Posted on 11/16/2007 3:15:41 AM PST by Clive
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Is there a photo of this?
I am in awe.
We once stole the front door of the TKE fraternity house, in the middle of the day, on a weekend... Nobody noticed or stopped us, and there were people in the house at the time.
In fact we also stole the letters off of the ADPi house too...
Mark
Heck, we would have left the High School music teacher's VW bug in the band room if only it hadn't been just a little too wide for the double doors.
For most of the day, including the morning rush hour, traffic was diverting through side streets until a newspaper photographer decided to photograph the work and discovered that there was none. The police had responded to the traffic snarl by assigning constables to direct the traffic around the Queen's Park section but none of them twigged to the fact that they were directing traffic around a prank.
On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game. Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the 40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The letters ‘MIT’ appeared all over the ball. As the players and officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.
The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1 and 5 AM, locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.
“I am in awe.”
I was a student at UBC from ‘62-’66. The great Sculpture caper referred to in this article was September ‘63, IIRC.
As a second year student, I was friends with several ‘active’ engineering undergrads at the time - my room-mate and others from residence.
The chicken-wire and cement ‘sculptures’ were produced in late August and placed in various spots on campus - they were sort of formless Moorean shapes with holes and knobs and such. After a week of campus controversy in September engendered by engineering students published complaints about the ugliness of modern art, red-jacketed louts armed with sledge-hammers smashed them all to bits one sunny lunch-hour.
The downtown press went crazy over these savage barbarians - their were booming editorials in Sun and Province denouncing and bemoaning the collapse of civilization.
On campus, the lefty artistic crowd were openly weeping. This went on for two days as I recall. Then the engineers revealed their spoof and challenged the Establishment to justify their taste, or lack of, in art.
Lots of laughs!
It was a good time to be 18 years old. ;^)
“Heck, we would have left the High School music teacher’s VW bug in the band room if only it hadn’t been just a little too wide for the double doors.”
A group of students at our high school picked up the VW bug owned by an unpopular social studies teacher and maneuvered it into a position where he couldn’t drive it off.
Recently, a senior prank occurred at one of our local high schools. One morning, the principal started receiving calls inquiring about the sale of the property. One of the students had put a classified ad in the local paper offering the property for sale. The ad included a description of the buildings, the number of acres, the asking price, and the name and number of the person to contact. Everybody got a laugh out of it, including the principal.
That wouldn't stop the U of T engineers. It's pretty routine for them to dismantle a car and re-assemble it in somebody's office.
Not a ping.
Holy cat. I wish I had a hat on. I’d take it off to them.
Long read, but sooooo very worth it ping.
Coming from a family of engineers, I can appreciate this story and imagine a few relatives involved in pranks like these.
Did this happen at all high schools? Kids used to take my music teacher's VW bug and leave it in the middle of the grass Quad at my high school, too! This was in a little town in CA many, many, many years ago!
Blame Canada!
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