Stupid Things I've Done

The original goal of this page was to document every stupid event in which I have participated. I fell short. I'm not proud of some of these, but most make good stories. Unfortunately I stopped updating this page in 2004 -- just when I began my biggest adventures.

Memorial S'mores

Last memorial day, I went to Chicago with my buddies. We ended up waiting until after dark and creating an open flame on the street. We roasted marshmallows and gave out s'mores to homeless people. It was a hoot.

Romeo the Turkey

My mom ran this "living Nativity scene" thing at the hospital one Christmas, and I helped her out by dressing up like a big idiot and tending to farm animals. This turkey named Romeo fell in love with me. A buncha jerks kept telling him that they ate his brother for Thanksgiving, and I sheltered Romeo's ears and hugged him when he felt down. By the end of the night, he followed me everywhere, jumped up on my lap when I was sitting, and spread his wings and blocked my escape if I ever tried to leave while he was near me. In return for my attention, he scared away this goat that liked to eat my shoelaces. Romeo was by far the coolest turkey I've ever met.

The Day Tim Met his Girlfriend

My roomie Tim and I were feeling rambunctious on a Friday during our junior year of college. We made plans to meet up at noon and then attend random lectures. We shopped around until we found a lecture hall that reeked of perfume. It was an introductory anthropology class. We were being fairly obnoxious by making fun of goofy kids in the room for the amusement of other goofy kids in the room. Most notably, there was this guy with long straight hair. He would periodically wrap his hair around his hand, shove it in his face, and then deeply inhale like he got high from it. Tim tried to convince the girl next to him that he was in the class, and made up random facts to impress her. He ended up liking her so much he went back the next two classes before they decided to actually go out together. Tim ended up taking a test and everything. Now that's devotion.

You Can Never Have Too Much Fun at the Mall

Nate and I went Christmas shopping at the mall, and we saw one of those roped off pianos left for some professional pianist to brighten everyone's spirits. We went to Nate's car and got some sheet music. We stepped over the ropes and Nate started pounding out the best rendition of "O Tanenbaum" I've ever heard. I pretended to turn pages for him. After about a half hour, a really big crowd gathered, and Nate ran out of music. He played that stupid love theme from Titanic once, and some kid gave him a dollar. Nathan graciously accepted, and broke into a really crappy jazzy version of jingle bells. As this went on, security guards with very perplexed facial expressions occasionally stared down from above and talked into their radios a lot. After about 7 minutes of them bickering among themselves, one of them came up to us and told Nate he wasn't allowed to play the piano. He apologized, and we left.

Soukup Forever

Brett had some chalk. We used it. Late late one weekend, we spent about two hours leaving our mark on the world.
We took a group of about 4 people out to the quad and went nuts. Some of us spent all night adding extra anatomy to statues, and some of us decided to write our friend Jeff's name everywhere imaginable. We noticed that Foellinger Auditorium, the ginormous domey building that everybody recognizes and can see from extremely far away, has six pillars, while Jeff's last name has exactly six letters. We wrote "SOUKUP" in huge, bright letters. It lasted for more than a week, and it was visible at great distances. It got in the newspaper. yay.

Megaphone Fun

We went to this classy hangout where all the cool kids go when they wanna look cool and not talk to anyone. Eric brought his megaphone. This one girl was especially cold to us, and we followed her around and Eric kept yelling things like "Stop calling me," and the classic "No, I will not make out with you."
As we were driving home, Eric foolishly decided to give me a crack at the megaphone. I saw a squad car and screamed "POLICE MAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!" at full volume. He pulled us over and took our IDs. He went back to his car and did some fancy shmancy radio work, then he returned and warned us about neighbors not liking noise. Then we went home. I'm not allowed to taunt the law anymore with Eric's electronic devices.

Breaking Stuff

I had to get rid of my TV when I was moving out of college, so Brett threw it from the top of my apartment complex. The glass practically vaporized as the frame got mangled.

