteps. Stuff like that. Kids would run out of the house screaming their heads off. I guess that was kind of mean.
Randy P
I’ve seen some pictures of things done to people’s cubicles when you knew they were away on travel. If it’s not actually destructive, I think those are pretty funny. My favorite was carefully wrapping every individual item in aluminum foil. If that was my cube, i’d laugh my ass off and appreciate the effort and creativity put into it. Heck, i’d probably buy the perpetrators a round of beer.
Another Holocene Human
@tybee: Nice, if you get the end of the article you get a taste of the terrible medical care we get in Florida even if you have health insurance and can afford a doctor. It’s fucking atrocious.
cckids
@Mnemosyne:
I’m in this group too. I really don’t like seeing people publicly humiliated, almost none of them deserve it. But the hoaxes? Can be brilliant.
My favorite was a few years ago, the morning DJ’s on our local pop station announced that the state of NV was going to start taxing people’s pets. You’d be charged something like $1 per pound; they would be going house to house to check up & be sure that all pets were registered. And yes, of course, horses count as pets.
They got hundreds of phone calls, all very butt-hurt about government overreach & a surprisingly large number appalled that horses were considered pets.
They had to cut it short & announce that it was a prank (hello, April Fools?), to get the phone calls to stop.
gbear
Back in the 60’s, we used to do a prank where you’d slip a rubber band through the holes on a large button, bend a large bobby pin into a V-shape, hook the ends of the rubber band to the ends of the bobby pin, and then twirl the button until the rubber band was thoroughly wound up.
Then you’d place it up under some papers that someone was going to go through. When the papers got light enough, the button would start spinning and slapping against the paper, usually scaring the hell out of the victim, and our tween-age selves would laugh and laugh and laugh.
The other good rubber band prank was to put the rubber band around the contol on the side rinse at the kitchen sink and then point it towards the front of the sink. Whoever turned on the water would get their shirt soaked, and we’d laugh and laugh.
Amir Khalid
No pranks to tell of, unfortunately. However, AFP reports Barack Obama will be visiting Malaysia on his Asian tour next month. This will be the first visit by a US President since Lyndon Johnson came by in 1966, and had a village named after him. It should make up for John McCain and Lindsay Graham being here last year.
nineone
@Another Holocene Human:
schrodinger's cat
I once told my brother who is six years younger and was an annoying tyke, that he was adopted.
ETA: I read this somewhere, someone told their annoying younger brother that he was an ewok and his parents had shaved him.
ruemara
@Fort Geek: Classic. In the old print shop I used to do overnights in, we’d do that, take the system file for an error and customize it in P’shop and set it as the startup screen. Plus, setting the colours for the system to eyeblinding, clashing neon shades you could hardly look at. And is there anything better than belches as system noises?
rikyrah
Florida bars Obamacare aides at public health centers
By Steve Benen
Fri Sep 13, 2013 10:04 AM EDT
We’ve been keeping an eye on Republican efforts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, including the recent focus on “navigators.” Leave it to Florida to take this to a new level.
To briefly recap, the Obama administration has partnered with organizations nationwide to hire navigators who’ve been tasked with helping American consumers navigate the new system and sign up for benefits they’re legally entitled to. Unsure if you’re eligible for your state’s exchange marketplace? A navigator can help. Confused about how to choose the coverage plan that’s best for you? A navigator can guide you through it.
Republican officials have determined that cracking down on navigators may help keep the uninsured from signing up for coverage. But Florida is taking this to levels unseen elsewhere.
Yes, actually, it is blatant and shameful, though Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) administration doesn’t seem to care
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/09/13/20476543-florida-bars-obamacare-aides-at-public-health-centers?lite
different-church-lady
Darn — would have been a frontrunner for a Darwin Award.
p.a.
Happy Josiah S. Carberry Day everyone!
Anoniminous
Being the anal unhumorous person that I am, I despise pranks and hoaxes. On one job an engineer thought he would be April Fool clever by re-routing test equipment lights so the tests would always fail.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
I fired his ass.
