That year, Rolling Stone music critic Greil Marcus published a piece spoofing the trend of big name rock stars forming “supergroups.” One of the most popular supergroups in the ‘60s was Cream: its guitarist Eric Clapton was already famous for playing with the Yardbirds, while drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce were already known for playing in the Graham Bond Organisation. Stranger Than Naked wasn’t the only prank journalists played in 1969.
#Naked prank how to#
The next year, McGrady published a book about the experience called Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun & Profit.īrian Rasic/Getty Images The Original Masked Singer
Because it was exposed as a parody soon after publication, readers were likely in on the joke and bought it for the laughs (after one intimate encounter, a character says, “I’d forgotten there was more to life than mowing a lawn”). The hardcover sales earned it a number four spot on the The New York Times’ bestseller list. He and columnist Harvey Aronson then patched these chapters together into a story about a Long Island housewife who suspects her husband is unfaithful and starts cheating on him. So McGrady rounded up about 25 journalists and asked each to contribute a ridiculous, over-the-top chapter to an erotic parody novel. “I saw the writing that was being accepted and it seemed absurd,” he told the Associated Press. The project’s ringleader was Mike McGrady, a Newsday journalist frustrated with the popular romance and erotic novelists he’d interviewed. But she remains one of the most famous protest votes in Brazilian history. Of course, she didn’t end up serving on the city council because the election board disqualified her. When the students looked at the 540 candidates vying for São Paulo’s 45 city council seats and feared that none of them would address the city’s problems, they decided to make a point by asking people to vote for the popular rhino instead.Ĭacareco won a city council seat with a whopping 100,000 votes, far more than any other candidate (the closest runner-up got about 10,000). The four-year-old had moved to the city from Rio de Janeiro when São Paulo’s zoo opened, and was scheduled to return to Rio soon. The rhino’s name was Cacareco (Portuguese for “rubbish”), and she was already a popular figure in São Paulo when the students launched her campaign. If an unlikely candidate runs for public office as kind of protest prank, but ends up winning, is it still a prank? Here’s one example: in 1959, students in São Paulo, Brazil, who were tired of the city’s overflowing sewers and inflated prices launched a campaign to elect a rhinoceros to the city council-and won. Sometimes the line between what’s a prank and what’s not isn’t always clear-cut.
The story spread quickly through European newspapers before people realized that it was an April Fools' Day prank by Louis Viereck, a New York correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt who published the joke article under a fake name. authorities were trying to hunt down the thieves while publicly covering up the fact that the country had been robbed. The Berliner Tageblatt said the heist was organized by American robber barons, whose burglars dug the tunnel over three years and made away with over $268 million and that U.S. built its Bullion Depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky). Federal Treasury in Washington, D.C., and stolen America’s silver and gold (this was before the U.S. On April 1, 1905, a German newspaper called the Berliner Tageblatt announced that thieves had dug a tunnel underneath the U.S. Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images Robber Barons Rob Americaĭecades before the Bond villain Goldfinger plotted to nuke all of the United States’ gold at Fort Knox, a prankster dreamed up another heist that was just as ridiculous. Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., circa 1900.
0 kommentar(er)
