October 31, 2009 | lists

When it comes to festive occasions on the calendar, Halloween holds a place in the hearts of many right behind Christmas – which for sheer volume of swag just can’t be beat – and ahead of Easter, which, in terms of sugared treats is a poor man’s Halloween. Today is the day when kids don cheap plastic masks* fastened on by a rubber band sure to snap and confirm to its youthful wearer that he or she does indeed have a big head.

(*click here for a Shark Guys’ exclusive on costumes being put to nefarious uses by dumb criminals – who were not, it must be said, this dumb) Pranks have been a part of the Halloween tradition ever since someone answered a doorbell on October 31, was greeted with “Trick or Treat”, and, not seeing a prostitute making house calls at eye level, turned his gaze downward to ankle-biters threatening vandalism if the candy wasn’t coughed up.

In a tense, post 9/11 world, rigging explosives up to your neighbor’s garden gnome tableaux, while once a sign of youthful verve and engineering aptitude can now result in your name being put on a list that will see you grounded – as in being refused when attempting to board a plane, not being delivered into a state of mental and emotional contentment.

When a Halloween prank goes off well, everybody has a good laugh and it very rarely makes the newspapers unless it’s something spectacular like convincing people the Martians are coming. Orson Welles these people are not.These are not the legendary ruses that will inspire with their ingenuity, and only made media reports (like all SharkGuy lists of this type this is based in fact, at least the version of it offered by newspapers) because of how badly they went wrong.

Despite our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death, – being referred to as the Darwin Awards for drunks – and not only by us when trying to sell it at book fairs, it should be noted – we only included a few, special deaths in that one, such as a guy who ran errands for an entire day before noticing that his buddy with whom he had upended a city’s water tower worth of booze wasn’t napping in the back seat… or if he was, the snooze button had been hit for eternity. We don’t deal in death if we can avoid it and here we have excluded those pranks – frighteningly numerous – that resulted in the death of the perpetrator.

But then there is death by shame. Here are the Top 7 Halloween Pranks Gone Wrong!

7. Hard-Boiled Justice: (Source: Roanoke Times & World News. Roanoke, Va.: Jan 17, 1998).

A few years back a UK grocery store chain was criticized for selling Halloween-themed egg “fun packs”, which detractors said encouraged youngsters to egg people’s houses. But to us that was just crafty marketing acknowledging an off-label use, like if Viagra were to market directly to impotent college boozehounds. Egging is as basic and essential to Halloween prankery as toilet-papering and kicking someone’s carefully arranged jack-o-lantern display to gourd-like hell with a pair of steel-toes.

Four Virginia men, who were in their early 20s and thus too old by a decade to be doing anything with an egg other than cracking one into a hangover remedy, drove around town Halloween night, leaning out of their windows and hurling eggs at traffic and taking aim at two girls. The latter egging resulted in assault charges, the former serious charges of throwing a “missile” at a motor vehicle. While the amount of eggs thrown is in dispute – “If you believe what everyone said, it must have been a million… The air was full of eggs,” one of the men’s lawyers was quoted as saying. Despite nobody being injured in the incident, the men were each given two-year jail sentences. Two years! No yolking matter.

6. Wiping out pranksters:

We said at the outset – four paragraphs ago – that we mostly don’t deal in death (We threw this out the window with a cherry bomb attached for animals – Click Here for a Top 10 list of ones that go BOOM). But a shotgun wounding of a 14-year-old is another matter.

Last year, five teens went out a couple weeks before October 31 for the time-honored show of Halloween rascality that is toilet papering. Frowned on in these eco-friendly days, toilet-papering involves taking several rolls of toilet paper – hint, buy a jumbo pack for better value, but not one too large to be concealed in a backpack (other toilet-papering tips here [The Shark Guys accept no responsibility for anything, including their own actions and bar bills when they can avoid it])   – and unfurling them all over the homes, hedges, trees and arthritic dogs in your neighborhood. Nobody enjoys cleaning that up, but better that than having that for which toilet paper is typically used tossed at the window and most people when looking back at their own not exactly squeaky clean childhoods, don’t begrudge the youngsters a bit of fun on Halloween.

