Pranks for Breakfast
If you’ve switched the salt and sugar at breakfast one time too many, try this frozen cereal prank instead.
The night before, pour your victim’s usual brand of cereal in a bowl, pour some milk in, add a spoon, and place the whole thing in the freezer. In the morning, take the bowl out and set it at your victim’s place at the table. You can make yourself the same kind of cereal (but not frozen) to make everything seem normal.
Shampoo Surprise
Pull this prank on a grownup, not a little kid. But make sure you choose a grownup with a sense of humor.
First, fill an empty shampoo bottle most of the way with ketchup. Then add some baking soda—at least half a cup. Shake it up, put the lid back on securely, and wait for your victim to take a shower. When they open the bottle, it will spray all over the shower (mixing ketchup and baking soda causes a reaction because of the vinegar in the ketchup). Thanks to Household Hacker for this idea.
I am thrilled to learn that FRIGHTLOPEDIA has been named to the 2017 list of "Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers" by the ALA's Young Adult Library Services. At my first job in children's publishing, working on Scholastic's Action Magazine, the goal was to get kids who don't like reading to give it another chance, so this feels like coming full circle, back to kids I hold close to my heart.
Workman Publishing asked me to write about a children's book I am grateful for to appear on their blog around Thanksgiving. Here's what I wrote.
When I write, I listen to music. Not recorded music, but the rhythms and melodies the words form inside my head. It was A.A. Milne who introduced me to the idea that words can become music through his brilliant book of poems When We Were Very Young. I was only four or five when my father read them to me, and when I revisit them now, I hear his gentle voice. “James, James, Morrison Morrison, Weatherby George Dupree,” my father would chant, and I would delight at the rollicking rhythm. I sensed that my father the English professor liked this book as much as I did. The wit and warmth of Milnes’ inventive rhymes pleased us both enormously. This was our book, and at the end of that poem, we would lower our voices, as instructed, and whisper together, conspiratorially, the coded version of the first line: “J.J., M.M., W.G. Du P.” Even abbreviated, it rocked.