Word: prankstering
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...Merry Prankster Breitbart was raised in Brentwood, on Los Angeles' privileged west side. The area is home to studio executives and producers, and the politics are Democratic. Breitbart was never fully comfortable in L.A.'s '80s social milieu. His parents are Midwestern Jews. (His father ran a Santa Monica steak house.) They saw life differently than the other kids' sophisticated dads and moms did. "My folks are from an older and very silent generation," Breitbart says. "My dad is as conservative as William F. Buckley was, but without the same presentation. He expressed his conservatism by working 16-hour days...
...Larry Solov, a friend since childhood and now Breitbart's partner in the Big sites. "At Brentwood, you got A's and bought into a system set up to get you into an Ivy League college. Andrew got C's." Soon enough, Breitbart adopted the guise of skeptic and prankster, staging acts of subversion designed to win laughs and undermine the school's prevailing assumptions about wealth and meritocracy. It wouldn't be Harvard for this wiseacre. He was going to Tulane. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
...country warning passengers to be distrustful of Romanians. According to the brightly colored fliers, the SNCF has encountered "problems with Romanians" after "numerous thefts of luggage [had] been noticed" and urges "all acts by Romanians" to be reported. After initially thinking the alerts were the work of a prankster, French author Mouloud Akkouche complained to the SNCF and then took the story to the media, which pursued it enthusiastically. Unlike the NSR and the government, however, the SNCF has neither defended nor stood by the offending ads. "This should not have happened," a terse SNCF statement said. "An internal inquiry...
...disqualifying eligible voters. Six swing states, using flawed and possibly illegal criteria, purged “tens of thousands” of eligible voters from their rolls in the run-up to the 2008 election. Some states passed laws to restrict voter registration drives; the threat of some prankster signing up as “Mickey Mouse” is just that terrifying! And others require extensive photo identification from in-person voters, which serves not to reduce fraud (in-person voter fraud is extremely rare) but to exclude eligible voters who don’t have the right forms...
Sinclair remembers a time when the area was relatively open. Security guards recall an incident decades ago when a vandal-prankster removed a brass letter from one of the celebrity plaques. Since then, sections have been either locked off or carefully monitored. Sinclair adds, "There are cameras and sound devices...