Randy P
Here’s a prank I planned but didn’t happen. My wife had a possibility of teaching a summer term abroad, in Italy. This would be in English to students from her University. No language requirement. But I was going to help her work up an opening speech in Italian as if the course were to be taught in Italian.
She loved the idea and would have done it. But alas, her course was cancelled.
different-church-lady
@schrodinger’s cat: When I was a teenager I said that as a joke to a friend. Turned out she actually was adopted and I didn’t know.
Awkward…
schrodinger's cat
@different-church-lady: True, in my defense I was 10 and brother was 4, my mother was not happy with me.
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: Why were they in Malaysia? Not to start a new war, I hope.
gogol's wife
I’m in the camp that likes hoaxes, not pranks. The Alan Sobel prank with the fake deconstructionist article was great.
ETA: I mean hoax, not prank.
ranchandsyrup
@schrodinger’s cat: My parents told me my brother came from the local drug store so I would go in there and ask where they kept the babies. That went on for about a year or so.
They also told me when I was 5 that my dad’s friend Steve was Steve Austin, the 6 Million Dollar Man. I challenged him to jump over the house to prove it. While I was running through the house to see if he jumped over he hopped the fence. So I told everyone possible that I met Steve Austin for a couple of years.
Good times. For my parents, apparently.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Olds alert.
shelly
‘Yes, actually, it is blatant and shameful, though Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) administration doesn’t seem to care”
********
Well, remember when they threatened to jail people trying to register voters?
Another Holocene Human
@scav: Paper Quantity Exceeded is a good one.
That reminds me of high school programming class. The teacher had written a login menu script and one of the kids wrote a fake one and loaded it up for someone who forgot to log out. (We were working on PCs, 386’s IIRC, so you can imagine how miserable that was.)
MikeJ
@ruemara:
It was never meant as a prank, but I used to use the windows blue screen screen saver. When I was working at the Q I went to lunch one day and when I got back several people were telling me they had no idea what happened but my computer had crashed while running the xml conversion process. Of course it was just my screen saver. To make it funnier, it was running on a linux laptop, displaying a windows blue screen.
gbear
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Yeppers.
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
Just to say hello, apparently. As far as I know, neither is on any US Senate committee that is concerned with Malaysia.
ruemara
@MikeJ: bwah! Were you surrounded by end-users? The best one I did was making a bomb screen and putting in a false code for a startup.
The Dangerman
Do we know the “prankster” isn’t George Zimmerman?
raven
Who put the bullet in the oven?
Belafon
OT: Syria has signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. We still have a long way to go, but it wasn’t Putin that got us there.
Poopyman
@schrodinger’s cat: When I was three and my sister was nine, she told me not that I was adopted, but that the police had brought me. And if I didn’t do what she told me, they’d take me back.
What is it with you older sisters?
Jane2
@Belafon: Oh yeah it was, as much as the eleventy-dimensional US chess players.
Amir Khalid
To my knowledge, there’s no tradition of pranks on Black Friday — around these parts, anyway. Just when did start in America, and how widespread is it?
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: I don’t know. April 1st is the official prank day, but I seem to recall hearing about Friday the 13th pranks for awhile now. Maybe because 4/1 is just too obvious?
Citizen_X
@Gozer:
The Joker!
ranchandsyrup
McCain’s gonna write an op-ed for Pravda. This is going to go well. http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/09/13/exclusive_john_mccain_will_attack_vladimir_putin_in_the_pages_of_pravda#.UjNf8qKr3wA.twitter
schrodinger's cat
@Poopyman: Have to keep the young ones in check, by any means necessary.
gbear
@ranchandsyrup: Could it be any worse than Bachmann, Gohmert and King in Egypt? I suppose it could…
Gravenstone
@Citizen_X: That Joke was just a killer.
Glidwrith
I wasn’t the one that pulled the prank but – you’ve seen the long-haired hamsters? In the dorm, someone had one that liked to let it roam down the hallway in an exercise ball. Someone else had a pair of earmuffs that looked EXACTLY like the fur of the hamster. They distracted the hamster owner, grabbed the ball and replaced the hamster with the ear muffs. They then sent the ball rolling down the hallway towards the stairwell. Did I mention this was on the third floor?
