Category: Pranks

Link: How “Christ, What an Asshole!” is the Answer to the New Yorker Magazine Caption Contest

via: Boing Boing

So I switched on LBC (a London talk radio station) where the topic was Gordon Brown’s alleged bad temper. I called up and got through almost instantly. “What do you want to talk about?” asked the LBC operator. Without time to think I replied, “Gordon Brown visited my place of work and lost his temper right in front of me”. Very soon I was on air, explaining how Gordon Brown had toured my workshop – a ‘lamination factory’ – and thrown a tangerine into one of the machines, breaking it, before calling a member of staff a ‘citric idiot’.  It was all I could think of at the time. A load of nonsense. But I was quite proud of the phrase, ‘citric idiot’.

Link: BBC – BBC Comedy Blog: Tangerinegate… by Robert Popper

This fall, Steven Kasher Gallery in New York exhibited Josh Gosfield’s collection of memorabilia relating to Gigi Gaston, the French singer/songwriter of the 1960s. His reproductions of album covers, posters, tabloid newspaper articles, fan magazines and scandal sheets tell the story of Gaston’s rise to pop stardom, the car crash that killed her stepbrother and briefly halted her career, her 1969 world tour, her scandalous love affair with an Italian film star, and all the triumphs and tragedies that kept Gaston in the public eye for more than a decade.

Link: How To Create a Pop Star in Photoshop

Link: U.S. Chamber of Commerce | The Yes Men:

In a dramatic announcement at the National Press Club today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reversed its position on climate change policy, and promised to immediately cease lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer bill.

Not.

Link: Business Reply Mail:

This small, sixteen-page pamphlet is produced to put inside the postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Every envelope collected is stuffed with the pamphlet and mailed back to its original company.

via BoingBoing

“SPECIAL EDITION” NEW YORK POST from The Yes Men on Vimeo.

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a “special edition” New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report.

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on
climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon
emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has “less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in
greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet,” adding that Copenhagen is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

Link: kanyelicio.us

Telephone Terrorist – The Smoking Gun:

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality

Greenpeace Activists Vandalize HP Headquarters | Gadget Lab | Wired.com:

HP employees at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto were in for a shock Tuesday morning as they found the message “Hazardous Products” painted on the roof of their office and Greenpeace activists squatting on top.

Author of Torture Memos Pranked in Classroom | Threat Level | Wired.com:

After Yoo mentions the Constitution during his lecture, and asks the students if they have any questions, an Australian comedian from the show Chaser’s War on Everything is seen wearing a black-hooded robe and standing on top of his desk with his arms outstretched, recalling one of the most iconic images of U.S. torture captured in the now-infamous Abu Ghraib photos.

The comedian says, “Actually, professor, I’ve got one question. Uhm, how long can I be required to stand here ’til it counts as torture?”

Yes Men:

In a front-page ad in today’s International Herald Tribune, the leaders
of the European Union thank the European public for having engaged in
months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate
conference that will be held this December. “It was only thanks to your
massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically
shift our climate-change policies…. To those who were arrested, we
thank you.”

There was only one catch: the paper was fake.

From The Fast Food Job Application Prank:

In the winter of 2008, I started noticing that all of the fast food places near work had these little acrylic application holders out in the open. So, I got to work designing a new job application, with much more entertaining questions. All I had to do was remove the spaces for “the last ten places you  worked” and there was more than enough room for every question I could dream up.

To blend into any setting, I invented the fast-food conglomerate Serv-Joy. With this logo, a better name would be “GoatSe.rv-Joy”.

It was an application best described as absurd. My goal was to create questions that were ridiculous, contradictory and just a little seedy.

Check it out here.

via Urban Prankster.