You can, of course, still buy the original over at http://www.2600.com or at a newsstand near you.

Teen who made prank calls writes letter of apology

By Lesley Hughes
News Editor
lhughes@erwinrecord.net

http://www.erwinrecord.net/Detail.php?Cat=LOCALNEWS&ID=58748

Prank calling during late-night hours landed three juveniles in trouble with the law, and one teenager wrote a letter of apology following the incident.Sheriff Kent Harris discovered the three juveniles had made phone calls on March 13, 14 and 15 during late hours. The citizens they called reported answering the phone and hearing a recorded voice of a baby crying.

After an investigation into one of the victim’s phone records, Harris identified where the calls originated.

A 13-year-old who made the calls wrote to the victims and apologized for his actions.

“I’m sorry for bring so stuped and immuture,” the eighth-grade student wrote in a letter full of spelling and grammatical errors not corrected for publication here. “It wuz a stuped joke that wuzn’t funny. I’m very sorry for bothering you. The Sheriff had 2 come 2 my house and talked to me mom and dad are [huh? -linear] very disipionted with me. I lost all privileges on the fone and got grounded for 2 months. And I have 2 do extra chores around the house and volunter at my mom’s work on weekind. So it wuzn’t worth the laugh and it wuz bad that I bothered people at their homes and worryed them.

“I’m very sorry and I promise that I will never prink call anyone else agin. U can get in alot of truble and its not worth it.”

Harris said the boy will work out a punishment through volunteer work.

UPDATE 5/7/2009: Shit no longer be fucked up, as far as we can tell.

Does the article sound a little familiar? it just might - - About three days after UPL030 was released, this same network neutrality article mysteriously disapeared from within it. The reason for this (which I couldn’t really discuss until now) was that about three months before, I had submitted the article to 2600. They hadn’t gotten back to me, and assuming they rejected it, I put it in UPL030. They contacted me shortly after UPL030’s publication saying they were in fact using it. One of the conditions of submitting articles to 2600 is that they can’t be published anywhere else until after they’ve been printed in 2600. So I removed it before they realized it had already been within UPL’s pages. It took about 6 months for 2600 to print it, but now it’s finally there.

Now that it has been published in 2600, I have reinserted it into UPL030. If the article seems a little bit dated, it’s because I actually wrote it close to a year ago, but it took a while to get published.

NOW GO OUT TO THE NEWS STANDS AND BUY A THOUSAND COPIES OF 2600!@#

History calls, but kids can’t beat ‘59 record
Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, March 26, 2009
But it did, and with the Plexiglas went the dreams and aspirations of a whole lot of St. Mary’s College students.

Some said they were disappointed. Some were too squished to say anything.

What happened Wednesday on the campus greensward was the re-enactment of the famous day in 1959 when 22 St. Mary’s students crammed into a phone booth and a Life magazine photographer snapped a picture of the spectacle.

That photo became an icon of the 1950s, an idyllic decade when people had little to worry about besides how many students could do something pointless at the same time. That, and the world blowing up.

Fifty years later, dozens of St. Mary’s students were lined up on the lawn before the booth, intent on breaking the record. Also on hand were several former students who had been in the booth in 1959 as wild-eyed teenagers and were now wizened grandpas.

And keeping an eye on everything were one doctor, two nurses, two paramedics and a sergeant of police. It would be bad, Dr. Ali Rezapour confided, if someone suffocated in the midst of all the merriment, and, as a medical professional, he was most eager to prevent it.

“Let’s do some stuffing,” said college President Ron Gallagher to the large crowd of alumni and students who had gathered to watch what passes for history in Moraga.

It was not easy to cram into a phone booth 50 years ago, and it has not gotten any easier. In the first place, there are no longer any phone booths around, and the college had to dig one up from storage in a warehouse in Los Angeles, a town full of useless stuff. Many of the students confessed that they had never been inside a real phone booth before.

The booth was trucked to Moraga and modified for the stunt - someone installed a comfy throw rug, of all things, and also removed the actual telephone, the lamp, the fan and the seat. The glass windows were replaced with shatterproof Plexiglas, for safety.

That made the grandpas feisty.

“There was a real phone in ours, and it took up some space,” said Ted Tsukohara, now a professor of liberal arts at the college. “I’m not sure you can call it a phone booth if it doesn’t have a phone. Maybe we better ask Superman.”

The big moment
And then it was time for the students to start cramming into the booth. After a few practice rounds between members of two campus clubs, those participants still breathing were selected for the record-breaking attempt. Student Sam Westermann, the president of the spirit club, kept a running body count.

“One!” he hollered over the loudspeaker. “Two! Three!”

Various strategies were employed and, before long, nearly everyone was screaming advice about something nobody knew anything about.

In the first round, the kids tried an elaborate configuration with the first three students making an arched bridge with their bodies and two others crawling underneath. It looked plenty scientific and space-saving, but it left one of the arched kids hollering. After a few moments, everyone piled out. Then they crawled back in, head-to-toe this time. As before, the young men and ladies pressed together in the booth kept their hands to themselves and tried to remain focused on the task.

