I have been trying to find a website or two that list and tell stories of some of the crazy pranks students at MIT and/or CalTech have pulled off over the years (such as dismantling a police car and rebuilding on top of a domed building on campus).
Can anyone help with this? I’m drawing a blank on my search attempts. Also, if you have any good pranks of your own or others you know about feel free to list them.
Some guys at school assembled a giant can of deoderant on top of a building and held the campus hostage under threat of releasing a massive spray of chloro-flourocarbons.
Google: MIT pranks
First hit? http://hacks.mit.edu/
My favorite happened years ago, during a nationally televised college football game. I forget which teams were playing, but it was two of the traditional West Coast NCAA football powerhouses… maybe USC vs. UCLA.
Anyway, some jokers from Cal Tech somehow took control of the scoreboard, and changed it from “USC 10 UCLA 14” (or whatever the real team names and real scores were) to something like “CAL TECH 42 SLIPPERY ROCK 0.”
There’s a book of MIT pranks and hacks. A lot of my friends were in on the one where they changed the WALK/DON’T WALK sign at the Mass Ave crosswalk to CHEW/DON’T CHEW. (Inspired, as no one points out, by a political cartoon that appeared in either the Boston Phoenix or The Real Paper showing Gerald Ford at a crosswalk with such a sign overhead).
CalTech once replaced someone’s (I think it was Washington’s) card section at the Rose Bowl with some interesting designs. One of them was their mascot, a beaver, and I think the others were stuff like “Huskies” spelled backwards.
I’m pretty sure the scoreboard hack has been accomplished at other times, too.
I highly recommend If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks, by Neil Steinberg.
Steinberg did tons of research and goes into great detail, rather than relying on the usual driend-of-a-friend type recollections. He covers a number of MIT and Caltech classics and tons of others.
Eric
Caltech has also published some books documenting various Caltech pranks: “Legends of Caltech” and “More Legends of Caltech”.
Putting the book titles into Google led to at least one on-line source: http://www.globalprovince.com/caltech.htm. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all of those, but the ones listed under “The Green Team” and “Winning Performance” are also documented in the books, along with something similar to the one described in “Sartre’s No Exit”, but there seems to be some discrepancy in the details.
My particular favourite, among the pranks I’ve heard of, was the one where some Caltech students made their neighbour’s room disappear. A student in residence unwisely let it be known that he would be out of town for two weeks, so his neighbours (a) removed the furniture from his room and put it into storage (b) filled the now-empty room with computer paper © drywalled, plastered, and painted over the door, and put new baseboards over where the door used to be, and (d) moved a hallway light fixture from its previous location to a new location on the new section of “wall” (it wasn’t wired up for electricity in its new location, but many of the light fixtures didn’t work anyway).
Then when the poor student returned late one evening, everyone pretended not to know him.