I can’t take credit for the ideas, but here are some things my brothers and I did as kids*…
TP someone’s house (for free). Being on a budget, we made a “scavenger hunt” list with a bunch of crazy things on it. We crossed everything off the list except a “roll of toilet paper.” We went door-to-door collecting free rolls of TP from our neighbors.
One neighbor gave us a roll of TP and we said thanks and walked away. The neighbor asked us why we were just walking away so casually if all we needed to win the scavenger hunt was one roll of TP. We said, “Oh!” and ran away.
We added a “shotgun shell” to the bottom of the list because we knew it was something no neighbor would ever give us and we wouldn’t be forced to run away from the house as if we were trying to win a scavenger hunt if the neighbor gave up the roll of TP.
We later applied the TP to a friend’s front lawn.
Car-cans-string-noise-thing. Tie aluminum cans to both ends of long fishing wire. Loosely wrap the fishing wire to two trees on opposite sides of the street at night. Hide in the bushes. Wait for a car to drive through it. I don’t think we ever got this one to work. Many drivers saw the string, stopped, and pulled it down before driving through.
Wall of fire. Throw rolls of TP over a telephone wire hanging over a street. Keep throwing until the TP forms a paper wall across the entire street. Wait for cars. When you are bored with it, set the entire wall on fire.
Flaming tennis ball. Soak a tennis ball in gasoline. Light it on fire. Kick it around at night. Make sure it doesn’t roll under a car near someone’s gas tank.
Sparking blade. Take the blade off a lawn edger. Throw the blade at a low angle so it skips and scrapes down a concrete sidewalk at night. Enjoy the sparks. Watch your toes if you are on the receiving end.
Glassy rooftop. Every time a light bulb burns out at your home, throw the dead bulb on your neighbor’s roof. Over time, enjoy the sparkling roof when the sun shines on it.
Lift your bike up onto the roof of your local school. Ride around on the roof.
Duct tape on the road. Put duct tape on the road, face up. Wait for a car to drive over it and see if the driver stops due to the noise of the tape flapping as it sticks to the tire. This one didn’t work… wasted a good roll of duct tape.
Sham fight. As a car drives by, pretend to get into a fist fight. See if the driver stops or says something.
My brother and I shot a lady with a pellet rifle while she was filling up her car.
Made bombs out of gun powder and match boxes and blew up various things. One bomb went off in my brother’s face and burned all his eyebrows off.
We’d put a marble in the end of a 3 foot length of garden hose then whip it at cars, we smashed lots of windows with the marble guns.
Broke into boats and houses and cars.
Egged peoples houses.
Chucked ninja stars at peoples houses and placed homemade pokey things on the door step for them to step on when they came out to see what was going on.
Jammed potatoes up car mufflers.
Took turns shooting a spear gun at each other while trying to get as close as possible without hitting them.
Same with an axe.
Lobbed eggs and grapefruits off the deck at passing cars.
We cut up firecrackers to make bigger firecrackers.
Burned army men in every imaginable way.
Played in the mine tailings piles.
We did TPing once, but it wasn’t that fun. It seemed more like making a mess.
My friend used to make prank phone calls, but he always took it too far and kept calling the people back until they got mad.
Rode down this REALLY steep, long hill on our bikes. We must have hit 50 MPH some times.
CO2 bombs. Man those were the shit. Of course, all our fun was ruined when my brother packed a plastic mini bottle full of dry ice and added water. He barely got the lid screwed down when it went off in his hand :eek: I had a slight, but measurable, permanent loss of hearing from the blast because I was 5 feet away and his hand swelled up like a balloon. Luckily he had no other damage.
Made ninja stars from steel food can lids using tin snips. Hurl at the fence and impale them.
Fake fights for cars, yeah. Or just lay there like a dead body.
Made expode-on-impact bombs with strike anywhere matches and lots of fuel. Fun to throw.
Another fun one was a trail of gunpowder across the road like in an old western. Light it just as a car goes over it.
Once got a .22, and fired straight up to see if we could hear the bullet come back to the ground. Heard it land in the bushes several times before we decided, um, duh, let’s don’t do that anymore. :eek:
We also did science stuff like building hot air balloons from lightweight bags, etc.
When I worked at the scout camp, we used to pull pranks on our friend, Brian. Brian worked in a different area of camp and would always get back to our cabin later than us. So one day we took all of his stuff… his bunk, dresser, fan, etc… and put it on the roof of the cabin. Brian came back and found all his stuff was gone. He walked around the cabin twice before looking up. His mouth hit the ground when he saw all his stuff laid out on the roof, exactly as he had it laid out before.
