At that time, my college was in the process of planning a move to a new campus. As part of this process, they had commissioned one of those nifty models that shows what a building site will look like once the buildings are constructed and the site is landscaped. This particular one was about 3′x5′, had rolling Styrofoam hills, several structures, roads, a lake, and a number of little automobiles on it. It was also surrounded by a Plexiglas case screwed on to the base so that passers-by wouldn’t poke it or pilfer the little automobiles.

One day I decided that the model, which was displayed in the library, needed to disappear. So that night, Glenn Gonzalez and I snuck into the library through an adjacent office to which I had a key. Since walking through the halls of the school with this large model in tow would of course attract attention, we instead snuck it out of the building through the door that falsely claimed that it was a fire door and an alarm would sound if you opened it. (We had previously verified this in reconnaissance missions.)

We then brought the model around the school to the back stairwell, which another friend had opened for us, and up to the second floor of the dormitory. Waiting until the coast was clear, we finally got it to my room without having been seen. Since I had two beds in my room, I simply replaced the mattress on the top bunk with the model, put sheets and a bedspread on it, and made it up to look just like another mattress. Stage one was complete!

Over the next few days, I showed it to several friends, including Ross Prinzo, who had given me the idea originally. Among the select individuals who got to see it was a certain David Granniss, who laughed hysterically for a full minute, and then stopped abruptly with a look of inspiration on his face. “What is it, Dave?” I asked. “There ought to be army men in it!”

Well, of course he was right. I leaped into Oslo the Land Shark, my trusty Italian-manufactured steed of the time, and made a beeline to the toy store. Unfortunately, upon examining the army men available there for purchase, I determined that given the difference in scale, they would tower over the buildings in a Godzilla-like fashion. Rather than army men, I ended up purchasing a selection of Micro-Machines, which were more suited to this application. Among them were tanks, missile launchers, and helicopters.

After unscrewing and removing the Plexiglas case, we deployed the missile launchers across one of the higher ridges overlooking the campus. The tanks rolled among the buildings, and we used cotton to create smoke both at the muzzles of their weapons, and at the married student housing, which they were bombarding. (I was bitter about not having a girlfriend at the time, a circumstance whose reasons are perhaps, in retrospect, rather obvious.) The Apache-style helicopters were suspended from the Plexiglas case with fishing line, swooping into the site in formation from one of the corners of the display. By the time we finished, we had an impressive looking war diorama, set in the beautifully landscaped Silver Lake campus.

Upon completing our improvements to the model and reinstalling its case, we determined to sneak it back into the library and replace it where it had previously been. This took a bit more planning, as some of the doors we had used had crash-bars, and would only open from one side. We eventually sent an operative into the library before we retraced our previous steps. The model made it back to its display table without further incident.

The next day, we kept our distance from the library to avoid drawing suspicion to ourselves, and thus only heard secondhand about the discovery of our modifications. Apparently the president of the college, fulfilling some of his fundraising duties, had VIPs from off-campus on a tour. As he described in glowing detail the plans the college had for its new location and showed the model off, he suddenly noticed that all was not as he expected. Needless to say, maintenance was soon there restoring the display to its former, mundane state.

Our triumph lasted only a day, but still causes me to stop every once in a while and laugh to myself. And then to go cause more mischief.

(Note: if this story is familiar, it’s because it’s a repost from an old version of the website. One of my friends requested that I get it back online, so here it is again.)

Watching a Nova show on string theory. (It was a requirement to maintain my supernerd certification this month.)

This morning, my friend Jeff presented me this, created in cooperation with his wife Fazia:

This of course immediately became one of my new favorite things. Be sure to appreciate the seal and the signatures!

Among these unsolicited stuffed critters was one Walter the Farting Dog, a stuffed canine apparently based on a children’s book series of the same name. Walter is a scruffy-looking beast who, when squeezed, emits a distinctive flatulent sound. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), his batteries were eventually exhausted, and his noisome and noisy gastric distress came to an end.

I thought that Walter deserved a second lease on life, but that it would be much funnier and more surreal for Walter to do something entirely different when resuscitated. While on an outing with Abigail, we happened across a Build A Bear workshop, where I noticed a good selection of voice boxes for their bears — just the thing for Walter! I explained to Abby what I had in mind, and we rooted through their selection of sounds until we finally settled on this. The woman at the desk was a little baffled that I only wanted the voice box without a bear around it, but happily obliged me when I started waving around the Lincolns.

A couple of weeks later, I divulged the plan to Jeff Snider, and we kidnapped Walter early one morning to do the necessary surgery on him. Putting his old scouting skills to good use, Jeff deftly snipped Walter’s belly stitches, extracted the old sound box, slipped in the new one, and with a surgeon’s precision, sewed him back together so neatly that one would never know by looking that Walter had been through trauma. (Photo gallery is here.) We thought about neutering him while we had him sedated, but decided that with the romantic hurdles he already faced, it was probably unnecessary.