Then there is the – fortunately – rare reaction of guys like the one in this story. He woke up while the kids were in the middle of hurling the bog paper over his house in traditional Halloween fashion and to quote the sheriff’s department’s lieutenant on the scene, “Their intent was to TP the house; his intent was to come out shooting.” While a non-aggressive type may argue that a warning shot fired in the air might have done the job, the man fired THREE shots at the teens, and injured one of them. The injuries were not life-threatening, though we’re guessing the youngster who received them will not be out with the Downy this season.

5. Prank Becomes a Current Affair:

We debated whether to include this one in our lists of Halloween pranks gone wrong. We’ll let you be the judge of whether we made the right choice. A 15-year-old in Pennsylvania, presumably having closed his family’s roadside fruit stand for the day, decided to chuck some eggs at a Pennsylvania Electric Co. substation for some Halloween fun. Some might question the entertainment value in this, but we’re not judging as we’ve been through Pennsylvania. Also, the result was pretty damned entertaining.

The second of the boy’s oval missiles hit the substation and the combination of egg splatter and rain resulted in a flash – one witness reported seeing a fireball – that knocked out power to 8,000 people (we’ve already slandered the great state of Pennsylvania too liberally here… so we won’t mention how 7,995 people failed to take notice).

The boy himself was treated for ringing ears and that’s why we count as a prank gone wrong because loud explosions like that can lead to tinnitus, a life-long ringing of the ears, and that is just not fun, ask William Shatner.

4. I’ll See Your Trick and Raise You a Throttling:

Halloween can be a bummer for certain adults – those too old to trick or treat who nobody sane would ever invite to a party. The prospect of answering the door and being greeted by so much festivity is enough to cause one to draw the blinds, turn off the lights and eat a Quaalude-filled lasagna to make it through to November 1.

A drunk 34-year-old Washington man decided to liven up Halloween night by donning a costume and – with a buddy, there is always a dopey buddy in these stories – scaring trick-or-treaters as they came to the door (just by yelling surprise or something, not with a jumpkick to the face or such like that.. wait for the violence).

One youngster was quick on the draw responding to the surprise with a blast of silly string he had at the ready. The enraged man leaped for the boy, shaking him violently. The youngster was able to break free, but the aggrieved host wouldn’t let it end there: he grabbed the boy’s bag of candy and refused to give it back when the youngster pleaded with him to do so. Because of incidents just like this, most people trick or treat in their immediate neighborhoods; the boy ran home, told his parents, and the beer-drunk man was arrested and possibly subjected to an unwelcome search for hidden candy down at the station house.

3. Roast of Halloween Past – Baby, Do Fear the Reaper:

We’re both deeply suspicious of fraternities, which are peopled by people we wouldn’t drink with unless we were stuck with them on an ocean skiff and they were the only ones with fresh water… and then we’d really do some soul-searching to decide whether life is indeed so precious. Frat boys spend most of their time getting drunk and forming bonds that will last them through to the years when they’re draining the pension plans of their subordinates to feather a tropical nest. But sometimes they do pull off brilliant pranks. This isn’t one of them.

Members of MIT’s Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity are known as the “skulls” because their coat of arms features a skull and bones… and it should. A “Kapper” dressed in a Grim Reaper very nearly had the opportunity tell him that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The student rigged a device that was meant to emit smoke and shoot out posters into a crowded classroom for a Halloween party that the fraternity was scheduled to host. He was evidently not on the dean’s engineering honor roll – the machine blew up, giving the student severe lacerations and causing the bomb squad to descend on campus and evacuate several buildings.