The owner didn’t make it in time and the ball went bouncing down all the way to the basement. We heard him yelling “Widgeeeeeeeeet” as he raced the ball all the way down. There was a moment of silence, then floating up the stairwell was “You A___H__LES!!!!!”
raven
@Glidwrith: You see this dude?
Porcupine that thinks he is a puppy
Felonius Monk
To pull an idea from an earlier thread — perhaps someone should have just kicked Mr. Prankster in the balls.
ranchandsyrup
@gbear: Unfortunately, it looks like we’re gonna find out. How do you say tire swing in Russian?
balconesfault
First I heard of that prank was about 30 years ago – someone at Princeton pulled it during a showing of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
At least that one had the benefit of being in context, for a crowd of people who wanted to have the crap scared out of them.
Here, it would not bother me one whit had someone pulled a gun and dropped him in his tracks.
Origuy
@ranchandsyrup: Grampa thinks the Soviet Union still exists. The print version of Pravda is pretty much irrelevant these days, and pravda.ru has no connection with it. Argumenty i Fakty would be the appropriate venue.
raven
@ranchandsyrup: Life is Just a Tire Swing
Life was just a tire swing
Jambalaya is the only song I could sing
Blackberry picking, eating fried chicken
Never knew a thing about pain
Life was just a tire swing
scuffletuffle
@gbear: What a shame…I would have dined out for life telling people how I sh*t myself thinking you’d fallen through the bridge! That’s just plain funny.
Keith P.
It must be exhausting trying to find things to get outraged about.
cckids
@Poopyman: Must be something. When I was 3, I fell & cracked my head; needed 20+ stitches. My older sister (she was 7) told me all my brains had leaked out with my blood and I’d be “undead” from then on.
I don’t remember being such a bitch to my little sisters.
Trollhattan
Bad: Being chased by a guy with a running chainsaw.
Worse: Being chased by Rand Paul with a bong.
Mike in NC
@The Dangerman:
We can very much look forward to Zimmy’s next prank, hopefully the one that blows up in his face.
Amir Khalid
@ranchandsyrup:
@Origuy:
Since Pravda is largely irrelevant now, it seems only fitting that it should print a guest editorial by an American politician himself largely irrelevant now. TPM reports McCain saying he’s probably in his last term.
Glidwrith
@raven: Yep, pretty darn funny. I kept thinking “Don’t go against the grain! DON’T GO AGAINST THE GRAIN!”
Redshift
At the place I used to work, there was a tradition that if you went on vacation (a real vacation, not just a long weekend), people did something to your office or cubicle. The most spectacular was when the originator of this tradition was away — we took parts of an unused cubicle, and made his cubicle into a solid cube (including a roof.)
Eric U.
blue screen of death screensaver. I used it for a while, and it even freaked me out even though I put it on my own machine. Microsoft finally changed the operating system to disable it. I think the authors changed it, but it wasn’t as good
I think the Jimmy Kimmel thing is hilarious. He probably got the idea from all the tv shows that report Onion stories and other such things as straight news. Yeah, it’s embarrassing for the TV shows that reported it like the woman set herself on fire, so what? I hate sitcoms that mine embarrassing scenarios for “humor”, but what Kimmel did was funny
Redshift
Horror-movie costume with chainsaw by a performer at a Halloween attraction = cool.
Horror-movie costume with chainsaw by a guy on the street = asshole.
Glidwrith
Another prank: Hubby-to-be worked the hinges off of a dormmates door and switched it with his own. Guy came back and couldn’t get his door open. Rightly not figuring out what had happened, he went to the dorm monitor to key his door open. Hubby-to-be got in and switched the doors back. The dorm monitor had the guy try his door, which naturally opened.
Guy left and hubby-to-be switched them again. Continuing hilarity ensued.
Mnemosyne
Though I will say, that stupid prank show that Jamie Kennedy had kind of restored my faith in humanity. They did one prank where it looked like Kennedy was being attacked by an alligator and they had to physically restrain one of the onlookers from jumping into the water to try and save him. (And he was a big, Ving Rhames-sized AA gentleman, so it was not easy for them to stop him.) This guy was fully prepared to jump into alligator-infested waters and try to save a complete stranger.
