Awesome flip-card stadium prank!

High school football game prank

from Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

During a recent football game, Kyle Garchar of Hilliard Davidson High School in Ohio and his pals pulled a great prank on their rivals from Hilliard Darby High School. Before the game started, they placed a black or white card on each seat in three sections of the stadium where the Hilliard Darby fans would be sitting. Attached instructions urged the fans to hold up the cards at the start of the third quarter to collectively spell out the message “Go Darby.” In reality, the cards spelled out “We suck.” Yay! Garchar and his co-conspirators were rewarded with three days of in-school suspension and were banned from school activities for the semester. Boo! The prank was inspired by a similar trick pulled on Harvard by Yale in 2004.

Link to news video

‘Misery Lit’

The last couple of years, there have been a HUGE AMOUNT of real-life books focussing on things like child abuse, …and child abuse.

What’s the deal? What started all this off?

A long time ago it was The Notebook and a bunch of similar books, now it’s all about people writing about their horrible childhoods. I think it possibly started with ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and now it’s stuff like ‘Not Without My Sister’. You can tell when it’s one of these ‘missing childhood’ stories when you see the cover. A crayon-like script handwritten across it, possibly with a picture of a young kid with a dour expression in ill-fitting clothes.

I think the more important question is, are there any signs of this trend abating?

Some articles from the Guardian, the BBC and The Independent about this grim, voyeuristic, real-life trauma drama.