Brian always had a hard time seeing in the dark. He just couldn’t get the knack of getting his night vision. So we would be walking back to our cabin late at night and then just suddenly stop walking. Brian wouldn’t know we stopped and he would just keep walking for a bit, then we’d sneak up behind him and scare the the bejeebers out of him. So one night we were walking and Brian finally got his night vision. “I can see you, Dragwyr. I can see you, Jim. This is great!”. Then Jim pulled out his lighter and lit it up. It totally destroyed Brian’s newly discovered night vision. Then Jim and I proceeded to scare the bejeebers out of him again.
First the layout: Small Texas town, not even a stoplight. The main road through town was a state highway, so most people on that road were just traveling through. The highway curved through town so that you would enter town from the south and leave town to the east. It was a slow gradual curve.
The speed limit through town dropped to 25 MPH. Everyone for miles around knew that going through town you had to slow down. The sheriff, unless he got a call, was almost always there, right at the center of the curve, running radar.
But, like I said, most people on that road were traveling from some far off distant place to some other far off distant place.
My best friend and I came up with the best way ever for 12 year old boys to make money.
My friend would stand right by the 25 MPH sign entering town with a large sign that said “RADAR AHEAD”
I would go to the other side of town with a bucket and a large sign that said “TIPS”
I had a friend who lived on a street that had no streetlights and we took advantage of that. When we were like twelve my friends and I would go out at like two in the morning and set up empty plastic 2 liter bottles in the road like bowling pins, go hide and then watch cars drive through them.
Relatively tame I guess but we enjoyed the shit out of it.
My cousin and I used to gather buckets of inedible but very purple berries from some bushes near my house. Then we’d hide in the weeds near the road and throw handfuls of them on passing cars. They made beautiful purple splotches.
One that I’ve been horribly ashamed of since I was old enough to understand the background - My friend and I used to ride our horses all over her families property. When we were 9ish her parents decided to sell off a section of the property as housing lots. We were angry about the loss of our riding area and for weeks we’d ride around the area pulling up and relocating survey stakes. Once we were found out we were banned from riding anywhere near that area. Turns out her dad was pretty sick and they needed the money from the sale of the property because he wasn’t going to be able to work anymore. Luckily we didn’t slow things down too much and it all worked out.
A store in town sold, among other things, live catfish. They advertised that fact with a letter board sign.
My friend and I (the same friend that held the RADAR AHEAD sign) rearranged the letters in “LIVE CATFISH” to read “LIVE SHIT”.
The funny part is it stayed that way for days.
The even funnier part was my mother, driving me and my friend somewhere, commenting as we drove by the sign, “I can’t believe someone would do that.” We were in the back seat struggling desperately to keep a straight face.
Not my story, but my grandfather’s: He and his friends would throw tomatoes into tubas and other such instruments during parades when they were little tykes.
Had one spate of slashing tires. I still feel badly about that.
Shoplifted a couple of things.
Blew up a lot of shit with cherry bombs and M-80s.
Threw a dart up in the air; where it came down was in my friend’s ear.
Friend and I chopping up a wooden crate with butcher knives. He swung wide, 15 stitches in my chest.
Made zip guns out of pieces of 1/2" pipe. Drop a lighted Zebra down the tube, followed quickly by a small pepple, aim it at your friend. Hilarity ensues.
Climbed out on the RR trestle supporting piers and waited for trains to come by. 30 foot drop to a muddy creek below.
Broke out a bunch of car windows in a salvage lot. Og’s truth, we didn’t know we were doing something wrong until the owner came charging in and caught us at it.
Stole a case of pints of Old Crow bourbon from a liquor store storage area. To this day, the smell of it makes me gag.
“Hello, did you know that your phone number spells FUCK?” “Did you know that your phone number spells SHIT?” Etc. with all the dirty words we could think of that were four letters–I think there were three of them. Too bad we lived in a town with only one phone exchange. We had to do this one long-distance, and it showed up on the bill.
We hung Ronnie from a tree that dangled over the street. He would swing out when a car came past. This resulted in most of us getting grounded, and Ronnie getting sent to another school. (It was Ronnie’s idea in the first place.)
Riding with Pepper. She claimed her grandfather owned the golf course, which was conveniently located right next to her yard (compound, is more like it), and therefore we could ride our horses on it. Yes, her grandfather had owned it. ONCE. Years before.
We were relatively tame, by some standards. Growing up in a midwest town of <1000 people, not much was swinging most of the time.
-Forking. We would buy plastic forks at one store, then toilet paper at another. In the still of the night, the forks were planted into the lawn of the prankee, tine side up. Then, toilet paper was wound around them, going one to the next, cris-crossing and making webs. Not only did the prankee have to remove the TP before the next grass cutting, but they had to pull up the forks, one by one as well. Bonus points if it rained by morning.
-Soaping a skylight. One of the newer houses built when I was a kid belonged to the family of a girl that was a bit of a snot. Late one night, by the light of the moon, a couple of us borrowed her dad’s extension ladder (conveniently left outside of the shed), climbed onto the roof and soaped the skylight. According to her brother (as adults, after the statute of limitations was up ), it took two years for the rain to wash the soap away.