Walter in the Operating Room.

We discreetly replaced the dog on Amy’s desk, and then began the most difficult part of the whole process: waiting for someone to discover Walter’s new personality. Neither of us could go squeeze him ourselves, as we would give ourselves away all too quickly. But nobody who was already familiar with Walter had any inclination to squeeze him any longer, as his batteries had died long before.

Fortunately, we were rescued from our purgatory about a week and a half later, when Whitten picked Walter up and gave him a good squeeze.

“Let’s go shopping!” chirped Walter.

“What the h***?” responded Amy promptly.

A few more squeezes elicited more of Walter’s new vocabulary, all delivered in a cloying preadolescent whine:

“Hey, Girlfriend!”

“It’s great to have a new friend like you!”

“You look great!”

“You are too cool!”

All of this happened while I was at lunch, alas. After our earlier Cuckoo Clock prank, Jeff and I were immediate suspects, and since I lack the ability to lie well, all the details quickly spilled out. Amy thought it was hilarious, and has now demanded that we install the flatulence voicebox into her stuffed spider.

• Player A chooses a wrapped gift from a pile and unwraps it.
• Player B then can select another wrapped gift, or steal Player A’s. Player A then selects a new wrapped gift.
• Player C selects a wrapped gift or steals one of the other player’s. They then have the option to steal from someone else, eventually forming long looping chains of theft, or to choose a new wrapped gift.
• And so on until everyone has had a turn.

This year, there were two gifts that came up that I was interested in: a couple of bottles of beer and a beanie. I managed to have both pass through my hands about a half dozen times before I decided to end the madness: I took a horrible silver plastic battery powered cuckoo clock from another player and finished the rest of the game unmolested.

After the exchange concluded, I left the clock in its packaging for a couple of weeks on my desk, while I pondered what I could possibly do with this travesty of a timepiece. After much thought and consideration, I decided that the appropriate answer was this: cause some mischief.

So, on the night of December 27, when my compatriot Jeff Snider and I were already in the office late at night for a system update, we decided to strip all the faux-bavarian plastic off of the clock, remove the hands, and hide it in our boss’ suspended ceiling, where it would peal forth hourly with its sickly electronic mewling. We taped up the speaker to make it a bit quieter (and therefore more difficult to find), lifted a ceiling tile, tossed it on top of one of the light fixtures, and beat a hasty retreat.

Download audio file (Cuckoo.mp3)

When everyone came back from the holiday, we were surprised to hear nothing about it for a couple of weeks. It occurred to us that we hadn’t actually stuck around long enough after putting the batteries in for the first time to verify that it was working correctly, and wondered if our prank had been stillborn. Word came to us through the grapevine a few days later, however, that it was indeed causing some havoc. Reports escalated for a few days after that until the situation finally came to a head in a fairly entertaining fashion. The story, as I’ve reconstructed it from various people’s accounts, is this:

After a couple weeks, Mike had had enough of the dreadful electronic caterwauling, and came storming out of the office, asking “what is that horrible noise? Has one of you got that as your wretched cell phone ringer?” Kay, the administrative assistant, explained that she (rightly) thought it was coming from his office, and assumed it was some kind of gadget or alarm that he had set up.

They then noticed that it was going off regularly at 13 minutes after the hour, and knowing now to expect it, grew increasingly agitated with the situation over the next few days. Finally, one afternoon, Ron (of Ron-A-Thon 2007 fame) had enough of their frustration, and pulled a ladder into the work area and started rooting through the ceiling at the appropriate time. He quickly located the loose bundle of batteries, a timepiece, and wires, and reached the conclusion that any right-thinking person would:

He thought it was a bomb.

They called Joan, the head of the library in which we all work, and Todd, one of her staff, to have a look at it. Todd fortunately quickly reassured everyone that it looked harmless, and was most likely just a prank, thereby narrowly averting an evacuation of the building and a visit from the local constabulary. (And, incidentally, allowing this story to actually be told.)

Kay kept the gadget on her desk for a few days while Mike began asking pointed questions in staff meetings: “Do any of you know anything about a little electronic chime that was in my ceiling? We think it may have been pulled out of one of those musical greeting cards as a prank.” We all had a good laugh about it in the meeting, feigning ignorance until Mike had the perspicacity to start asking people individually “Did you have anything to do with this?” Jeff, unable to tell a lie, hedged until Mike was sure he was involved. From there the whole sordid tale came out.

Fortunately, all the involved parties had a good sense of humor about it, though Mike has promised revenge most foul will come our way when we least expect it. I say: Let the games begin!