At least he’ll never have to worry about what he would do if confronted by an emergency — he’ll do just fine.
MikeJ
@Poopyman:
The Deschanel sisters have each told the same story on different chat shows about the older one convincing the younger that she(the elder) was from Neptune and speaking in space language when ever their parents were out of the room.
Trollhattan
@Redshift:
Once made the boss’ office disappear. The office had crappy wood wall paneling and we made the door disappear wtih an unbroken stretch of paneling in the hallway. When he finally made his way in he was confronted with Tut’s tomb. There may have been some questions about how long it took, but what the hey?
ranchandsyrup
@Amir Khalid: What will the Sunday shows do with no Johnny Mac?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
I told my then-5-year old son that after he was born, just returned from the hospital, that I baptized him under the stars with his secret “dude” name- Kunta Kinte.
It all paid off when pudgy, pale, mostly Irish boy watched “Roots” in 8th or 9th grade.
Amir Khalid
@ranchandsyrup:
I wouldn’t worry. There’s not going to be a shortage of blithering idiots at any time in the foreseeable future.
TG Chicago
Today’s McArdle nonsense:
She starts off worrying that driverless cars will not take off because the corporations who make them would be too worried about liability. If something goes wrong, there’s hardly anybody to blame but the manufacturer. That’s a fair point.
Then she goes on:
But what if you’re alert and at the wheel… and reading a book? You’d never be able to make the split-second decision needed to prevent a collision.
So now you have to be alert and at the wheel… with your hands and feet and eyes all in position to be able to take over at an instant’s notice. That’s more stressful and unpleasant than simply operating the car yourself.
It’s not merely “far from the Dream”, it completely kills any motivation to move to a driverless car. Great solution, McArdle.
Also, she assumes that people taking over control from driverless cars at the moment of panic would cause fatalities to fall “a lot”. But what if the car tried to make a smart evasive maneuver but the “driver” perceived it as an error, took over, and failed to make the maneuver — resulting in a fatality? If driverless cars ever got to be good enough that we actually allowed them on the roads, I suspect this “miscorrecting” scenario would be far more likely than car errors.
Glocksman
Coming at someone with what appears to be a deadly weapon isn’t a goddamn prank.
It’s attempted suicide, either by cop or armed citizen.
If the idiot gets shot for his trouble, my sole concern would be for the mental state of the person who shot the idiot, not the idiot himself.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and sheds like a duck, it’s impersonating a duck during duck season.
Try saying ‘it was just a joke’ to the cop who just emptied a magazine of hollowpoints into your chest because he saw you chasing down civilians with a goddamn chainsaw.
Mnemosyne
@TG Chicago:
It really sounds to me like McMegan has fallen into that very common fallacy where she assumes she has more control over her car than she actually does (and she probably thinks she’s a better driver than she is, too).
It’s the same reason that’s behind people’s fear of flying, even though you’re exponentially less likely to die or be injured in a plane than you are in a car — the illusion of control is very, very difficult for some people to give up.
suzanne
@Mnemosyne: I guess I like hoaxes, but not pranks. Is that too narrow a distinction?
That makes perfect sense and I agree.
I especially hate pranks that involve startling or scaring someone. It’s just mean and only funny to 12-year-olds.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Bleh.
Seeing the reactions to what happened in Colorado, I’m just going to have to accept that we’re sooner to see mandatory gun ownership on the national level than any meaningful gun control measures anywhere that won’t result in a psychobilly freakout that results in the inevitable total rollback once the righties get their claws in. Because apparently guns are the only sacrosanct freedom in America and any sort of gun control ever is absolute fucking treason. And every and any attempt otherwise, no matter how horrible the atrocities we react to , will simply make people hate anyone supporting gun control all the more and show just how all powerful and fuckin’ unassailable groups like the NRA are.
Just….christ.
Flying Squirrel Girl
My older sister once woke me from a dead sleep to tell me the house was on fire. She gathered me up and ran outside and laid me in the front yard. Then my mom came out on the porch and told her to leave me alone.