2. Partier Stops Chopping Spree:

The Bobcat Goldthwait-era of Police Academy aside, cops and hilarity do not often go together and the reason for that is made clear here. A partier arrived for a Halloween fete in the woods and was told by fellow partygoers that a man had been spotted in the woods, wearing a white mask, carrying an ax and chasing children around the neighborhood. Alarmed, and not having seen enough 80s horror films to realize something might be up with this story on Halloween, the man rushed back to his home and returned with a handgun.

He must have kept the fact that he was packing heat quiet until dogs began to bark and out of the woods emerged a man who matched the description, carrying an axe. But alas this was not the most obvious and unlikely murderer in the history of Halloween, but an off-duty police officer in on a Halloween prank.

Presumably the officer was still operating in the realm of make believe, when the partier told him he had a gun and would shoot if he took a step further. The axe-wielding officer took several steps further and was shot twice, though he survived the incident.

1. Kentucky Fried Faker:

Earlier this month a man who shot himself in the head on his balcony was left to rot slumped over in a chair in full sight of his neighbors who, apparently not being the say hello types, mistook his corpse for a Halloween decoration and went about their business.  (And that was not the first time that a suicide victim has been dismissed as the product of someone whose Halloween ambitions went beyond carving the humble pumpkin).

With such ghastly sites being commonly mistaken for Halloween pranks, it’s no surprise that pranksters feel the need to pull off gags of a graphic enough nature to cause the makers of Saw to gasp and flutter their handkerchiefs before falling into a dead faint.

An employee at a chicken restaurant in Kentucky walked in to discover her employer sprawled out on the floor in a pool of blood. Little did she know as she ran screaming out of the restaurant in fear for her life and with the mental scarring at its freshest that the whole thing was a Halloween gag – her boss had arranged the entire scene.

The boss later said that he tried to call his employee on her cellphone to tell her that it was all a bit of Halloween ha-ha, but her phone was engaged – presumably as she was frantically dialing 9-1-1 to report the fact that her boss had been given the treatment usually reserved the chickens. The man was arrested on a charge related to causing a false alarm.

CLICK HERE FOR OUR TOP 10 HALLOWEEN MASK-WEARING CRIMINALS!

October 28, 2009 | lists

Along with remaking old movies and awful television shows, as well as adapting every written work apart from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, Hollywood also keeps from having to come up with its own ideas by turning comic books into hugely successful films (provided Ben Affleck is in no way  involved).

The popularity of superheroes [click here for Captain America, the groping version] speaks in part to the appeal of assuming a completely different identity. (And of wearing a get-up that would be inappropriate outside a fetish bar or a scuba dive meet). Those of us who aren’t actors or committing welfare fraud have little opportunity to assume someone else’s identity, so watching Batman illegally pursue vigilante justice gives us a vicarious thrill and some ideas on how to deal with neighbors prone to 5am guitar-heavy sing-alongs.

Most of the time, though, people adopt fake identities for crime, such as those who claim to be members of Nigerian royalty (who are much like the genuine article in that they are also in the business of lining their pockets with your cash).

Back in the days when police science consisted of little more than asking a bank teller, “Hey, Phil, did you recognize the guy that robbed ya?”, raiding the old lady’s stocking drawer for something that you could pull down over your head as you sprinted over to the neighborhood savings and loan was as good a way as any to avoid detection when committing a robbery. And the tradition continues to this day with many bank tellers held up by sitting presidents, though unfortunately for them and — fortunately for us — their ruses did not keep their names out of newspaper or their mugshots out of the nearest jail house.

As a tribute to Halloween, we present  the kind of masked minions you don’t want tapping at your door with an eye on your candy, The Top 10 Halloween Mask-Wearing Criminals!

