Tuesday, April 21, 2009

And Marconi dreamed on ...

I've got a couple of mates who are all brothers and fond of practical jokes. No, this isn't one they played on me.

For those of you still reading, I was reminded by Kath's recent post about phone calls of this prank, which was actually a revenge prank for something else entirely.

One of the recently-pranked brothers, let's call him Ducko, designed a flyer for a Rockin' Roddy's pizza shop which was celebrating its grand opening in the local area. The way Rockin' Roddy had decided to celebrate was by giving a free pizza to everyone who called up the delivery number and shouted "Rockin' Roddy's Pizzas are the rock-rock-rockingest in town!" down the phone. Rockin' Roddy knew his market: just the kind of crazy young types who would be willing to shout something silly down the phone for a free pizza. At 3am. Did I mention that Rockin' Roddy's was a 24-hour pizza shop?
With the flyer all designed, Ducko then copied it a couple of hundred times and, with the help of a few friends, distributed it to every house in the area.
Of course, Rockin' Roddy's never existed in the first place and revenge was beautifully exacted when Ducko placed his brother's home phone number as the delivery hotline.


For weeks the phone rang hot at all hours with everyone from stoned yobbos to jolly-housewives hollering "Rockin' Roddy's Pizzas are the rock-rock-rockingest in town!" into Ducko's brother's ear every time he lifted the phone.

***
In other news: Charlie now lifts his head easily and can roll over from his stomach to his back. And if he's not rolling over when we place him on his front, he's working his arms and legs back and forth and slowly moving across the ground on his tummy (and, let's be honest, his face when his neck gets tired). One might even call it crawling, if he weren't, you know just six weeks old.

***
GTH - Shippy for effort, River for 'fully baked' and Mele for, well, read the damn post!

9 comments:

  1. The art of a good prank is well rewarded when the prank continues on further than first anticipated.

    Question: Did Ducko's Brother find out that Ducko had played such a devilish trick on him?

    Questions 2: Did Ducko tell his brother that he'd played a devilish trick?

    MP Cup, where even the dumbest pranks seem like a good idea.

    GTH: A young pre-1990's Franzy playing a wishfully successful prank on his at-a-guess grandparents that his hair was more 'ranger than it was when they last saw him.

    P.s. Sounds like Chuck is learning fast - start installing baby stopping devices - fences, powerpoint stoppers, mouse traps...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Q1: Yes.
    Q2: Yes.

    MP Cup - I suspected years ago that the entire cup weekend is actually some kind of elaborate prank.

    ps. fences - too much work, powerpoint stoppers - why hold back the learning process, mouse traps - we'll put his pocket money in there and when he can take it without getting caught, he will have been deemed to have earned that dollar.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rockin' Roddy's Pizza, eh?
    I'm not a fan of practical jokes, mostly because they were often played on me.

    My kids were lifting their heads and looking around at 6 weeks too. Sitting on my lap or lying on the floor, reaching out for stuff they couldn't yet hold. My mum would insist that babies that age should be sleeping between feeds, I'd be telling her he/she is perfectly happy playing on the floor, he isn't crying, he's learning stuff, leave him there. (for christmas that year she sent me a booklet on how to raise children. I sent it back...)
    GTH:- Charlie, much more advanced than his age would imply.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Question 3: Did Ducko's brother kill Ducko for this?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love pranks like that. My brother used to subscribe his mates to the free religious mag, 'The Plain Truth' all the time. No wonder you don't see it around now.

    For Chuck to be rolling at 6 weeks is incredible - most of them don't even know what their hands are for until 3 months! And you do realise that young Charlie is already being referred to as 'Chuck' in blogland?

    GTH - For a boy so physically advanced, it's not surprising he's grown a full head of Fanta hair as well. Just don't show us his groin or his pits just yet....

    ReplyDelete
  6. River - The only reason I found out about the rolling over was that some nurse told us that he wasn't happy with Charlie's neck muscle development and that we should be putting him on his tummy more to develop them.

    Squib - Q3: No, Ducko knows a good prank when he sees one. And also how to plot revenge ... slowly ... surely ...

    Kath - And yet, we're still waiting for a smile. If you don't want pits and pubes, I guess I'll have to hold off on the planned video postings ...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh and you're TAGGED, sonny boy - http://blurbfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2009/04/mummy-meme-from-what-i-can-gather-it.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. I looooooove that prank. Perfect for using when your neighbour Mr Doof-Doof is pissing you off. Just have to find his phone number.

    ReplyDelete

An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test

Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

Champions of Guess The Header

  • What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
  • Nai - 1
  • Lion Kinsman - 2
  • Will - 2
  • Brocky - 2
  • Andy Pants - 2
  • The 327th Male - 3
  • Mad Cat Lady - 3
  • Miles McClagen - 4
  • Myninjacockle - 4
  • Asheligh - 5
  • Neil - 5
  • Third Cat - 5
  • Adam Y - 6
  • Squib - 6
  • Mele - 6
  • Moifey - 7
  • Jono - 8
  • The Other, other Sam - 14
  • Kath Lockett - 15
  • Shippy - 19
  • River - 32