This reminds me of a similar stunt we used to enjoy at the dining hall
in my undergrad days.  The food service used opaque plastic salt and
pepper shakers with pop-off tops that could be pried off with a knife
blade if you were persistent enough.

PREPARATION (in a restroom nearby):  (1) Empty salt ( or pepper) from a
previously 'acquired' container and fill about 1/3 full with
concentrated lemon juice.  (2) Place a thin tissue across the opening,
poke it down a bit to form a depression, and fill the depression with
about a teaspoon of baking soda.  (3)  Cover (from the inside) the
holes of the top with tape of the appropriate color.  (4) Replace top
on container and trim visible tissue from around the top.

Carry the device to dining hall (upright and as stable as is
possible...  for your own sake).

After discretely placing the shaker on your table (only place it near
to you... see caveat \#1 below), observe the next person to use the
salt (pepper).  (S)He will shake lightly at first, then harder as
nothing comes out.  Due to the breakdown of the tissue and the pressure
resulting from the classic acid/base reaction, the top will pop off
(quite spectacularly) amidst a shower of foam.  Your victim (as will as
everyone around) should have quite a reaction, since one does not
usually observe this type of behavior in a salt (pepper) shaker!

CAVEATS: 1.  The top will come off with some force.  If the holes are
sealed well, this will happen on about the second or third shake.
Once, though, due to poor sealing, it took about 5 seconds, during
which time our victim started looking at the shaker to examine the
"foamy stuff coming out" of the holes...  we quickly grabbed the shaker
from her to direct the top towards the ceiling before it went off.  So,
watch carefully!

2.  The "foam shower" (lemon juice \& soda) may ruin you victim meal...
be prepared to pop for another one.

3.  Don't do this if your victim or anyone near ground zero is dressed
up (this joke will flop at board meetings and the like).





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This joke has been done 50 (yes, 50) years ago by my father-in-law.

First, a little background:

He lived in a small village, north-west of Quebec City along the St-Laurent
river. In those days, toilets were located outside the house in what
we call in good ol' french canadian 'becosse', from 'back house' I think.
These are a little wood shack with no floor over a hole in the ground
where you ... You can guess.

Now, for the joke:

He and a friend were thrown out of a party by the doorman.

When it was really dark,, the doorman went to investigate what was
knocking at the window. They had suspended a rock to the window
frame so it hung right it the middle and tied another string
to the rock and hid behind the 'becosse' where they pulled
that second string to make the rock knock in the window.
That's an old trick. The doorman wouldn't fall for that one. So
he followed the second string in the dark
and soon concluded that they were hidding behind the 'becosse'.

He ran toward the merely visible wood structure...

But my father-in-law and his friend had taken care of moving the
shack six feet ... Boy he fell in the shit !!
  




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                      Letter from Daughter to Parents
     
   
Dear Mother and Dad:

It has now been three months since I left for college. I have been remiss
in writing this and I am very sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having
written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on,
please sit down. YOU ARE NOT TO READ ANY FURTHER UNLESS YOU ARE SITTING DOWN. OKAY!

Well then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull  fracture and the
concussion I got when I jumped out of the window of my dormitory when it
caught fire shortly after my arrival are pretty well healed now. I only get
those sick headaches once a day.

Fortunately the fire in the dormitory and my jump were witnessed by an attendant
at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the fire
department and the ambulance. He also visited me at the hospital and since
I had nowhere to live, because of the burned out dormitory, he was kind enough
to invite me to share his apartment with him. It's really a basement room,
but it's kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in
love and are planning to be married. We haven't set the exact date yet, but
it will be before my pregnancy begins to show.

Yes Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward
to being grrandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the
love, devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason
for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has some minor infection
which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly
caught it from him. This will soon clear up with the penicillin injections
I am taking daily.

I know you will welcome him into our family with open arms. He is kind and
although not well educated, he is ambitious. Although he is of a different
race and religion than ours, I know your oft expressed tolerance will not
permit you to be bothered by the fact that his skin color is somewhat darker
than ours. I am sure you will love him as I do. His family background is
good too, for I am told that his father is an important gun-bearer in the
village in Africa from which he came.

Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was
no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or a skull fracture. I was
not in the hospital,  I am not pregnant,  I am  not engaged. I do not have
syphillis and there is no man (of any color) in my life. However, I am getting
a 'D' in History and an 'F' in Science and I wanted you to see those marks
in the proper perspective.

Yours-
        Your Loving Daughter
  




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This one hasn't come up despite the presence of UCLA on the net.  I'm
led to the sad conclusion that the tradition has died.

In the mid '70s, just before it was overrun by fanatic Dungeons \&
Dragons (tm) players, the UCLA Computer Club was host to a long series
of "glitter traps."  Example: joke subject sits at a desk, pulls out a
drawer.  A string runs from the back of the drawer, up the wall, into
the false ceiling, over to a spot directly over the subject's head,
where it triggers the trap: a mousetrap whose action snaps a card away
from its position covering a funnel, releasing a handful of glitter,
which flows down the funnel, through its spout, through a hole in the
ceiling acoustic tile, onto the subject.  It was wonderful to watch: a
muffled snapping noise, a quiet "chuff," and the slow, glittery descent
of a cloud of brightly colored dust, to settle over the head and
shoulders of a club member who by now has assumed an expression of
appreciative resignation.

Another, more short-lived ploy was to suspend a wooden horseshoe by a
string from the ceiling in the corridor, such that the horseshow
dangles a couple of inches above the top of an upright broom.  Most
conventional brooms will stand on their straws with a little coaxing.
We attached a sign labeling the horseshow "wood magnet."  Quite a few
people took it at face value.





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                                  College
                                      
                               by Dave Barry
     
   
  Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about
  going to college.  (That is, of course, a lie.  The only things you
  young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex.  Trust
  me: these are closely related to college.)

    College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly
  two thousand hours and try to memorize things.  The two thousand
  hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time
  sleeping and trying to get dates.
    Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

    * Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).  These
  include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and
  crepe-paper stains out of your pajamas.

    * Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
  These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology,
  - - -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on.  The idea is, you memorize these
  things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them.
  If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay
  in college for the rest of your life.

    It's very difficult to forget everything.  For example, when I was
  in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why -- the names of
  three metaphysical poets other than John Donne.  I have managed to
  forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were
  named Vaughan and Crashaw.  Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember
  something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed
  in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in
  my mind, right there in the supermarket.  It's a terrible waste of
  brain cells.

    After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to
  choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and
  forget the most things about.  Here is a very important piece of
  advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts
  and Right Answers.

   This means you must *not* major in mathematics, physics, biology,
  or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.  If, for
  example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class
  one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of
  the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result
  to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with *exactly*
  the answer the professor has in mind, you fail.  The same is true of
  chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen
  combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you.  He wants you to
  come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have
  agreed on.  Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

    So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy,
  psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really
  understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve
  virtually no actual facts.  I attended classes in all these
  subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:

    ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have
  read little snippets of just before class.  Here is a tip on how to
  get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a
  book that anybody with any common sense would say.  For example,
  suppose you are studying Moby-Dick.  Anybody with any common sense
  would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters
  in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand
  times.  So in *your* paper, *you* say Moby-Dick is actually the
  Republic of Ireland.  Your professor, who is sick to death of
  reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are
  enormously creative.  If you can regularly come up with lunatic
  interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

    PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and
  deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch.
  You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

    PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams.
  Psychologists are *obsessed* with rats and dreams.  I once spent an
  entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain
  sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing.  The rat
  learned much faster.  My roommate is now a doctor.

    If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats,
  you should major in psychology.

    SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and
  away the number one subject.  I sat through hundreds of hours of
  sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never
  once heard or read a coherent statement.  This is because
  sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of
  their time translating simple, obvious observations into
  scientific-sounding code.  If you plan to major in sociology, you'll
  have to learn to do the same thing.  For example, suppose you have
  observed that children cry when they fall down.  You should write:
  "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies
  of prematurated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists
  between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior
  forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will
  get a large government grant.
  




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