![]() The crowd cheered as he made his way to the podium and handed the torch over to the mayor. At last, a runner came sprinting into the city. Some 30,000 people lined the streets, waiting for Dillon’s arrival. A champion runner named Harry Dillon was scheduled to carry the torch into the city and present it to Mayor Pat Hills. But nothing beat what happened when the Olympic flame arrived in the city of Sydney. Flaming UndiesĪs the Olympic Torch neared the end of its 1,695 mile-journey to Melbourne, Australia in the summer of 1956, it had already faced several challenges, including torrential rains and temperatures so high that the runners carrying it nearly collapsed. Today Cacareco’s memory lives on in the expression “Voto Cacareco,” which is used in some parts of Brazil to mean “protest vote.” 5. “Better to elect a rhino than an ass,” commented one voter.Īfter Cacareco won, the head of the zoo where she lived demanded that the rhino receive a councilman’s salary, but the election was nullified before any paychecks were cut. The students had ballots printed up with Cacareco’s name on them and then got thousands of voters to send them in. The four-legged candidate won by a landslide, garnering 100,000 votes-one of the highest totals for a local candidate in Brazil’s history to that point. Most college pranks have relatively trivial consequences, but in 1959, a group of students in Sao Paolo, Brazil, managed to swing an election when they got a five-year-old rhinoceros named Cacareco elected to city council. In the final stunt, gigantic letters filled the stands-and TV screens across America-with, you guessed it: CALTECH. Stunt 13 spelled out HUSKIES, only backwards. Instead, the cards formed the unmistakable silhouette of a beaver, the Caltech mascot. Then things went awry: The 12th stunt was supposed to be the team’s dog mascot. ![]() ![]() The first 11 stunts were just as the Huskies had planned. The next day at halftime, the Washington fans started performing the card stunts. CalTech pranksters then replaced the plan with their own, revised version. A Caltech student managed to liberate the master plan for the stunt while the Huskies were visiting Disneyland the day before the big game. They learned that the Washington Huskies cheerleaders were planning a halftime stunt where their fans would hold up colored cards in prearranged patterns to spell out a series of pro-Husky messages. But a group of students decided to get Caltech in on the action anyway. The school is famous for its brilliantly engineered pranks, and the Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961 is perhaps the crème de la crème.Īs usual, the Caltech football team did not stand a chance of actually playing in the storied Rose Bowl game in 1961. But if you attend the California Institute of Technology, you can come close. Card TrickĪs far as we know, you can’t actually major in pranks at college. The real story: They had the statue built out of wire, papier maché, and plywood and then hauled it onto the lake. The two pranksters told everyone that they’d had the statue flown in by helicopter, but the cable holding it had broken and Lady Liberty crashed through the ice. Her gigantic green head and glowing torch floated above the icy surface. No one took them seriously until…one day in February, rising up out of the frozen lake was Lady Liberty herself. Like all good leaders, the pair vowed to make good on their campaign promise, which was to move the Statue of Liberty from New York City to Lake Mendota near campus. In the spring of 1978, two students at the University of Wisconsin ran for student government as candidates of the facetious Pail and Shovel Party. ![]() These 11 school pranks went above and beyond, and that's what makes them the stuff of mischief legend. Any group of subversive students can cover campus trees with toilet paper or make a series of prank calls.
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