Unnecessarily dangerous cartwheel

We went to the roof of Bromley Hall, a fourteen story building. On top of that was a fifteen foot elevator service shack that was about six feet wide and 10 feet long. A few of us climbed to the top of that just to see the view. I did a cartwheel on top of it. It didn't feel dangerous at the time, but I think it was kinda dumb. A good gust of wind could have made me ache.

Spend $5 and Get an Entire Day Worth of Fun

My OTHER friend Eric bought a really cheap voice changer, and decided to take it into a movie. We saw "13 Ghosts." At the very end, when the dead mom was having a touching moment with Shannon Elizabeth, Eric turned on the deep scary devil voice and said "I LOVE YOU." SO many girls screamed.

Broken Escalator Mayhem

Brett uncovered some classified documents that told him there is a special location on most escalators that shuts them down when enough pressure is applied. After about a week of kicking the shit out of escalators, Brett found the spot. He took us with him to the mall one day and decided to shut down as many escalators as he could at the same time. We rode down the first escalator, and right before we got off, BAM! Brett kicked it and everything stopped. The girls behind us fell from the sudden shift in momentum. We scurried away to the next area. With unstoppable confidence, Brett shut down the next escalator too. By the time we got to the third escalator, mall security started following us. Brett shut off the third escalator anyway, and the security guard had no idea how he did it. As we got closer to the fourth escalator, we saw 3 security guards staring at it from above, and 2 waiting at the bottom. We left, giggling like idiots, while the the upper level stores lost millions upon millions of dollars because fat people don't like climbing stairs.

Taking Rejection "Lightly"

Brett, Chris K, and I went to some after-hours party at the house of some fraternity that will remain nameless. The girls we came with were let in immediately, but the dude at the door wouldn't let us in. He said some stuff about there not being enough room, but it was obvious that they weren't letting us in because we had male genitalia. Chris started telling the guy "I know Doug Sisterson," and that he should ask around or he'd get in trouble. Doug Sisterson is Nathan's dad's name, and it has absolutely no relevence to anything here, but it was funny cuz the frat boy was all scared and went and asked around about this tough guy Doug. Anyway, he eventually came back and still wouldn't let us in. So we waited outside with a big mob of hopefuls before we nonchalantly strolled around back. It turns out this house has a huge switch behind it that controls all of its electricity. It looked like something we shouldn't mess with, so Brett flipped the switch. All the lights in the house immediately shut off, and all the loud music was replaced with girlish shrieks. We ran away then laughed a lot and decided we should do it again. The lights eventually came back on, and there were now frat boy guards in back of the house. We walked back there and the guards eyed us suspiciously. Chris asked them what was up and how the party was going. They engaged in idle conversation with Chris as he made his way back to the switch. Then Chris flipped the switch and the guards responded with a confused "...heyyy!" as we ran away again. On the way home, Chris yelled to a pizza guy "We don't want your sausage here!" and the guy hung his head and drove away. We ended up cutting the power to that house like 2 or 3 other times that year.

More Wrong Lectures

I didn't really do anything stupid here, but I was there.
Tim decided to join me in my computer graphics class. The professor had to pull teeth to get students to answer questions in that class, so he was overjoyed when Tim tried to answer everything. He asked geometry questions with extremely simple answers, and Tim always managed to think of something wrong ("What three-dimensional surface do you get when you rotate a circle around an axis?"... "A triangle!"). I'm shocked that the professor didn't realize it was a joke after an hour of everyone laughing.

Bus Barn

Our freshman year of college, we all decided to get our sisters out of school for a day. We were going to pull some stupid prank on our old high school, and have the senior class get blamed for it all. The plan was to lock down the bus barn just before the drivers left for school, making every single bus unable to execute their routes, and eventually cancelling school because of low attendance. We stocked up on padlocks and chains and dark clothing. The bus barn was across the street from the police station, so we had to execute it flawlessly. Nathan and I walked up from opposite directions and simultaneously locked down both gates and broke the keys off inside the locks. We then met up in a nearby neighborhood and left. Nothing happened. The janitor just had a huge-ass pair of bolt clippers, and school continued for our sisters without anybody realizing that we were idiots.