WooOOOOooooOOOoo.

I gave up my office upstairs, and in return got a wireless mouse that I don't use. 

It was a sensible decision. I almost never have online meetings or business calls; I have never seen the faces nor heard the voices of most of the people I work for. It's all e-mail, and that suits me. But my wife has constant online meetings and calls, and the distraction of baby puppy Izzy was too dangerous. She could very easily be on an important call that suddenly turned into a Korean-expert-on-the-Beeb situation, our dog rushing in to play, me (unshowered) flailing in after him and tripping on something.

It made sense to trade offices with her. Hers was downstairs, where the dining room would be if we had a dining room, and mine was directly above it in the spare bedroom. Izzy is not allowed upstairs during business hours, and a gate on the stairs enforces the rule. So, we made the swap. 

I had to leave a lot of stuff upstairs -- my books, my posters, my framed photos of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and, oh, some family members -- and in exchange she left her old wireless mouse. The kind where you plug a USB nub into the computer and the mouse sends it the signal. 

Well, I tried it, and I didn't much like it. BUT I had an idea for a prank. 

First: Sneak upstairs and stick the nub in her computer (and no, that's not a euphemism). She has a Mac, so all the USB ports are in the back where they are not visible. Next: Remove her mouse's nub. Third: Change her computer's wallpaper to a Ouija board.  

Then I wait. When she sits down at her computer, I start moving the mouse she left me around on the ceiling, hoping it will point to various things on the board. It would be great if I could spell out something, like R-U-N or G-E-T-O-U-T or M-A-K-E-M-E-A-S-A-M-M-I-C-H, but there's no way I could do that, even if I sneaked a spy camera into the room so I could see what I was doing. I'd have to be happy with commandeering the pointer and making it look like a specter was trying to get her attention.

Thing is, I don't even know if the signal from the mouse can penetrate the ceiling. I'd need a second pair of eyes to check. Unfortunately there's no accomplice handy to help, except Izzy, and he's A) not allowed upstairs during the day, B) a bad liar, and C) a dog. My prank will have to wait until I get some flunkies to help. 

Maybe I'll put an ad on Craigslist: Henchmen Wanted. No Pay, Just Laughs. Worked for the Joker!

Bananas.

Even when you're not on Twitter or Facebook, the pop-ups memes will find you. This one was particularly intriguing, I had to admit:

Now, obviously it is a mean practical joke to convey terrifying messages to strangers by the use of common produce. I had to wonder two things right away: 1) What kind of a monster would do such a thing? And 2) Could it really work?

Well, you can read about the results of others, but for my money there is no substitute for experimentation. I'm sciencey like that, you know. So on the weekly trip for sustenance, I got some bananas at the supermarket, including this fine, almost-ripe specimen below.

I wanted to try to replicate the furtive scratching one would have to do to pull off this prank. I decided that one would probably want to do the scratching with a fingernail, because if you were going to put the message on a banana while in the supermarket, you oughtn't draw attention to yourself by messing around with a paring knife. However, if this plot was to work, the initial writing had to be nearly invisible -- so I decided to scratch my message using a common sewing needle. The flaws in the plan began to appear long before the writing did.

First, it's tricky to scratch a message on a banana without actually breaking the skin, which would make it an unappealing (ha!) banana and one less likely to be bought. Second, you see that the writing was immediately visible despite the thinness of the needle; the second picture was taken a minute after the first, at 10:44 a.m., when I should have been working.

I put the banana aside and went about my business. By 4:08 p.m., the message had emerged:

The writing came through beautifully. But now we see the other problems:

1) When writing furtively with a needle in poor visibility, it's hard to see what you're doing, and easy to forget even the D in Fred.

2) This vivid writing was seen little more than five hours after it was made. Unless the bananas were flying out the of store that day, it is unlikely that someone would buy the fruit and get it home before the writing appeared. I don't even know when it did appear, as I wasn't checking it. I didn't expect to see the writing that quickly. It might have been visible by noon.

So maybe planting the etched banana in the store for a future customer wouldn't work. I thought, suppose you etch the banana and slip it into your kid's lunch so your embarrassing message would be visible when he opened the bag. Something humiliating: Mommy loves baby kiss kiss. That'll teach him to "forget" to mow the lawn.

But no -- the key to the joke is that the writing appears while the banana is untouched. So unless your kid inspects his lunch before he leaves the house, you might as well have just written on the fruit with a Sharpie. He'll know you wrote the message, roll his eyes, and complain to his friends.

So there you have it -- as practical jokes go, this one has a low probability of succeeding.

But now I'm thinking about the possibility of injecting hot sauce into avocados....

Box o' water.

Seen in the supermarket, and purchased:

Why?