RobNYNY1957
When I was working at a big law firm, and it was time to take the summer interns to the big summer outing (country club, big lobster banquet), I had temporary tattoos made with the firm’s logo and sent them around to all of the summer interns at the last minute, with instructions to apply them to cheek or forehead so the rest of us could pick them out easily. About half of them did. The only downside is that the firm’s graphic designer came under suspicion, but she pretty easily showed the discrepancies between the tattoos and the real firm logo.
Some pranks have definitely gone too far, like #9, which is addition to being cruel, has legal and ethical implications.
Trollhattan
@TG Chicago:
Shorter McMegan: Auto industry is going to FAIL, FAIL, FAIL with autonomous cars until I can get in, dead drunk, and have it deliver me wherever I
wantdeserve to go.Trollhattan
@Flying Squirrel Girl:
Has there ever been a case of an older sibling not telling the younger that they’re adopted? Think there’s some kind of rule requiring it.
Tommy
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Personally I hate guns. No idea why you’d own one. But I am less worried about guns then those that own them. I wish a little more on that end was done. If you might beat your wife. Kick your dog. Maybe having a gun isn’t a good idea. I could car less if you obey the law, you can have a rocket launcher. Get even close to breaking the law I don’t want you near a gun.
Lavocat
I laughed my ass off at this. DAMN, that shit is FUNNY.
And it is also blatantly illegal.
You can file it under, oh, I dunno: menacing/disorderly conduct/attempted assault/criminal mischief and it WILL get your ass arrested. And most judges I know WILL put your ass in jail if only to give you sufficient time to think about your stupidty.
Still, I think even the judges would laugh at this – in the privacy of their chambers.
Lavocat
@elmo: You must be a shitload of fun @ parties!
scav
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Their Christ will soon be hanging over every altar in all his black velvety splendor, ammo belt over the shoulder, picking off unbelievers with a sidearm, hanging on the cross for better sniping visibility.
Glocksman
@Tommy:
That’s the reason even a staunch RKBA’er like myself supports the idea of universal background checks.
Magazine restrictions? Lean against, but I’m not wedded to my position either.
Full autos? Current laws have worked fine since 1934.
CCW? Favor, but would like to see some sort of training requirement.
My own state is required by law to issue an LTCH (License to Carry Handgun) if you can pass a Brady Check and don’t have anything else come out during the ISP background check.
No training or knowledge of self defense law required.
Banning importation of 70 year old 8 shot Garands that aren’t even a rounding error in the crime stats?
Fucking stupid, and it only makes those on the right who say ‘give the bastards an inch and they’ll take a mile’ seem reasonable.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Tommy:
The starkest irony for me is how much easier it is these days to get a gun than it is to vote. A felon seems to be much more likely to get his gun rights restored than voting rights it seems (no small thanks to the NRA for pushing these state level easebacks).
But christ….like 95% of reaction to this is either to ring the death knell of gun control (which I may have to grudgingly agree to at this point) or more often than not outright gleeful celebration and sticking it in the eye of ‘gun grabbers’ and acting like it’s the only fucking freedom that matters ever.
And again, the sad stark reality that the NRA seems to fucking rule our entire fucking universe for all intents and purposes. What they want, they fucking get, always.
Glocksman
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
According to the ATF, that’s simply not true.
ATF FAQ
Mnemosyne
@Glocksman:
I think you two are talking past each other — the ATF can only do something about your gun rights restoration if you committed a federal felony and were prosecuted in a federal court. That has nothing to do with states changing the laws for state felonies prosecuted in state courts. If you committed a state felony and your state decides it’s okay for you to have a gun after you’re released, the feds have no jurisdiction to do anything about it.
Glocksman
As an aside, I’ve seen all kinds of bitching from gun owners and dealers about the ATF bureaucracy.
In my limited experience in dealing directly with ATF as a holder of a Federal C&R FFL, they’ve been quick to respond to telephone enquiries and were timely with paperwork processing.
In fact, the only ‘complaint’ I had was that one rep on the phone had a southern drawl that was so thick I kept having to ask her to repeat herself because I couldn’t understand half of what she was saying. :)
Whereas the ISP took 4 months to process a simple change of address on my lifetime LCTH.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Glocksman:
ATF has also been kneecapped since the Bush administration to near uselessness making enforcement nigh impossible for most of its functions, especially regarding firearms.
