prankalicious
the april fool's day nonsense is getting a bit out of hand. when baseball prospectus is running multiple "funny" articles, it might be time to reassess the whole thing. besides, the best prank of all time already happened recently when that guy covered everything in his friend's apartment with aluminum foil. how can you top that?
used without permission
i was always a fan of the standard litany of childhood pranks: tacks on the seat, tying shoelaces together, leaving fake notes for your friends that were supposedly from whatever crush they had, TP-ing houses. there was a fairly serious phase of prank calling too, and some mailboxes that may have exploded (can that be considered a prank, or just wanton destructiveness?). but my downfall is that i always want to be there to see the person's reaction and revel in my own cleverness. it would kill me not to know how things transpired. this is one reason i could never be any sort of suicide bomber. even if i believed in a cause seriously enough to consider it, i wouldn't be able to take missing out on the aftermath.
one Halloween a friend and i put out a bowl of candy in front of his house with a sign saying "Please Take 1" knowing full well that the first pack of kids would likely try to empty the whole thing into their bags and take off. meanwhile we were waiting in the bushes with a hose so we could douse the selfish little bastards. a couple groups of small kids came along and abided by our sign, but finally some older kids thought they had found the motherlode. before i even had a chance to yell "now!", my friend had leapt from the bushes without the hose, instead yelling "what do you think you're doing?" they freaked out understandably, and the lead kid tried to hide behind a "we just took 1" defense. but they remained bone dry (at least on the outside of their costumes), and we never did end up soaking anyone.
better was the time a pack of us found a stray STOP sign amidst some construction equipment and dragged it into the middle of a fairly busy street. from our hidden vantage point, we howled with delight as cars actually tried to obey the signs command, despite the lack of an intersection or other reason for the sign's placement. hi-larious.
view the top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of all time, and more pranks from the folks at RE/Search.