10. Commander in Mischief (The Press Enterprise Riverside October 2002). The motivations behind choosing a particular president’s mask are not nearly as nebulous the voting process itself. We would like to think that a bank robber might don a Ronnie Reagan mask for his work as a comment on trickle-down economics, but most bandits just go for what’s lined with lead, made in China and marked down heavily the closer it gets to Halloween at Wal-Mart: a mask of whomever happens to be president at the time. Such was the case in 2002, when police chased down a man wearing a George W Bush mask who was wanted for stealing a motorcycle. Unlike many of a political bent, he was not the kind of thief prone to partisan politics, as police also found a Bill Clinton mask at his home. A Murietta police official said: “It’s the first time I’ve ever had to chase a president.”And unless Martin Van Buren rises from the dead to become a ring leader of some kind of zombie apocalypse, it is likely to be the last.

9. Bush League, not Ivy, but same Stone Age Family: (New York Times September 2007) Police officials were stunned  when they apprehended a man dressed in a George W Bush mask lumbering around St John’s University wielding a rifle (stunned as one does not usually associate W with higher learning).

NYPD officers initially said it appeared to be a George Bush mask, but the suspect’s lawyer later confirmed it was someone of a less prehistoric mindset, Fred Flintstone.

8. Nightmarish Freddy Krueger Bandits (News Tribune Tacoma June 1999). Four intruders wearing Freddy Krueger masks burst into a Washington state man’s home and — like some kind of nightmare –  demanded money, beat him up and absconded with his truck.  They also handcuffed him and wrapped his head in duct tape, the product preferred by movies baddies who let a hostage grow a mustache, cover it with tape, and, once in a soundproof room, inquire of them: “What’s that you’re trying to say? I can’t quite hear you”, before ripping it off in one cruel tug.

Honorable Mention: Freddy Mask a Scream (Salt Lake Tribune November 2006). Salt Lake City cops investigated after a 23-year old was robbed of her candy (the kind that causes cavities, not drug addiction) by assailants wearing Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream Halloween masks, and perhaps more unbelievably, speeding off in a Volvo.’Scream’ is a pretty popular robbery disguise, see Ontario robbery below featuring a guy in a Tap out MMA shirt.

7. They Got Game (BBC October 2005). Campton Rapper, ‘The Game’, not to be confused with the WWE wrestler of the same name, unless you’re a copyright lawyer, did what every self-respecting rapper eventually does as part of his career trajectory—got himself arrested. But for a former Blood, getting arrested and pepper-sprayed in a suburban mall at an autograph signing for refusing to remove a Halloween mask, wouldn’t exactly fill up liner-note space on your next album. This year, Game might want to consider going to Hollywood bashes as “Successful Defendant in a Frivolous, and Galling Lawsuit”. Game used footage his crew shot of the incident in a video of his and the officers pictured breaking out the pepper spray in the land of 12-year-olds decided to sue. They dropped their case after two dismissals.

6. Dummy Arrested (Minnesota Star Tribune August 1986). When the record was set for most people crammed into a Volkswagen, bells went off and somebody thought high-occupancy vehicle lanes would be a great way to ease congestion without funding transit. Ever since these were created, drivers have tried to beat the system and cruise solo in these less crowded lanes.  A Minnesota motorist was pulled over for propping up a dummy rigged up with a Nixon mask in the front seat and the highway patrol confiscated tricky Dick immediately. Driver’s obvious defense: “I am not a crook, I’m just friendless.”

5. You don’t have Nixon, a Devil or a Bear to Kick Around Anymore (News Tribune Tacoma Washington November 1995). A rash of burglaries in Pierce County, Washington led deputies to a suspect’s vehicle where they discovered six Halloween mask — including the devil, Richard Nixon and a bear, along with loaded weapons, jewelry, home stereos and unfortunately, for some poor kid who’s not going to look at a teddy bear or a voting registry the same way again, a bag of stolen Halloween candy.

4. Judge Lance Ito (Washington Times August 1997). Baltimore cops apprehended a bank robber, who committed his crimes not while wearing a mask of that former rental car spokesman with a penchant for double murder, but the guy who, when given the opportunity to throw the book at him didn’t even reach for the shelf:  Judge Lance Ito. The judge famously presided over the marsupial proceedings that were the Simpson trial, and yes, a Halloween mask of him was once made. [Editor's note:  They no longer are, though undoubtedly a few of the other 11th-tier celebs this trial produced will be willing to stop by your Halloween party for a fee.]

