The Pie Bandit

A little while back, I had posted a YouTube video orchestrated by a married couple who are among my college friends going back the late 1980s (that post here).

That event was, of course, thoroughly staged, and only the students in the class were caught unawares.

But it isn’t the first time my friend Bill Horner has been involved in such shenanigans.

At Northwestern University, having a chicken head mask and nothing societally productive to do with it, he and his roommate, Brian Feldman, staged a pie attack in a class. Now, as I recall, it wasn’t even a class that Brian was actually registered for. The chicken-headed “Pie Bandit” appeared, struck Brian in the face with a pie, and then vanished. Neither the professor nor the class was any the wiser.

It was funny and harmless, as college pranks go, and we all enjoyed the minor spectacle and brief buzz it created, with people wondering: WTF? (Of course, the Internet was in its infancy back then, so nobody knew what the fuck “WTF” was…but I digress).

What the stunt lacked, though, was documentation and a way for it to be locked into the history of Northwestern over the long run. So Bill and Brian, being determined pranksters, and my roommate Adam Beechan and I (being journalism majors) decided it needed to be in the daily college newspaper.

Problem is, if you know anything about Northwestern, you know it is home to a top-tier journalism program, so the people working at the paper aren’t going to just run a prank story for the hell of it. So, in a bit of media manipulation in my pre-professional journalism career, we conspired to make it a real story.

So, a second attack was staged, and this time with the paper having been tipped off that something might happen to Brian in the class (I don’t recall how we managed to tip them off without giving away that it wasn’t even a class Brian was registered for and without giving away that he knew the attack was coming…just goes to show the news media has always been easy to manipulate, I guess). As such, a photographer was there, ready to catch something happening, and got the shot of Brian having been “pied.” A story was run shortly thereafter, interviewing Brian about his attack, how he felt about it and if he knew who his attacker was.

Not only that, but if I recall right, we manufactured a letter from the Pie Bandit, done in “ransom note” style with words cut out of magazines, that put out his words on the matter, and the paper ran that as well (I think they might have actually printed a photo of the letter itself).

History was made, and people did begin to wonder who the Pie Bandit was, what was going on and…to be honest…whether it was all a set up (it wasn’t a campus of completely gullible idiots).

Still feeling a bit prankish…but now moving more toward self-parody mode, we as a group began to think this was pretty cool, and we saw potential in this to milk it some more, since Bill and Brian were both in the radio, TV and film program and we had various friends who did performance-related studies at NU.

So, we decided to do a sort of “48 Hours” news special parody, enacting a third staged pie attack without the knowledge of the professor or the class, filming it from the back of the lecture hall, and doing other assorted silliness to make an entire short film, essentially. We enjoyed many re-watchings of it. Bill has finally digitized the video, after editing it to fit YouTube’s time limits, and I can now offer it up to you for amusement, enjoyment and/or ridicule.

By the way, as you will see, most of the people involved had at least rudimentary performance abilities. Myself, seen beginning at the 8:50 mark or so (the only guy in the film with a beard, so I’m easy to spot), am far less smooth in my delivery, and I know it, so don’t rub it in. 😉

(P.S. There was a “dancing chicken” stunt at Northwestern University recently that got some attention and went a bit viral, and if you look at the comments, I have links there. It was the dancing chicken prank, in part, that inspired Bill to dust off our old analog video and make it web-ready)

Hey, Come Visit!

I know I let my novel stall here at this blog, and I’m not sure when I’ll return to it, but if you like fiction with a “fantastic” element to it, don’t forget that I have another blog, recently launched, with a superhero/supervillain theme to it. I’ll be posting ongoing series and also one-shot stories, so there won’t be the same kind of stalling effect we saw when I realized here that I had an epic novel series on my hands.

No, it’s not all “Bam” and “Pow” and costumed mayhem. I have characters, issues, dialogue and more. It’s real fiction, folks, not fluff, and I hope you’ll give it some attention even if you find “caped crusaders” not to be your usual fare.

http://whethermentales.wordpress.com/

I’ve Lost My Mind

Of course, it’s not enough to write for a living. No, I have to go on a compulsive fiction-writing kick as part of my mid-life shenanigans, much of it in (as I’ve noted before) a genre which does not allow me to share it with you.

As if that isn’t enough, I’ll be taking part in NaNoWriMo (a competition attached to National Novel Writing Month, which is November), so I’ve basically committed myself to write at least a novel of at least 50.000 words in 30 days or less.

Oh, and to show I’m REALLY insane, I’ve started another blog, focused on fiction.

Yeah.

Someone medicate me, please.

(oh, the new blog is here: http://whethermentales.wordpress.com)

Co-signing away your soul

I cannot take credit for the following quote, but I can’t help by smile ruefully and nod my head as I read it. It’s sort of the religious/spiritual equivalent of the Tea Party candidates who tout that we need to remain true to the U.S. Constitution, but who don’t know what the Constitution says or what the amendments to it are.

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.”

That came from a Twitter account known as almightygod (I didn’t know my Father in Heaven had signed on to Twitter until now ;-)), and I don’t know if the owner of that Twitter account is the originator of the quote or simply passing on something he or she heard, but it’s a gem if I ever saw one, regardless.

