Strollerderby : pranks

Cops Taser Toy Panther

JeanneSager — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:35:00 GMT

If you've ever been terrified by one of your kids' all-too-lifelike toys in the middle of the night, don't despair. At least you didn't call out a team of cops to Taser your daughter's stuffed animal.

The black panther lurking near a playground that set a father on edge, prompting him to make an anxious call to 911 turned out to be the work of a prankster. But cops didn't know until AFTER they'd shot the big fluffy toy with a stun gun (give them all the benefit of the doubt - it was dark, and there were kids around, which makes parents and police alike more nervous about dangers).

The response cost the city around $1,000, and they're searching for the prankster to charge him for making a public nuisance (and hopefully recoup the money). The question I'm begging to ask?

Who buys their kid a life-like panther? We're not talking your warm and fuzzy critter over here. Meat-eaters, they have been known to attack humans (although they try to avoid us), and with few predators they tend to reign supreme out in the wild. And, hello, they like to rip their prey limb from limb?

And this you want your kid cuddling with at night? Eeek!

Give me a nice stuffed puppy any day.

Image: NBC

Kid Gets Tongue Stuck on a Metal Pole

JeanneSager — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:13:00 GMT

Somewhere in Indiana, a family is rethinking the annual viewing of A Christmas Story.

A fourth grader at an elementary school in Indiana told emergency workers a friend dared him to stick his tongue to the metal pole. Surprise, suprise, in the middle of January, it was ten degrees in Indiana, and you can guess where this is going.

Just like Ralphie's friend Flick's tongue, it stuck. Of course, since this wasn't a Christmas movie from the eighties, the kid simply yanked hard enough that it came off. Emergency workers reportedly instructed his mom on how to stop the bleeding and went on their ways (probably trying to rein in the laughter). She admitted to the AP that her son was testing the reality of television.

What does this prove - other than the fact that this family might be the only one in America to miss the marathon airings of A Christmas Story in future Decembers? The same doofy pranks we pulled? Our kids are going to pull them too.

Technology might be better, but what they'll do for the sake of a bet is just as simple as ever.

Image: Gothamist

Mystery Solved: Dog Swallowed Fifteen Pacifiers

Daddy Club Rule: Don't Argue Kids Shows

School to Parents: Donate Toilet Paper

Top 100 Best April Fool's Day Hoaxes EVER

Amy S.F. Lutz — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:01:00 GMT

This post is real. I mean, it's an April Fool's Day post, about April Fool's Day, but I didn't make any of these amazing pranks up, I swear!

As you can tell from other posts that went up today, April Fool's Day can inspire the world's greatest minds to tremendous heights of creativity. Which is probably necessary to trick people who should, on this one day a year, be expecting numerous attempts to dupe them.

What else besides pure imaginative genius helps make a prank successful? Well, it certainly doesn't hurt if you're a famous expert in your field, so the public is more prone to believe whatever crazy announcement you come up with. And the more esoteric your field of knowledge, the better - I mean, when a world-renowned astrophysicist claims that the alignment of Jupiter and Pluto has caused a reduction in the earth's gravitational field, is Joe Schmoe really going to challenge him (see Hoax #10)?

Click here to see the other 99 best April Fool's Day hoaxes ever, courtesy of museumofhoaxes.com.

5 Pranks to Pull On Your Kids

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:27:00 GMT

Kids are natural pranksters. They pretend to be upset when you wait 5 hours to change their diapers, or feign hunger first thing in the morning. They are masters of comic timing.

Time to turn the tables and show them, Mommy and Daddy have a trick or two to show them, even though we're nearly middle-aged:

1. Monster Masks at Night - Wait until they're counting pthalate free baby bottles in their sleep and lean in over their crib and sing "Lullaby" wearing the mask pictured right. Unforgettable fun.

2. No Sleep for the Wicked - In this game, you keep the kids up all night feeding them sugar and caffeine. Now who wants to sleep, little puddin? Hmmm?

3. Even Baby Can Cook - Prop up your baby or toddler in the kitchen with some pasta and premade sauce and a saucepan. Click some pics of the little cook and email to Grandma.

4. Who Needs Sheets? - Take the sheets and bumper off the crib or big girl bed just for laughs. Your kid will hardly notice and you'll save yourself a bit of laundry.

5. Even Toddlers Can Swear - Take your toddler to the Hallmark card section of your local store and have him drop a few F-bombs near some little old ladies and men.

Have fun! And don't forget to report back.

11 year old saves mom from message board-created seizure

Brett Singer — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:00:00 GMT

As weird as this story is, I was surprised that it was the first time it happened.

Here's the deal: some nasty pranksters used computer code to put up posts containing numerous animated gifs (you know, those annoying flashing things). The thing is, they did this on the Epilepsy Foundation's message board, the idea being to, you know, cause visitors to the site to have seizures. The next day the same group of "Internet griefers" used another coding trick to redirect people who clicked on certain posts to a page with an image "designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics," according to Wired.