Because when I saw it I was immediately reminded of Robert Benchley's classic essay, "Why We Laugh -- Or Do We?" in which he analyzes what was then said to be a popular joke:

A man who lived in a boarding house brought a horse home with him one night, led it upstairs, and shut it in the bathroom. The landlady, aroused by the commotion, protested, pointed to the broken balustrade, the torn stair carpet, and the obvious maladjustment of the whole thing, and asked the man, confidentially, just why he had seen fit to shut a horse in the common bathroom. To which the man replied, "In the morning, the boarders, one by one, will go into the bathroom, and will come rushing out, exclaiming, ‘There’s a horse in the bathroom!’ I want to be able to say, ‘Yes, I know.’"

What I wanted to do was slip this carton of water into the fridge and wait for Mrs. Key to say "There's a box of water in the fridge!" so I could say "Yes, I know."

Unfortunately she did not do that. She did say, "Is that a box of water in the fridge?" which does not lend itself to the answer "Yes, I know," thus ruining the joke. To make the situation even more dire, she had heard of the outfit, the name of which actually is Boxed Water Is Better. They claim (not without reason) that shipping their drinking water in cartons rather than plastic bottles is more environmentally friendly.

I had to judge it on two crucial criteria:

1) How did it taste?

2) How did the carton function?

And the answers:

1) Like water.

2) Poorly.

Really, from the start the carton affected the taste of the water, not by changing the flavor but by making me reluctant to drink it. The cap, a typical plastic cap as on many cardboard milk cartons, snapped open with no resistance at all; it bothered me that it seemed to have already been opened. I'm sure it hadn't been, but once your mind goes to that someone-peed-in-my-box-of-water place, it's hard to bring it back.

Would be tricky to pee into, in fairness.

And while I could mush the carton into a cup holder, it did not go all the way to the bottom, and in no way fit as well as the evil plastic bottle next to it.

I don't want to judge the product by the cap issue, as one cap does not a product make. And other cars may have more forgiving cup holders that can accommodate a square bottle, and at least it got in -- but if I spent a lot of time commuting in my car, it would actually be an issue.

So good luck, Boxed Water people. I'm willing to overlook my objections and applaud your motives. But as a setup for a joke, at least in my house, it sucked.

Rate the crap!

I cannot tell you how many times I saw this ad in comic books when I was growing up.

All of these things had a certain appeal, although even with a kid's impaired ability to reason we knew they would be disappointing. As one boy I knew once said (in a somewhat less elegant manner), "If X-ray specs really worked, they'd be standard issue in every doctor's office."

Honor House, which peddled this stuff and lots more to gullible children, always sold products that could not fulfill their promise, but the promise was enough to fire our imagination. I never ordered any of these items from them, but I did engage in any number of discussions on their supposed virtues and probable failures. Maybe being a New York City kid made us more wary, but I doubt it. Personally, I was just too broke to send away for anything. The price of the comic book cleaned me out.

Looking over this page, all jammed with goodies, I feel compelled to rate the crap. Herewith are my brief takes on the objects on this iconic page, bearing in mind that I have never actually held any in my hand. Ratings focus on appeal, schoolhouse experience, and probability of worth, largely based on recollections of discussions held decades ago.

X-Ray Specs
Top rating. Just because they could maybe work and wouldn't it be awesome. Note how the ad shows the guy looking at his hand, but in his line of vision there happens to be a buxom lass. Makes ya think, eh, boys?  A

Secret Book Safe
This one seemed likely to be legit. We knew it would never keep out a determined sibling, but camouflage and secrets are cool. A little too practical, though, to be that much fun. A-

Monster Size Monsters
Sharp eyes notice that the ad doesn't say what these things are made of. Paper cutouts, I believe, are what they turned out to be. Nice reminder, though, of the 1960s and early 1970s nostalgia for the great Universal horror movies of the 1930s. Now I'm nostalgic for the nostalgia. C+

Throw Your Voice
Eerily compelling, and at an age when you think it is possible to actually make your voice come out of some other place, highly suggestive of practical jokes. "Hey, don't pee! I'm stuck down this terlet!" Still, throwing your voice means throwing your voice, so even if it works people will figure out that's just you with a lousy Bela Lugosi accent or something. B

Naval Cannon
Maybe cool, especially if you looked up to the military vets in your family, or you just want to wake up Mom from her headache nap in a new and funny way! Funny for three seconds, anyhow. Otherwise, not that great. B-

Monster Size Skeleton
Smaller than the Monster Size Monsters, but supposedly glows in the dark. Every kid old enough to send away for this knew that glow-in-the-dark stuff is always disappointing. Would get an A if you had a nosy younger sibling that had skelephobia, but otherwise, meh. C

