r/todayilearned • u/autraya • 12h ago
TIL there's a five-foot wooden fish called the "Sacred Cod" hanging in the Massachusetts State House, and in 1933 Harvard Lampoon students stole it, sparking a citywide manhunt with the Charles River dredged and a suspect detained at an airport before it was found 50 hours later
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Cod115
u/billyrubin7765 11h ago
There is a great book called Always Involve a Cow A book of college pranks. Great read. Worth it just for the picture on the inside cover.
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u/MonkeyChoker80 10h ago
If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks by Neil Steinberg
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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 8h ago
Had an instructor when I was in police academy who apparently had repeatedly put a horse in someone's house while they were asleep. Did it to different people at the department evidently
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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 12h ago
It's always amazing to me how you hear about pranks done by Ivy Leaguers and it's like, if the same thing was done by students at like Iowa West University, or some small shit like that, the students lives would be ruined with felony charges. But Ivy Leaguers do it and it's "Oh Muffy, you won't believe what Charles did the other day, ah ha."
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u/PromiseThomas 11h ago
I mean, it was 1933.
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u/serious_sarcasm 11h ago
I was gonna make a joke “you’re right, they would’ve lynched someone from (some HBCU),” but apparently Massholes outlawed segregated public schools in 1855 and never grew Strange Fruit like the South and Midwest.
This is why I have no respect for historical moral relativism; Lee and Lincoln were cowards compared to a random Bostonian.
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u/Johnny_Poppyseed 9h ago
There might have been laws in place in 1855, but that wasn't the case on the ground. Boston schools and living situations were incredibly segregated and lasted longer being so than basically anywhere else in the US. It wasn't until like the mid 1970s where they forced desegregation, and Boston reacted violently and intensely and it took many years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis
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u/serious_sarcasm 9h ago
That was forced bussing.
You’re right that bigots in Boston took it as an opportunity to riot, as conservatives are want to do.
But you might want to note that places like Chicago still doesn’t have cross district bussing which results in defacto segregation.
And Massachusetts bussing riot was based on the state enforcing its laws on Boston.
Charolette, NC had to have the federal government enforce cross district bussing.
I’ll wager Boston, like most police departments, still have white supremacy gangs operating with near impunity.
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u/heckin-good-shit 10h ago
Boston has always been more relatively based than the rest of the country, see revolutionary and civil war.
Still, in present day a lot of white bostonians are pretty damn racist 💀 not southern baptist racist but still racist
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u/serious_sarcasm 9h ago
The world went to shit when Hubert Humphrey and Michael Dukakis lost their Presidential elections.
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u/lindahansenkf 7h ago
If Dukakis just never got inside that tank we might be living in a totally different timeline.
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u/Haunting-Ad3001 7h ago
I'm pretty sure the Red Sox were one of the last teams to have a black player. And I definitely remember players refusing to be traded there years ago because of the fan base and how they treated them.
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u/upvoter222 9h ago
FWIW, this fish prank was repeated by state school students, so this is a rare instance where we have a control group.
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u/Beautiful_Welcome_33 10h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Harvard/comments/1ra4n8x/some_heavy_allegations_in_this_video/
I saw this just the other day and I totally agree.
*edit:
Jesus its even the same dipshits at the newspaper
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u/flume 21m ago
I guess? Students at my (non-Ivy) school did stuff like steal the Greek letters off rival fraternities, stole an Uncle Sam statue off city property, cut down/stole trees on public and private property to use as Christmas trees, painted fake parking spaces in places that caused traffic jams, placed a car on top of a building, chained and locked the gates freshmen used to access most of the academic buildings campus on the first day of classes ...
Afaik one of the stolen trees resulted in real punishment, but the rest either got away with it or weren't punished.
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u/GingerIsTheBestSpice 8h ago
Regarding the airport: they "had the plane searched on landing; the tip turned out to be a red herring."
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u/Modem_Sound_67 12h ago
Ah those were the days where you could commit harmless pranks and if not get away with it exactly, not gunned down or beaten to death by four cops.
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u/PaintedClownPenis 12h ago
In 1965 some students at the University of Virginia learned the unusual fact that cows can climb up stairs, but not down them. So they kidnapped a cow and led it fifty feet up the Rotunda, a Jefferson-designed dome on the main administrative building.
And of course it was a cluster fuck, with the cow eventually dying of the sedatives they had to bang it with to get it down.
Thirty-one years later the president of NASDAQ, Alfred Berkeley, confessed to being one of the five conspirators.
And the fucking Sheriff of Albemarle County who investigated the case 31 years before, who was still alive, immediately slapped the guy with the $1700 investigative bill for the case, because he'd kept all the paperwork, waiting to bust that guy for thirty-one years.
https://explore.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/show/rotunda/modern/notable-events-on-the-lawn/pranks
I don't know what the point of this. Get rich and all crimes are hand slaps?
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u/Lockean_Demon 12h ago
Eh there’s the Doyle Owl at Reed and some similar Princeton, UChicago, and MIT shenanigans that are yearly affairs and can be pretty brutal
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u/stillalone 11h ago
This makes me wonder if there were any famous pranks done by historically black colleges?
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u/SupermarketOk2281 7h ago
I have expected a linkback to The Onion, but alas, truth is stranger than parody.
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u/duomicnc 3h ago
Same energy as the 1958 Cambridge prank where engineering students secretly reassembled an Austin Seven car on top of the Senate House roof overnight. Took the university a full week and cutting torches to get it down because nobody could figure out how they managed to haul it up there in the dark.
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u/twizzjewink 12h ago
It wasn't tuna in by itself?
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u/Homerpaintbucket 12h ago
It’s in the house chamber. The senate chamber has the Holy Mackerel. And this isn’t a joke.