-Corning. Small town midwestern kids all know that there is loose corn for the taking around the local grain elevator. When things got really slow, we’d pick up enough to fill up a couple of small bags and go pelt windows with it while the residents were settling in to watch TV for the evening. They’d come outside to see what was going on while we’d watch from a hidden vantage point.
-Soaping screens. This is hard to remove, short of taking the screens down and scrubbing. We each had our own signature tags.
Not too dangerous or exciting, but it beat sitting around doing nothing.
When I was a teenager, a lot of asshole teachers got their houses egged by some kids who looked a lot like my friends and me.
We used to have one of our friends in the trunk of the car. We’d stop at a stop sign or whatever near a pedestrian. Friend would jump out of the trunk and run away screaming. Saw the same prank on an episode of Jackass, or something similar, except their guy was naked and handcuffed.
My one friend tried to order from the drive through at a fast food place while on foot. They told him he had to be in a car to use the drive through. My friend spent about 5 minutes arguing that he was in a automobile. It wouldn’t have been so funny except that the employees kept trying to argue that he wasn’t in a car instead of just telling him to piss off. The dialogue went vaguely like this.
“You have to be in a vehicle to use the drive through sir.”
“But I am in an automobile.”
“No you’re not, we can see you.”
“Are you making fun of my automobile because it’s so small?”
“You don’t have a car.”
“Now you’re saying I’m too poor to afford an automobile?”
Reasonably tame I guess, I used to throw caps into the fire when our babysitter was watching over us. Take a little of one of those tapes of caps, pop it in a tissue I had blown my nose with, then pop it in. There was enough snapping to cause reasonable consternation.
And seeing how much annoyance it caused my Dad to come across stones on the lawn, especially when they hit the blades of the lawnmower, I’d use my catapult to fire stones into the garden of a neighbour on the morning her help would come to do the mowing, so that I could listen for the ping when he came across one.
Actress Thandie Newton told a hilarious story of her own childhood hijinks on the Graham Norton show a while back. As a young teen, she and a friend would go to a thrift store and buy a handbag, one that looked like someone’s nice grandma would carry. They would then feed the friend’s horse a hot mash, which would have the effect of the horse almost immediately … evacuating. They’d catch the poo in the handbag.
Then they’d lay it alongside the road and hide in the bushes, waiting for someone to notice and stop to pick it up. Then, as the person opened the bag to look for ID, they’d pop up and yell, “SHITTY HANDBAG!”
Which is pretty damn funny when yelled in a posh English accent.
I tried that once in my late teens. Some friends and I had been out boozing late one night, none of us had a car, and I was hungry as hell. Everything was closed except a Jack-in-the-Box or Wendy’s or something that was also closed but had a 24-hour drive-thru. I figured the late-night staff would probably just be kids about my age and wouldn’t give a shit as long as I actually paid (which I was going to do, of course). No dice. I explained that I was really fucking hungry, had money, would even pay a little bit extra, and that I wasn’t just screwing around. They told me to beat it. Now, I could have understood if there was a line of cars behind me and a manager watching everything or something, but it was 3AM, there was nobody there and I was a paying customer…I mean, who would know or care? Alas, I did not get anything to eat.
That fucking rules.
I didn’t really do anything too crazy as a kid. One time, though, my friends and I were running around in some undeveloped desert area when we saw a corner of a plastic bag sticking out of the dirt. We dug it up and found that it had a very realistic-looking…um…dildo inside. We spent a good few minutes laughing at it and then one of my friends suddenly slapped my other friend across the face with it. It made this nice, wet, loud plastic SMACK sound and we all just lost it…except, of course, the guy who got smacked with it who, from that day forward until we all left for college, was known as “dickface,” a nickname that got shortened to “DF” over the years. One of our high school teachers asked him why he was called “DF” when his name was really Gary and those of us who had been there that historic day cracked up but said nothing.
Convinced the French teacher that he was mistakenly embroiled in an international drug operation. (He ended up taking leave.)
Kidnapped the annual Big Game trophy; buried it in the long-jump sand on the field . Ransom: cheerleaders had to recite an idiotic cheer. Coaches were told the location, and dug it up at half-time.
Performed “animal sacrifices” on the school quad on random nights throughout the year, leaving bloody “entrails” (pulverized live fish bait) and cryptic symbols in chalk everywhere.
Took legitimate political control of the student government, passing various resolutions much to the embarrassment of the administration and student body. (Declaring war on Canada, mandating or prohibiting specific snacks in the student store, disapprobation (“censure”) of certain brand name clothing, etc.)
Intercepted the school public address system, blasting air raid sirens throughout the morning.
Intercepted the sound system of dances at a yacht club, in order to blast polka music.
Reported electric, street, telephone repair men as “vandals” to the police.
), it took two years for the rain to wash the soap away.