$10 cash.” Your next step is the local Goodwill Industries, a local thrift or
second-hand shop, or a garage sale for books. Buy two or three dozen used
hardcover books. You buy them as cheaply as you can, but they’ll cost your
mark plenty. Your next step is to paste on the bookplates and distribute
these books–at the beach, on park benches, in a bus or subway, or in a bar or
restaurant. The final step is for you to enjoy a good chuckle at your mark’s
expense, as people find the “lost” books.
If your mark has a fine library, you might consider introducing it to
silverfish. They love good books; in fact they will devour them. If you feel
this nasty, you probably already know where to get silverfish and their eggs.
This one bothers me, though, since I love good books. Maybe there’s a better
way. Perhaps you could put an earwig in you mark’s bed pillow.
Why not give your mark the image of a philathropic person? Donate books
in his/her name to the local library, but without either party’s knowledge.
Buy a bunch of really scuzzy porno paperbacks, especially the colorfully
illustrated ones from Denmark–the more grossly hardcore, the better. Your
printer will produce some paste-in bookplates that say something like this,
“This book donated to the [Name] library by [Mark's name] in loving memory of
all the sweet children of [Town name].” Paste in the bookplates and sprinkle
the donated books around the local library. Put some in the children section,
and others in the religion books.
@ENDNODE
@NODE CAMPUSES “Campuses”
Not everyone is hibernating on college campuses. Although it’s true that
many students have become docile zombies, lobotimized by lethal doses of
television and the bureaucracy of the educational system, there are a few live
ones. At an eastern university, a number of students got upset with the rent
gouging of a massive corporation acting as an absentee landlord for private
off-campus dormitories. After getting nowhere appealing to an untesticled
school administration, and after being ignored by a housing inspector and a
city council belonging to the same social class and clubs as the corporate
landlords, the students held a pizza party.
The unusual part was the the pizza party was held in the clothes dryers
of the dormitory laundry rooms. One particpant reported, “We dumped a couple
of really gooey pizzas in each dryer, put in the coins, and turned them on.”
Try cleaning up that one!
Epilogue: The corporate landlord and his student tenants settled their
problems shortly after the party, totally to the satisfaction of the young
protestors.
Professor James Shannon claims that college students of the past had
heinous imaginations. Today, of course, many students are content merely to
move around enough to prevent roots from forming on their contact surfaces
with the ground. Professor Shannon suggests that if you have a teacher you
don’t like, and he/she lectures from a desk or podium on a raised platform,
you move the stand so its legs are barely balanced on the front edge of the
platform. When the academic leans forward on the structure ever so slightly,
it will come crashing forward. With any luck the pedagogue will land on top
of it.
At an eastern university, two looser colleagues filled a humorless and
bookish faculty member’s office closet with several large and irritable geese
one evening. The professor was in the habit of arriving quite early for 8:00
AM class, early enough so that the hasty-tempered birds would just be
awakening. When he opened the closet door they woke up and became badly
aggressive really fast. Eyewitness reports left no doubt whose feathers were
ruffled most.
This will be truly appreciated only by those privy to the pettiness of
academia: Other colleagues of this same professor sometimes send truly
pedantic, nasty, personal, and vindictive memoranda to various other faculty
members, deans, etc., in the name of their priggish colleagues.
On one occasion they sent really nasty letters to the parents of a few of
this faculty member’s students, giving the poor folks hell for daring to
produce such genetic drift as their kids, much less turning them loose on a
college campus. The school’s PR people had a terrible time getting out from
under that one. As for the mark, the dumb schmuck had no idea why so many
people disliked him. But please take his colleagues word for it–he deserves
every bit of it.
@ENDNODE
@NODE CARBIDE “Carbide”
Having been brought up around hunters and miners, I learned all about
carbide lamps and carbide fishing early. Working on my grandfather’s farm, I
learned about carbide bombs. Let me explain some things you might find
useful.
When calcium carbide is exposed to air and water it produces a gas that
will kill small animals. Farmers often pour it down gopher, rat, or groundhog
holes, then dump in some water and put a rock over the hole. The animal is
gassed to death.
A lot of poor people used to fish with carbide with the same efficiency
with which legions of GIs fished with hand grenades. Simply toss a pound or
two of carbide into a can and seal it, but be sure to punch a few holes in the
lid. Toss it into a pond. The results can play havoc with your mark’s fish
pond or fancy goldfish pool or an indoor aquarium. Water and carbide can
produce an explosion.