RyAnne Fultz, 33, saw the page and then, "couldn't move and couldn't speak." Her 11-year-old son saw her, figured out what was happening, moved her eyes away from the screen and "killed the browser process" (translation: closed the offending window).

I am slightly surprised that this is the first time someone tried this, since, for a sick mind, it would seem obvious. If this sort of thing that happened in a novel it might be funny. In real life, not so much. Props to the kid who helped his mom, though.

Aside: Something similar happened in 1997, when an episode of Pokemon caused seizures in several hundred Japanese children. Unlike the Epilepsy Foundation prank, this was an accident. You can read about that here; if you are not seizure-prone and want to see the offending video clip, search YouTube for "Electric Soldier Porygon" (which, sadly, is not a typo). I'm not linking to it so no one sees it inadvertently. I, however, just watched it and now have a headache.

image: Living With Epilepsy

Single Mom Duped By Evil Lottery Fake

Kelly Mills — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:30:00 GMT

Mary Ann Shaffer was given a lottery ticket from a customer at her concession stand, and she thought her ship had come in. The single mom of two scratched her ticket to find she won $25,000. But when she looked for a phone number on the ticket to see how to collect her winnings, she realized she'd been had. The ticket read, "Claim forms supplied by Santa Claus. All winning tickets must be validated by the tooth fairy and conform to her game rules ... All winners are losers and must have an excellent sense of humor." And this is why I detest crappy practical jokes like this--"sense of humor"? What is that bullshit? I'm with the patrol officer who examined the ticket, Bear Terstegge (isn't that a great name?) who said, "How can anyone be so mean around Christmas time?"

But since it's Christmas Eve, I wouldn't post a shitty story like that if it didn't have a somewhat happy ending. See, word of the mean trick spread around the pier where Shaffer sells hotdogs, and people started giving her cards, gift certificates, and big fat tips. One of her regular customers bought Christmas gifts for Shaffer's kids. I guess depending on the generosity and kindness of other people is a safer bet than any lottery ticket. Awww.

Tracking the Baby Jesus

Kelly Mills — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:05:00 GMT

I don't know if you are aware of this, but around this time of year there's typically a rash of stolen baby Jesus stories. Pranksters (I love that word) make off with baby Jesus out of nativity scenes all over the country, and often there's a sort of cat-and-mouse game where nativity scene keepers try and devise methods of preventing the infant savior from disappearing. Well, after a Florida town's Jesus went missing from the founder's circle nativity scene despite being bolted down (Mission Impossible 12 anyone?) a Jewish attorney in Cincinnati donated a new figure, and this time the scene keeper has taken unusual precautions to protect him from disappearing again. In addition to erecting a plexiglass screen in front of the display, people in the town raised money to do something else. Can you guess what? I'll give you a hint: Once the season is over, someone could probably get extra use out of the figure by afixing him to the dashboard of a car, perhaps next to a plastic adult version of his holy self.

Yep, the townsfolk raised money to outfit Mary, Joseph, and the infant lord with GPS devices. Scene keeper Dina Cellini says, "I don't anticipate this will ever happen again, but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior." Of course, it might have been prudent to equip the original baby Jesus with such devices, cuz it would have saved those wise men a ton of time in tracking, and we'd have Epiphany pageants happening closer to Christmas. Though if you think about it, the star over the stable was sort of an early GPS thing itself.

Delicious Droolicious: 5 Other Things to Do With an Optimus Prime Voice Changer Helmet

Kelly Mills — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:29:00 GMT

Posted by Aaron Burgess

If you've been scanning the "hot holiday toy" lists this season, you've no doubt seen many shots of Hasbro's Optimus Prime Voice Changer ($29.99), a big plastic helmet that lets your kids play as the Transformers hero and Autobots leader, complete with digitized robot voice. Of course, kids aren't the only ones who've taken to Optimus -- see these YouTube videos (some of the least unfunny, at least) of grown people geeking out over the thing.

This one's made the rounds (and is still the best):

Go, Malaysia!

Optimus doesn't need to show ID:

Optimus will pwn you:

I would've let him in free:

Other things gettng shouts on Droolicious:

High School Prank Worthy of Suspension, Many Cool Points

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:02:00 GMT

A kid in Ohio, no doubt a bored and restless and dreamy "One day, I'm gonna get outta this podunk place" type of teen, recently pulled a big one over that earned him a three-day suspension, stern verbal reprimand on "sportsmanship" and probably a date with a cheerleader to the Sadie Hawkins homecoming dance. Senior Kyle Garchar tricked fans from a crosstown rival school into hoisting up squares of paper that, when held up together, read "We suck." Instructions for participation told duped fans that the cards would spell out "Go Darby," to cheer on their school. We bring you the YouTube smarty pants wrap-up below.