“Thirteen! Fourteen! Fifteen!”

Rezapour was on his knees just outside the booth, watching the kids on the bottom through the Plexiglas and demanding to see upturned thumbs from all participants, even those whose faces were lost in the pile.

“Keep breathing!” hollered Rezapour, never an unsound piece of medical advice.

But that configuration maxed out at 19. The students piled out and, after a brief huddle, said they would try it one last time, while the grandpas held their breath. Most of the grandpas, while saying they wanted to see the kids succeed, were none too keen about giving up their record.

And many of them took pains to point out that too many legs, arms and business ends were dangling out of the phone booth door this time around.

“They seem to have a lot more appendages hanging out of the booth than we did,” sniffed Ray Motta, one of the 1959 record setters.

For the final attempt, the kids threw out strategy and simply flung themselves into the booth head first, like a pile of puppies or rugby players. It caused maximum numbers and asphyxiation.

“Nineteen! Twenty! Twenty-one!”

Disaster strikes
It was then, while Rezapour was frantically tallying upturned thumbs, that disaster struck. Although a half dozen beefy students had been employed to hold in the sides of the booth from the outside as the stuffing progressed, they were not strong enough to prevent a large sheet of Plexiglas from coming loose from one wall of the booth. Arms and legs spilled through the hole, and a metal support beam gave way just as the 22nd student was flinging herself into the booth to tie the record.

“Get out!” somebody screamed. “It’s breaking apart! Everyone get out!”

The students clambered to safety. The poor phone booth looked like Dorothy’s farmhouse after the cyclone.

And then everyone tried to figure out whether the record had been officially tied or if the collapse of the booth meant that it didn’t.

“I say we tied it!” said Stephanie Goff, 19, who had been halfway up, somewhere on the left side. “This is what college is all about!”

But the grandpas said a broken phone booth is even less of a phone booth than a phone booth without a phone, and that the only reason the 22nd student could squeeze in is because several of the body parts in the middle had squeezed out through the hole created by the broken Plexiglas.

About the only thing everyone could agree on was that St. Mary’s, which had gone coed since the days of the 1959 stuffing, was now a far more interesting place to engage in phone booth stuffing or anything else.

“When we did it, it was all guys,” said Don Dorito, who had been on the bottom layer in 1959. “We didn’t have any girls in the booth with us. If we could have, we might have got a lot more than 22 bodies into the booth.”

E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

but the whole website going down every time our SMF database crashed (which, for some reason, seems to happen often) eventually got old. So now I’ve swicthed everything over. That means a lot of dead links and errors will be found, I imagine. Let us know about any errors you find by commenting on this post or on our message board.

I entered this contest where I make a commercial for a domain registrar. For my commercial, I followed the time-honroed UPL tradition of stealing and idea from PLA, and used a PLA Radio promo concept. I called an old lady and explained to her all about registering a domain. She didn’t seem very interested. Please help me win by rating the video highly.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Here are links to two other entries I made, they’re not prank calls so you might not be as interested. But you can rate them high too and that would be awesome.

Whole Lot Better #1
Whole Lot Better #2

Thanks for your help!

]]> http://www.phonelosers.net/help-upl-win/feed/ http://www.phonelosers.net/10-year-anniversary-of-upl-ezine-a-decade-of-dumb/ http://www.phonelosers.net/10-year-anniversary-of-upl-ezine-a-decade-of-dumb/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:07:13 +0000 linear http://www.phonelosers.net/cockpit/?p=146

Even though the UPL technically started in late 1998, we didn’t release the first issue of our ezine until January 27, 1999. That was 10 years ago this day. That’s an entire decade of dumb, friends. The ezine started as single-article issues, but progressed quickly into multi-topic, multi-author issues and through them we’ve shared a lot of (mostly worthless) information with you. And even through hiatuses, parental punishment, domain hijackings, cybersquatting, and the Bush presidency, we’ve managed to spit out well over 200 articles through our zine.

What I’m saying here is that I’ve wasted 10 years of my life for you stupid assholes, and I won’t get those years back. What have I done with my god damn life? What have I become? What COULD I have been?

But I digress. In honor of our 10-year anniversary, I created an archive of all articles ever published through the UPL ezine. This archive will make it a lot easier to find specific articles without having to search through individual issues tracking everything down. It’s a fully sortable list, so it will be easy to arrange the articles by author, or by issue, etc.

You better appreciate it, assholes, you don’t know what a pain in the ass it is cataloging 10 years worth of 200+ articles.

I’ll add this archive to our “Outdated Stuff” page soon. Hopefully someday we can track down some archives of the list from other services, like Yahoo! Groups, ListServ, and the myriad of other shitty sites that hosted us.

Please ignore the fact that this new design looks a tad similar to some other all-too-well-known site’s design.