This might be anecdotal, I guess, but… – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/felons-finding-it-easy-to-regain-gun-rights.html
Tommy
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: I have never shot a gun. Yet I have a gun permit cause if my dad dropped dead tomorrow, well I’d inherit a lot of guns. My dad is SO anal about following the law. I told him once if he passed that would be the least of my concern, gun ownership, and he said well it is the law Tommy.
IMHO that is my experience with gun owners, so hard for me to get mad at them. Another example is I like fresh game, but nobody I know would hand me a gun cause they know I got no clue how to use one.
If there is one thing I would ask, if you want to buy a gun, you pass a basic course.
Glocksman
@Mnemosyne:
You were saying it seems easier to get gun rights restored on a state level than voting rights.
As far as I know, rights restoration comes as a package that includes voting rights.
States can and often do preclude gun rights when restoring civil rights to felons convicted of certain offenses, but I’ve never heard of one restoring gun rights while withholding voting rights.
If you know of such a case, I’d love to hear about it.
Glocksman
Addendum:
Personally I’d love to see restoration of voting rights be automatic upon completion of sentence.
Gun rights? Petition the courts, governor, or state AG for those.
cckids
@Trollhattan: We did take a page from our mother & tried to convince our youngest sibling that she was born in a barn.
Adolphus
@RSR:
In Baltimore it is Friday the Merkin-teenth. Everyone who is anyone is sporting pubic wigs.
Mnemosyne
@Glocksman:
No, that was Snarxist’s argument. I was pointing out that you were mixing up state felons and federal felons and implying that the ATF had any say over restoring the gun rights of state felons.
gnomedad
@The Dangerman:
Can someone direct him to Zimmerman’s neighborhood?
LanceThruster
Not a Friday the 13th prank but we made a novice nun quit in Catholic Grammar School. Every time she turned to face the chalkboard, the entire class inched their desks forward a bit until the front row was practically on top of her (she was often the target of similar mindless and harmless? foolishness). At some point she determined she didn’t need the headache of young unruly children to oversee. To this day, I’d like to think we did Sister Barbara a favor.
Joel
How is this “prank” not assault?
The only way “out” that I can see is if the video is a hoax (like the twerking girl on fire video).
Glocksman
@Mnemosyne:
Ah, confuse poor old me, will you?
Admittedly it’s not very difficult to do. :)
@Joel:
Not only assault, but could lead to the idiot being quite legally shot in self defense or in defense of others by an armed citizen or a cop.
Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.
Jebediah
@Glocksman:
Agreed. Let’s have fewer douchenozzles like that and more like the guy in Mnemosyne’s comment upthread who had to be restrained from trying to save somebody from what he thought was a real alligator attack. That’s some impressive selflessness.
SiubhanDuinne
@David in NY:
The forcible-haircut thing was hilarious.
@David in NY:
The branding-on-the-butt-with-the-tip-of-a-wire-coat-hanger-held-in-the flame-of-a-cigarette-lighter-until-it-was-red-hot was hilarious.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodinger’s cat: Never heard of that one. Love it! Almost makes me wish I were back in school.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
Awesome. I hope Malaysia names a village after him.
SiubhanDuinne
@ruemara:
Farts. Duh.
Tehanu
@elmo:
Me too. I wouldn’t even want to see Dick Cheney writhing with embarrassment. Writhing on a gallows, maybe.
Scott Alloway
Went for pranks and hoaxes.
#1. On my Mac in the early 90s, had a startup screen that said the hard disk would erase itself in 10 seconds. Also had an audio countdown. Freaked the crap out of someone who tried to use my Mac on a weekend.
#2. Stretching a huge “Happy Birthday, Beethoven” across the entrance to the campus in the middle of the night. Lasted all day (1968).
#3. Carrying “Jean Claude” Glew’s volkswagen into the lobby of his dorm and parking it there (1969). He was insufferable to begin with.
Nothing to hurt people, just humor.
opiejeanne
@Scott Alloway: On December 16th, I hope.