3. You’re a Foul One, Mr. Grinch (Charleston Gazette July 2005). Picket lines are dangerous. Apart from an NBA court, there are fewer places where one’s lateral quickness is likely to be put to more of a test as it’s not uncommon for brakes to miraculous fail nearby. A United Steelworkers worker found out just how hazardous these situations can be, not in a hit and run with a scab, but when he was arrested for wearing a Grinch mask—a misdemeanor offence that makes it illegal to wear a mask or hood in public, punishable by a fine of up to $500 and up to a year in jail (the latter is usually just thrown in there in the case of cheapskates and those whose jib the judge does not like the cut of). The man, who was released on a recognizance bond, “took it off when officers asked him to,” but made the mistake of putting it back on and not anticipating this heavy-handed, asinine response.

2. Who is that Masked Man? (Contra Costa Times California October 2009). In 1960, Jacques Plante introduced the goalie mask to the NHL (previously they just picked chicklets out of their mouths between periods). As a result, goalie masks and bloodshed were already well-associated before the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises took off.  Still, it’s a scary image and scarier still for fat kids forced to tend goal in pickup games. California cops arrested suspects in a jewelry store carjacking/kidnapping case, one of whom was wearing a hockey mask and wielding a crowbar.

Honorable Mention: Bloods and Crypts (Murfreesboro Post September 2009). Is it moral to steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family? We are not sure, but what certainly isn’t is the case of a homeless man who held up three clerks for $800 in a Tennessee market with a .22 caliber revolver, black wig and Crypt Keeper mask.

1.   Gorilla Mask (Associated Press September 2005). An upstate New York student on a dare (naturally), was caught streaking through his high school in a publicity stunt in no way orchestrated by our friends over at the website of the same name (but should’ve been). Surveillance camera video helped nabbed the would-be simian and, sadly, nobody was quoted making any “Donkey Kong? Make that Donkey Kong Jnr”, snide remarks.

Honorable Mention: Gorilla Boss (Windsor Star September 2008). Police arrested a “gorilla-mask bandit,” who is suspected of a number of robberies in Hamilton, Ontario while armed with a hammer. He was charged with, among other things, possession of cocaine, which Jane Goodall has yet to observe snorted in the wild. Honorable Mention: Darth Vader (New York Daily News 2010). As the paper so delicately put it, “a lot of robbers use force, this one used the Force.”

[For more on guys who like to dress up and cause trouble, see our Top 20 Worst Masked Pro-Wrestling Gimmicks of All Time]

October 26, 2009 | weird news

“You haven’t lived until you have seen a Japanese salaryman sing the Frank Sinatra ballad “My Way”. It is one of those quintessential said sights that seem to define Japan. What an odd and yet common spectacle: a tousled salaryman, living a life of bows and stifling conformity, a man married to the company, a man who—in the thousands every year—works himself to death for the sake of the corporation, a man who has to eat shit and smile every day, a man who fuels the economic engine yet remains unsung, unacknowledged and often openly mocked. A man like that, standing up and singing in heartfelt English: that the record should show, he took the blows and did it his way! This is something you don’t soon forget.”

Will Ferguson, Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

Apparently, the owner of Tokyo’s most famous karaoke bar, ‘Smash Hits’, holds the dubious distinction of hearing one such hit, warbled 25,000 times: “My Way”, the song penned by pumpkin-complected Paul Anka.

We’ve written about karaoke-inspired violence previously, and if there’s one person who no jury in the world would convict for turning homicidal it would be Smash Hits’ Hide Saito, who notes: “We have tens of thousands of songs to choose from, but they always finish with a bad version of My Way. Usually after ruining Bohemian Rhapsody.” Everybody croon along at home. “Regrets, I’ve had a few…”