Some of the nastier kids used to place amounts of carbide into the
toilets at our school. The idea was to place the carbide bomb in the toilet,
leave a lighted cigarette on the seat, and run like hell. The carbide would
combine with the water to produce a huge cloud of noxious gas, which would
explode when it hit the lighted cigarette the perpetrators left behind. This
little homemade bomb did more damage than an M80.
Tim Bell, who later became a Special Forces NCO in Vietnam, explains, “We
had a kid bully whom no one liked–a real prick. He always went to the john
after fourth period to sneak a smoke. So two of us went in right after him
and laid a carbide bomb in the water in the next stall. We were about a
hundred feet down the hall when the damn thing went off.”
At this point, Tim burst into a wild laughter. I was able to learn, though
, that the bully had his legs burned and cut by flying porcelain, bit
his tongue badly, was knocked violently off the throne, bruising his ribs
against the steel wall of the stall, and was deafened for nearly twenty-four
hours, all by the force of this carbide explosion. With that kind of
background as a high school kid, it’s no wonder Tim Bell made a good Special
Forces trooper.
Are there more adult uses for carbide? Some sixties semi-terrorists used
to dump a pound or so into the toilets of corporate offices and government
buildings, flush the mess into the system, and walk away briskly. Enough of
the stuff could get very dangerous, considering the possible backup of gases.
A combination of water and carbide has been fed into the ventilating systems
of various corporate and government buildings, also by semi-terrorists who
wish to harass the resident bureaucrats.
@ENDNODE
@NODE CARS “Cars”
This one’s really kiddie Halloween time, but it does work. A bunch of
old nuts and bolts placed into the wheel well behind the hubcap will make the
mark think his/her car is falling apart. It’s worth some minor harassment, of
course, and works outstandingly well with high-strung nonmechanical typed who
absolutely panic at car noises.
You can get a little heavier than Halloween by removing a hubcap from
your mark’s car wheel and loosening or removing the lug bolts. Sooner or not
much later, the wheel will simply roll off the car.
Moving up the escalator of nastiness, you could probably fill your mark’s
whole body with adrenaline if you placed a split shot sinker, of the type used
by fishermen, on the accelerator cable of his/her vehicle. Willy Seamore, a
top mechanic, suggests you extend the cable, then place the lead weight on the
extended portion, which effectively blocks it from returning. This means the
vehicle’s throttle will run wide open. It’s a nasty version of the
jack-rabbit start.
From choking up to locking up is hardly a quantum experience. The new
miracle glues are impregnable when squirted into car door keyholes. Nothing
short of a locksmith can repair this low-risk attack. If you hit just before
the mark’s family vacation, leave the car door locks alone and hit the trunk
lock. With any luck, they’ll never notice until they’re miles from home.
A refinement of simply putting a super glue or epoxy into the car’s
various locks is to take any old key that will vaguely locks is to take any
old key that will vaguely fit into the lock cavity, insert it, then twist it
rapidly back and forth until the key breaks off, stuck in the lock. Now is
the time to squirt glue into the lock. The job is more permanent and more
costly to repair.
If you tire of fooling with the locks, you can look elsewhere. Marshall
Tanner, inventor of muffler bearings, says you can prop some large-headed
nails against the tires of your mark’s car, especially if it’s parked so it
will have to be backed up to get out of a parking stall in a lot. The car
moves back and the wheels roll over the nails, puncturing tires.
If your mark’s married, you can have all sorts of sport with his ride. A
male mark deserves that you slip sexy undergarments usually worn by a sexy
lady under his car’s front seat or wedge them carefully into the back seat.
You could tear them a bit. More than a hint of perfume or flavored douche
will always hype suspicion. You can escalate this stunt somewhat if you buy
male underwear–get the sexy style in white–and place some lipstick smears
around the fly area. You can help the campaign along by having a very trusted
lady friend call and ask nervously for the mark. The younger she sounds, the
better. Have her call several times. Use your and the mark’s wife’s
imagination.
If the mark is a woman, a pack of condoms carelessly hidden in the car is
always a sure-grow plant. Several daint handkerchiefs of the type favored by
milady and heavily impregnated with semen can also be stuffed in the car. As
with the male, a series of appropriately timed telephone calls from a nervous
male will add to the marital festivities between mark and spouse.
In less carnal surroundings, if you can get to the distributor cap,
remove it and use graphite from a pencil to contact the rotor brushes. The
charge will run along the graphite, causing the engine to misfire. This could
cause the mark to dash into his local car butcher and get charged an
outrageous price for an unnecessary tuneup.
A quick way to disable a car battery is to slip a couple of Alka-Seltzer
tablets or a teaspoonful of baking soda into each battery compartment. The
antacid will kill the battery’s power before you can say “Plop, plop, fizz,
fizz.”