Onion Gum
Fool your friends! Might work. Probably be about as fresh as the gum that came with baseball cards back then. Worth a shot, if you can offer it with a straight face, and victims will accept it without examining the packaging. B

Bullet Holes
No one is going to fall for these. Yeah, someone shot up my car. Call the cops! Probably don't look that great. As pranks go, way below plastic dog poop. D-

Trick Baseball
Strange, possibly fun---but for prank purposes? Hmm. What if someone did manage to hit it? Would it break? Could be little more than a Wiffle Ball with coins in it; they also wobble in flight. Maybe it was just a version of that? If it was plastic no one would mistake it for a baseball. Too liable to be a flop. D

Moneymaker
If it really made good-looking bills, they wouldn't sell it. Maybe good enough to fool your little sister, but she's not too smart. And couldn't you get arrested for this? C-

Joy Buzzer
These were all over the place, and always so big and clunky that you could never hide one in your hand, and they didn't give anyone a shock. They just buzzed. Harmless indeed. Rare case of popularity sinking an idea. Kids don't normally shake hands, anyway. D+

Magic Cards
If the 10 tricks didn't suck, sure. But the cards had to look like regular playing cards, not something out of the Goofy Kidz Deck O' Fun. Risky. C

Jack Pot Bank
"Should not be used for gambling purposes"? What the heck else is it for? Maybe you can get some dummies to play. But if it works, they might win. Bleah. F

Smoke Bomb
Always fun in school, the smoke bomb was great for all-purpose laughs and smelled like egg farts. How much to buy them by the case? A

Boomerang
There wasn't a boy alive who didn't want to try one to see if they really came back. Seems like something you could get at the toy store rather than having to buy through a comic book, but never could. It would be great if it was of any quality. You could play catch by yourself when Dad was busy fixing the car or drinking or something. And don't they use these in Australia to cut the heads off kangaroos? Nice. B+

Skin Head Wig
Oddly enough, one thing we never considered was that for this to work, it would have to be the exact shade of the rest of your skin. And even if it did work perfectly, it wouldn't be much of a joke. "Hey, Joey! Where's your hair?" "Oh, I'm bald now." "That sucks." D

Karate Et Al
You can't learn sports out of books, but kids weren't all enrolled in karate classes in those days. Where else were you going to learn to be cool like Bruce Lee? If you just learned a few things... well, it might be the difference the next time Stinky Joe Blatz decided it was Swirly Day. B

Surprise Package
Way way way too dangerous. You figured you would definitely wind up with the 500 stamps from the other offer in the comic. Skip it. F

Weddings and japes.

It's almost June, or as the magazines tell us, wedding season! Much like hunting season, you have to get a license. You have to buy special clothes. You get to eat afterward. And also like hunting season, even if you think you know what you're shooting for, you may have some surprises when you bring it home.

If you're a wedding guest this season, you may think it's a great chance to pull some classic practical jokes. Think again, buster! Doing something destructive and ruining someone's special day just for a stupid joke is absolutely out of bounds. Don't even consider it!

Not unless you have a really, really funny idea.

So do not take any of these ideas to heart:

• Bribe caterer to make exploding cake.
• Wire up mother-of-the-bride's pew; when the minister asks if anyone has any objections, send enough of a jolt down the line to make her leap up like terrified pigeon.
• Arrange big ball to drop from above altar right as the couple says "I do" so they can be chased out of the church Indiana Jones-style.
• You know that special rug they unroll down the aisle for the bride? Get one reinforced so it snaps back like a slappy bracelet.
• Sneak into groom's room the night before ceremony; raise hem on rental pants legs five inches.
• Superglue on groom underpants also an option.
• Secretly stuff softballs down every toilet in reception hall.
• Replace all meat in catering kitchen with Spam.
• Dance floor? WD-40!
• For outdoor weddings, hire a biplane to seed the clouds. Or buzz the ceremony. Or at least to trail a banner casting aspersions on the virtues of the bride.
• Beach weddings require flash mobs of spontaneous nude bathers.
• Hire a hooker to come in during the ceremony, slap the groom, depart. Hilarious!
• Find out if bride is allergic to any flowers and replace bouquet with bunch of that. Can you say gesundheit?
• Replace DJ's music files with complete collection from 31 Years of the Lawrence Welk Show.
• Band? Stuff cheese in the instruments like Lucy Ricardo did on the way back from Europe.
• Secretly change the names on all the hotel reservations.
• Call minster to reschedule wedding; get boozy bum off street dressed as minster; break into chapel before wedding; pay phony minister to perform ceremony. Tell couple 10 years later they get a do-over.