Longtime readers will remember our battle with Cool Site of the Day (complete timeline), a massive prank which spun out of control when we were banned from the Cool Site of the Year awards, which prompted a Time Magazine story on the feud. Now that five years have passed, and we've been named Cool Site of the Day again, I'm going to finally reveal the prank behind the prank, the story that has never been told ... until today.

Since 1995, ZUG has been "The World's Only Comedy Site." We began as a small comedy magazine, and slowly built a cult following through smart and funny articles, controversial pranks, and Nude Shakespeare. In 1998, we created our innovative comedy message board, which has now become the world's funniest comedy forum, as well as a great place to get a zesty lo-calorie chicken recipe.

From the beginning, ZUG had a problem with the word "cool," a desperately-overused word in the early days of the Web. There were dozens of sites with names like "Cool Site of the Day," "Cool Site of the Nanosecond," and "Cool Site of the Unspecified Period of Time," sites with no actual content of their own. So when we were picked by the granddaddy of them all, Cool Site of the Day, we fought a tongue-in-cheek battle in which we asked them to revoke our award and issue a public apology. One thing led to another, we were eventually kicked out of their Cool Site of the Year awards, and the press started to take notice.

Always a publicity whore, I created a fake e-mail account and sent a note to a friend of mine at Time Magazine, posing as a freelance writer who wanted to do a piece on the battle between ZUG and Cool Site of the Day. I still can't believe that the editor signed off on a piece from a total unknown (I went under the pen name of "David Priceson," a joke name that I often used on ZUG), but he did. I now had to write an article where I "objectively" presented the battle between ZUG and Cool Site of the Day.

I still remember calling the then-editor of Cool Site of the Day, Richard Grimes, from my office, posing as this freelance editor who had to ask all these difficult questions about this ne'er-do-well comedy site named ZUG. It was glorious. Richard didn't know what I sounded like, so as he shared his reactions to John Hargrave's antics, he had no idea he was actually talking to John Hargrave.

I finished up the piece a day or two later and sent it back to Time. I purposely misspelled my name as "John Hargraves," since that's what the press always seems to call me, and I got a few other facts wrong, just like a real reporter. I tried to be balanced, but I gave myself all the funniest lines.

Given my reputation for pranks, I think the editor was suspicious that the freelance writer "David Priceson" might actually be me, because he e-mailed me a few times asking if I was behind the article. I managed to wriggle out of it without actually lying (note to editors: always get a "Yes" or "No" answer), and the piece ran the next week (read it here). Ironically, the editor changed my original title for the piece, "Ballot Boxing Match," to "Cool Prank of the Day," which was a beautiful, if unintentional, final touch.

So there you have it. Now we've been named Cool Site of the Day twice, which means we're Cool Site of the Two Days. Maybe we'll eventually work ourselves up to Cool Site of the Fortnight, which has the added benefit of rhyming.

It's funny ... I've always thought of myself as room temperature.

Coming Monday: the all-new credit card prank!

Went to see the Red Sox play the Orioles last night at Fenway Park. It was a pretty close game (15-3, Sox), and I quite enjoyed my $4.75 Miller Lite, served by a man so surly that the only way he acknowledged my presence was to slightly curl his upper lip. The Miller Lite tasted excellent, and by "excellent" I mean "like tea made from Larry King's jockstrap." For a fleeting moment, I thought the surly bartender might have chilled and served his own urine. Then I realized that Miller Lite has become like the delicately-flavored waters that you often find in health spas. It's cool, refreshing water with only a hint of that off-putting beer taste.

Later, I went to the men's room to pee out my $4.75 beer (though I could have made my money back by simply serving it again), and was pleased to find that Fenway Park has done away with the long trough-style urinals that I remember from baseball games of my youth. Yes, those disgusting wooden troughs, with men jockeying for position like a pack of hungry boars at feeding time, have now been replaced with a long row of tiny urinals, each roughly the size of an oatmeal cannister.

Women can't understand the abject humiliation of having to urinate into a trough. Women get comfortable, soundproof stalls furnished with reading materials and aromatherapy oils. And the powder puffs! Even the filthiest gas station women's room has a powder puff. And a complete line of Revlon cosmetics, and a complimentary psychic. Women often complain about the long lines into the women's room, which is true, but here's the alternative: troughs! Imagine getting up on a footstool and squatting over a long feminine trough. If that's what you want, I'll phone my grandfather, who is an architect.

In the men's room of my high school, they didn't even have doors on the stalls. I think I developed my lifelong fear of pooping in public from those six traumatic years. Most criminals get more privacy than that, since you can always briefly knock your cellmate unconscious.

