Beach Pokemon

While I was catching pokemon on the beach before work, I looked up from my phone and saw this:

Mr. VooDoo

In junior high, my friend Mark and I jotted off hundreds of voodoo curse notes and placed them all over the school. Our intent was to weird people out. The text of the notes read, "You is cursed, says Mr. VooDoo," and was accompanied by a badly drawn skull with a few feathers sticking out of it.

"You is cursed," says Mr. VooDoo.

We'd slip these notes into students' textbooks, teachers' grade books, people's lockers, under staff coffee cups, and inside teachers' office mailboxes. All over the place.

Luckily, our 8th-grade teacher found it amusing and gave us a special mention at graduation for making something entertaining out of nothing. She said she’d crack up whenever she opened a book and one of those notes fell out.

P-E-P-S-I S-P-I-R-I-T

In 1981, Pepsi launched a bottle cap collecting game to ignite the "Pepsi Spirit" in their customers. The idea was simple: collect the letters printed on the inside of each bottle cap to spell "Pepsi Spirit." This was before plastic twist-off caps were common, and you had to pop open a Pepsi with a bottle opener. Here’s the original commercial.

As a kid, I didn't realize that the rarest letter was the elusive R. I thought the distribution of letters was even, and I would excitedly tell people that we had all the letters except for the R. Little did I know, everyone was in the same boat.

One day, while stopping at a gas station, my friend and I thought we had struck gold. The gas station owner had altered a P into an R with a marker and had the caps displayed next to the register. We were ecstatic and thought our dream of completing the Pepsi Spirit was finally coming true.

"We have the E! You have the R! Let's go in together and split the money!" we exclaimed.

But then, the gas station owner laughed and pointed out that it was a fake R—one of the fifth ones he'd made because people kept stealing them!

Pretty good prank.

[Originally posted on Rebel Leady Boy, May 18, 2006]

Leap Froggin'

Spontaneous game of leap frog outside the venue while waiting for Jack's band to play.

Leap froggers.

Fork Fangs

Cousin Ross taught me this at Long John Silvers in Fort Wayne, IN during the late 1970s and I've never forgotten it. Fork Fangs are an example Hoosier ingenuity at its best.

It's an easy way to entertain yourself and others in a public dining area for no extra cost while your parents are talking for hours. 

Directions:
1. Start with a standard disposable plastic fork.
2. Break off the handle and center prongs.
3. Flip it upside down.
4. Place it in your mouth, and....ta-daaaa - Vampire fangs.
5. Fun time!

Recreating the Fork Fangs experience as an adult..

Shaving Cream Head

Has anyone ever played Shaving Cream Head?

It's tons of fun, it's almost free, and it's anonymous.

Just run around in public and raise hell with your identity disguised by the shaving cream.

If you're in a small town, it's funny to urge people to try to guess who you are. Nobody will have a clue.

I am the one in the Attakiska Alaskan Vodka t-shirt.

My friend James and I originated this in 1991. 

It may have influenced the later Juggalo movement.

[Originally posted on I'm Nacho Steppinstone, Feb. 27, 2004]

Cheap Thrills: Fire & The Dictionary

In Los Angeles, whenever we were looking for something to do, we often turned to the dictionary. A random word could spark all sorts of fun associations.

One time, we used it to see what we’d write on our tombstones: Sarah's would say, "Faithless," mine would read, "Snake," and Miski's would be "Uncontainable."

Another fun pastime was playing with fire. One night, while cleaning the house, we got frustrated with all our clutter and decided to start a big bonfire in the backyard to burn anything we didn’t need. It turned out we had a lot more to toss on than we thought! After an hour of tossing in old dish towels, ugly clothes, random objects of questionable origin, and even a traffic cone (which took ages to melt), we started to wonder if we really needed any of it at all. We were all pretty drunk, which only added to the hilarity of the situation—after all, we could have easily ended up burning everything we owned!

Sarah Vaquero burning a shirt in the backyard.

When someone brought the dictionary over to the fire, it shifted our carefree vibe. None of us had the heart to toss the dictionary into the flames, so we decided to incorporate it into our game instead.

The rules were simple: one person would stand by the fire, ready to choose something to burn, while two others acted as judges on the sidelines. The person by the fire had to justify their choice for burning that item. But if they paused for more than five seconds or lost their train of thought, the judges would randomly pick a word from the dictionary and shout it at the speaker. The challenge? They had to weave that word into their justification in a coherent and meaningful way.

It was a fun game and it inspired some great arguments for burning shit.

This is what we all looked like in those days.

[Originally posted on I'm Nacho Steppinstone, Dec. 11, 2003]