Another camhead nasty is to take a pushpin and jab a few tiny holes
through spark-plug wires. According to Lee H. Santana, a real straight
shooter in the dirty-tricks department, the pin pricks cause a hellishly
rumpety noise when the car is driven.
Don’t forget additives when working on a mark’s car. The nice thing
about additives is that you don’t have to be odd or even to use them. Many
experts, including some of Uncle Sam’s khaki-clad nephews, suggest light
materials, such as crushed cork, as a great additive to the gasoline tanks of
vehicles belonging to people or institutions you don’t like.
One former professional trickster said, “It isn’t to exotic, but a
handful of old leaves in the gas tank will bind the damn engine up too.”
Sand is not recommended because of its weight, especially when wet. It
would sink to the bottom of the tank and not much would be introduced into the
engine, he explained. The idea is to get the additive to the bearing
surfaces, where the coarse little buggers can kick and scratch up a mechanical
breakdown. Silicone carbide, emery powder, and fine metal filings will work.
During World War II, our OSS used a mixture of finely ground cork, resins,
carborundums, and metal alloys to muck up an engine.
Another method that could possibly send a driver off to a service station
would be to pour a gallon of shellac thinner into your targeted vehicle’s
gasoline tank. The alcohol will gather up all the water in the fuel trap, and
when this mixture goes through the fuel line it will cause the vehicle to
snort, stammer, and act as if it has big carb troubles. By the time the
driver gets the vehicle to a mechanic, the problem has usually departed out
the exhaust pipe. Done enough times, this one can redline the frustration and
credibility levels of both the driver and the mechanic.
If you want to use additives in your mark’s gasoline tank, yet are
concerned about arousing suspicion in daylight or in an otherwise
high-visibility area, simply adopt a cover prop.
“Put the harmful additive in a metal gasoline can like they sell in
stores,” advises Joey MacJohns, a veteran trickster. “That way, any potential
witnesses will never really pay attention to what’s happening; they’ll simply
infer because you have a gas can that you’re putting gas in the car.”
And don’t forget oil additives. Styrene, a colorless, oily liquid, is an
organic compound that is one of the two chemicals mixed together to make
hardened fiberglass. Boat-supply stores and marinas have styrene available
for patching fiberglass boats. It is also used in body shops and
upholstery-repair places.
There are substitutes compounds that will do the same job as styrene, so
read the label when purchasing the stuff to make sure you’re actually getting
styrene. Styrene is the only sufficiently effective, commonly available
material that can be put into a car’s crankcase to completely break down the
oil and ruin the engine.
Styrene in the crankcase is far better that sugar in the gas tank because
it can’t be seen after being introduced and because only a little does a
thorough job. If it’s used at the rate of one per four quarts of oil, the
treated vehicle will run about a hundred miles before the engine locks up
tight.
This is a fairly high-risk stunt, but it could be fun if you don’t get
nailed doing it, according to Bill Rally. If you find that your mark is going
alone to a movie you have an hour or so to have some fun with his automobile.
If you’re motivated enough to carry off this stunt, no one has to tell you how
to start the mark’s car without a key. After you start it, drive to some very
nice homes with pretty lawns. But stay fairly near the theater, so you can
get back there in a hurry. Do donuts, dig out, and otherwise use the car to
make a shambles of lawns, shrubbery, flower beds, etc. Run over lawn
furniture, hit mailboxes, and try to frighten some old people by coming really
close to them with the car.
This is a real hit-and-run mission. Do your dirty driving fast and get
the car back to the theater parking area even faster. Park it and leave. If
you’ve done enough damage, all sorts of police reports will be out on the car.
The second or third question the police will ask the mark is whether he or she
has any witnesses for the movie alibi.
That can be a real blast. But if you want another sort of pop, dig
deeply into the potato bin for this one. My thanks here go to all those great
truck farmers who say a potato jammed into a vehicle’s exhaust pipe is not
explosive, but it will cause all sorts of nasty problems. In one case, the
mark parked his car with the rear end towards his home. His tormentor jammed
a fresh, hard spud tightly inot the car’s exhaust pipe. The mark started the
car on a cold evening and waited a few moments for the engine to warm.
Meanwhile, the hot gases, unable to escape, built up dangerously behind the
potato….Woom!…KABLOOM!… With an explosive roar, the gases fired that
big, hot, hard potato right into the metal siding of the mark’s home, just
fifteen feet away from the exhaust pipe, which acted as a cannon barrel. The
holing and denting of the siding cost $150 and a day to repair.
There are all sorts of other devices that make good muffler bombs. A
firecracker may be shoved into the vehicle’s exhaust pipe, pushing it along