PENCASTS AND YEARBOOK PRANKS

This time out, I recorded the podcast with a Livescribe Pulse smartpen. What the audio lacks in fidelity, it makes up for in convenience, I think.

Topics include Jefferson Park, neighborhood festivals and some suburban high school administrators who have a stick up their fundament over an innocent yearbook prank in which a photo showing a student holding a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer made it into print. To hear New Trier Township High School spokeswoman Laura Blair tell the tale, Western civilization is on the brink of destruction.

"It's clearly defiant and subversive and intentional," Blair declared to Chicago Tribune reporter John Keilman.

Talk about an overreaction. Judging by her credentials, Blair looks to be a sharp public-relations professional, so she should have had a much more measured response when journalists came calling, as Tribune columnist Eric Zorn points out.

When I worked at a certain small-town daily newspaper I won't name, we had a similar problem. Each year, the paper would print two full pages with an alphabetical list of all graduating high school seniors. This page was put together and proofread by students from the school's paper. The paper usually painstakingly proofread the list before printing it, but one year somebody slipped up and thousands of readers found the following names among the graduates:

Hugh Jass, Lilac Arug, Seymour Butz, Mike Hunt and (my favorite) Buster Hyman.

School officials and our publisher publicly made the requisite comments about how sad it was that a few pranksters had ruined it for everybody -- but everybody I met thought it was pretty funny. Although not as funny as the time the paper supposedly printed an ad that promised a sale on "Men's Tapered Shits."

And then there's the time that Chicago's very own Lerner Newspapers ran an ad -- in the Skokie edition, I believe, which surely qualifies as icing on the cake -- whose typo announced the opening of the "Nazi Car Wash."

But to get back to subject of yearbook mischief, the sad reality is that it isn't always funny. Pranks are definitely not funny in cases like this.

MORE INFO

Here's information on Jeff Fest. And click on the Flash player below to see and hear the pencast version of the show.

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