Here's what I propose: we gather all the architects (except my grandfather) into one place, say, a Siberian jail. We ritually torture them until they agree to double the capacity of all women's rooms, and put doors on the stalls of all men's rooms.

And then we make them lick the troughs clean with their tongues. Hey, that's a $4.95 value.

Wednesday, May 01, 2002

I'm a little skeptical of this one, sent in by my friend, the fabulous graphic designer Jodi Vautrin. It looks like an urban legend, but I couldn't find it on urbanlegends.com. It looks like one of those perpetually-forwarded e-mails that ends up looking like an enormous hieroglyph of punctuation, but it had neither the >>>>>>>> before each line nor the RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: in the subject header. So maybe it's true.

Last year I wrote about my friend who was showing his fifth-grade class the wonders of the Internet for the first time, and accidentally surfed to www.whitehouse.com instead of www.whitehouse.gov. That story was true, so maybe this one is, too:

A class of elementary students started a class project to make a ceramic pot with some sort of plant in it to take home. They wanted to have a plant that was easy to take care of, so it was decided to use cactus plants.

The students were given green ware pottery in the shape of a clown. They painted them with glaze and had them professionally fired at a class outing so they could see the process. It was great fun. The cactus plants grew nicely in the clown pots, but unfortunately the children were not allowed to take them home.

The teacher said cactus seemed like a good idea at the time.

It's the hunched-over clown on the right that gets me. Poor clown, with his giant cactus boner.

That teacher. What a cac-tease.

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the genre of music known as "butt rock," and the consensus on the message board was that "butt rock" is synonymous with "hair band." So Poison, Twisted Sister, and Van Halen would be the Monsters of Butt Rock.

But the other night, I awoke with a start. "Van Halen?!" I cried. "Nay! Let it not be so! For their debut album, Van Halen, was a masterpiece of rock!"

Those of us who illegally steal music enjoy singles, but Van Halen is a tribute to the art of the album. It starts off with the kick-ass rock anthem Running With The Devil, which is like throwing a stack of dinner plates in your face; then progresses to the groundbreaking guitar solo Eruption, which is like someone slicing the membranes of your inner ear with broken glass (but in a good way); then into the cover of the Kinks' You Really Got Me, which is like being run over again and again by a derailed freight train. The rest of the album is also great, but those three songs are like the holy trilogy of rock: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Solo. (Who will also be a bit character in the new Star Wars movie.)

Then I started thinking about David Lee Roth's first solo album, Eat 'Em and Smile, which was every bit as groundbreaking as the original Van Halen. Roth left Van Halen (which, let's be honest, had a phenomenal guitar player, an average drummer, and an awful bass player) and formed the supergroup of rock: the great Greg Bissonette on drums, the phenomenal Billy Sheehan on bass, and the godlike Steve Vai on guitar. It was like the Norse gods of rock. The four of them actually had the power to start hurricanes and earthquakes, and we can all be glad that they only used their powers for rock.

Then I thought, hey! What about Stryper? This was Christian butt rock, but I owned every one of their albums and attended at least three of their concerts, which were so loud that I went home with second-degree burns on my face. Their drummer played in a giant steel cage covered in percussion instruments, like retarded monkey bars. Stryper dressed in yellow-and-black leotards that showed off their packages (true), and wore enough makeup to singlehandedly support Revlon for a year. Come to think of it, maybe "butt rock" had more than one meaning for Stryper.

So if these guys were all butt rockers, then I am branded with the mark of the butt. Hey, at least I didn't listen to Poison.

Monday, April 29, 2002

Here's a freebie for you: next time you're in a theater and they show the trailer for the next Star Wars movie, after the blistering saber battles that are now much cooler because the saber has TWO ends (who says they've run out of ideas?), after the breathtaking graphics that were created completely on computers (which means that Lucas can now shoot Episode III down in his basement), after the ATTACK OF THE CLONES title rips across the screen in 5,000 decibel sound, like the rending apart of heaven and earth, in that perfect and quiet that follows a high-octane science fiction trailer, wait 1.3 seconds and then say:

Where's Jar-Jar?!

It is a punchline that I guaran-friggin-tee will get you a laugh. The great thing is, you can use it for any science-fiction movie. When they start showing the Matrix II trailer, you can use it at the end of that. It will even work with trailers for "chick flicks" and Elizabethan period pieces. Though probably only with your nerd friends.

By the way, Yoda is going to kick Dooku's ass with balls of lightning. Thought you might like to know.