And So It Goes…and Perhaps Ends

It was not quite the discussion I had envisioned it to be, but the debate about the Catholic Church and Vatican that started here has, at least from my standpoint, come to an end with a series of posts over the past couple days that were increasingly (though politely) combative on both sides. If it continues, it will be without me, as I feel further participation by me will only enflame matters and raise my blood pressure…as well as distract me from other things I need to do.

If you didn’t read any of it, or haven’t finished following it, I recommend you check it out.

There has been some interesting historical information shared, which is probably not 100% accurate on either side of our debate, but somewhere in the middle (though I think even in the middle, history tends to support my arguments ;-)) and there has been some insight into the mind of man who became Catholic and embraced it fully in his faith walk, and of another man who respects Catholics overall but cannot stomach the institution that leads them.

It is my hope that even in disagreeing with David, that I have not offended him. I have learned some things, and filled some errors in my knowledge, and gained more knowledge than I had before. I hope he can say the same, but who knows?

New Layout Woes?

So, it looks like my recent layout change here at the blog may lose me one of my regular readers, as Robyn recently posted (here) that it hurts her eyes, no matter what resolution she sets her computer monitor at.

Is anyone else having problems with the new format?

Or, for that matter, are you neutral or do you like it?

Let me know. I resisted changing for a long time and actually thought this would be an improvement over the previous format.

Debate Time!

In case you don’t check the “Recent Comments” section in the sidebars, let me inform you that David (who commented in my “Down the Hole With You” post the other day) and I are engaging in some friendly debate about Catholic doctrine. He asked in the comments of one of Miz Pink’s posts if I was Catholic, and it went off from there. It’s good clean fun…no one’s getting savaged or anything, but if you’re curious, it starts here.

Think Pink!

No, nothing to do with Miz Pink, my still-absent partner in blogging crime.

This would be the pink that is breast cancer awareness. One of my best friends from college, Prof. Bill Horner in the political science department at Mizzou (University of Missouri), is the husband of another college friend of mine, Prof. Heather Carver of their drama/theater department (and a 5-year breast cancer survivor).

Well, they staged a little thing to “ambush” Bill’s class to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” and I’m going to do my part to see if I can help this go viral on the Web.

Down the hole with you

As we celebrate that the Chilean miners are finally being hoisted out from being thousands of feet underground for weeks, I would like to suggest that with that space having been organized so nicely and made relatively comfy (for a mine)…how about we put a few people down there in their place?

I nominate:

• Glenn Beck
• Ann Coulter
• Rush Limbaugh
• Ingrid Newkirk

…just for starters. Any other nominations?

Sunday Share

So, our pastor had an interesting line today in church, and not sure if he got it from someone else (so if he did, apologies if credit needs to go elsewhere). In the final of a four-week series on “Why Church?” he noted, of the value of attending church, that in doing so…

The synergy of collectivity overcomes the entropy of individualism.

Now, there are a lot of non-Christians who read my blog here who are cringing right now. Really, I can feel your shuddering through the Internet. You’re saying, “See! This is the problem with churches. They preach conformity and groupthink.”

Get your knickers out of your ass crack for a moment though, and reflect. First off, even the non-churchgoing types belong to plenty of clubs, groups, political parties, community groups and more where unity of action and thought is often encouraged. So get off the high horse.

But more importantly, let’s examine what the pastor of my church is really talking about (because, for one thing, it’s a highly open and inclusive church, and doesn’t promote lock-step thinking at all).

Having a community that is together in a single purpose, or a set of purposes, can be a very good thing. My church, in fact, is very involved in community helping and in helping abroad. Helping primarily, with proselytizing really far down the list of priorities. That is the synergy of collectivity. Not a collective “turn off your brain” mindset but the pooling of talents, wills and resources.

Together, we can achieve things that as individuals we could not do, or not do as effectively. The offerings we give, the time we might volunteer, the smiles we might offer to fellow church members who need a smile…all these things come together to make the church community powerful when there is love and compassion at the heart of things, and not judgment or recrimination.

And that’s where we get to the “entropy of individualism.”

Not, mind you, “individuality.” Our pastor said individualism.

I think there is a distinction. The first is natural. We are all unique and should be. We all have lives outside the church as well. And we should. These are good things.

But the latter thing, individualism, is trickier, and more dangerous. It speaks to me of the desire to put individual desires above all else. We’re all guilty of doing this, regularly. But we must be careful to remember the importance of community (spiritual or otherwise) and not lift up the individual so much that we end up preaching the dangerous nonsense of someone like Ayn Rand and that dangerous school of thought known as Objectivism, which encourages people not to help their fellow humans.

There are pastors and churches where the collectivity is taken to the extreme of collectivism, which is where we end up with “sheeple” and large groups of people mobilizing behind issues that I’m sure make Jesus cringe.

I agree that such a state is not good. But I like the “synergy of collectivity,” idea and I agree that it should be one of the primary reasons for finding a good church and being a member of it, even if you don’t attend every week and even if you can’t give much or your money or time.