The stunt required careful planning by Garchar, who applied a similar prank pulled during a Harvard-Yale game three years ago. He took photos of the stadium's seats, drew out a grid, planned how all the details of the slam would fit together and then circled all the hot chicks in Dungeons and Dragons Club he'd reserve front row seats for to make sure they saw his genius unfold. No word whether he enlisted any assistant marching band conductors who are really good at strategic football field stuff like making an exclamation point with tubas or doing a kick-ass medley of Red Hot Chili Peppers hits on the way to the bandstand.

Despite the in-your-facing, the prankster's school lost to Darby 21-20 that day. The real winners are the seniors who, like, totally have good material to write about in their yearbooks now, bra.

If this was your kid's prank, would you high five him or ground him until prom?

View Video
Format: ???
Duration: --:--

Soccer Players Pee on Rival Field: Or Why I Can't Be a Soccer Mom

Kelly Mills — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:04:00 GMT

There's lots of reasons while I'll never be able to be the right kind of soccer mom. I can't give pointers, because I stink at ball sports. My snack-making skills are limited, and I'd hate for my kid to be mortified by my offering of broken multigrain crackers and browning apple slices. I detest sitting in lawn chairs, and my car only seats four comfortably. I lack the ability to get grass stains out of a uniform, and I'm totally the kind of mom who forgets to wash the gear until moments before the game, and has to dress her child in a slightly damp jersey while she's already standing on the field.

Also, when I read about these girls peeing on their rivals' field and then posting the pictures on the internet, my first thought was "hee hee hee."

See, I know that I should be appropriately outraged by the unsportsman/womanlike conduct. It flies in the face of the good, character-building aspect of the sport, of healthy competitiveness, of the self-esteem that comes from taking wins and losses gracefully. But I loooove sports rivalry pranks. Mascot-stealing and uniform sabotage entertain me. Look, I draw the line at violence and post-game fights and getting overly worked up about what is, after all, just a game. But peeing? That's just funny.

I don't pretend to have the high moral ground here, and I can only imagine if my child came home with a suspension notice after taking a leak on the competition's home turf and my disciplinary response was a high-five and hysterical laughter. Maybe my inner frat boy is just too powerful. That's why I'm staying away from the field. For the greater good.

MySpace Mistake: Students Create Fake Page for Principal, Get Sued

Stefania Pomponi Butler (CityMama) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:04:00 GMT

When four high-school pranksters decided to play a cyber-joke on their former principal, they got a wee bit more than they bargained for when the principal decided to sue their punk asses.

The four students created fake MySpace profiles for their former principal Eric W. Trosch claiming that he kept beer at school, had sex with students, and enjoyed "smoking drugs."

Trosch is suing for punitive damages. He says the fake pages "damaged his reputation, caused him humiliation, and hurt his earning potential."

Looks like those students are going to be working at Dairy Queen for a looooong time to pay their parents back all that money they're going to have to hand over to Mr. Trosch. Who's punk'd now, suckas?

Boys Steal Mercury, Contaminate Town

Stefania Pomponi Butler (CityMama) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 12:30:00 GMT

A West Virginia town has been contaminated and over 200 of its residents are being screened for mercury exposure because of the actions of some elementary school pranksters.

A group of 10-year-old boys stole about 4 pounds of mercury from an unlocked dentist's office and basically painted up the town with it. Yeeehaw! "It's shiny and makes fun shapes when you drop it," said a local doctor, trying to offer up an explanation for why the boys did it. The mayor of the town cut to chase saying, "Boys will be boys."

The little punks were busted shortly after one of them tried to trade his mercury for a pair of sneakers. Five of the boys who handled the poisonous substance showed high levels of exposure, but none suffered serious health risks. Until they got home, that is.

April Fool's Day on Strollerderby!

Stefania Pomponi Butler (CityMama) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 03:26:00 GMT

We hope you enjoyed reading our April Fool's Day posts as much as we enjoyed writing them. Our goal was to "fool" as many readers as we could. We do know that we "got" some of you; those comments speak for themselves, people. (You know who you are.)

To everyone who fell for our prank posts: "You got punk'd!" And to those that didn't: "Doh! We'll try harder next year."

In case you missed it, here's the round-up:

Apple Releases iPod for Babies

Peanut Butter and Babies Equals Crazy Delicious

Czech Civil Unions Produce Baby Boom

Trend: Waldorf School Students Going Military

Top 5 Ways to Ensure Your Kid Is Cool

Similac Releases Two New Formula Flavors: Mayan Chocolate and Vanilla Chai Spice

New Study: Everything is Harmful to Children

Organic Foods Found to be Poisonous for Children

Potty Mouth Kids Have Higher IQs

Brad and Angelina: Why So Secretive?