Lacking Animation Or Interest, Part I

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Now, today's story...

Hallo, komið þér sælir?

Huh? Right?

I said "Hello, how do you do?" in the Icelandic native tongue. I've been gathering sources today to begin teaching myself the langugage, though frankly it'd be easier if I had someone who could speak it teaching me.

I think that's at the very least slightly interesting. Icelandic is an old Norse language that's been unchanged for something like five centuries. Not to mention, if I plan to one day live in Iceland, I might as well learn the language (even though most of the country is quite fluent in English). I feel like I could learn more.

Then there's Mark, age 15. He is the youngest and without a doubt most dull of my three brothers. His only distinguishing physical feature is his shaggy hairdo which, oddly enough, like a chameleon, only helps him disappear into a crowd of teenagers. Shame about that.

See, Jason and I have been watching a lot of America's Funniest Home Videos lately and watching random people collecting thousands of dollars simply for sending in funny tapes made us think. Why don't we take a shot at collecting thousands of dollars simply for sending in funny tapes?

The plan was to innovate, to do something unique. Practical jokes and music montages are some of our favorite types of videos on the show. We decided to combine the two. We'd pull a series of fast ones on a single person — Mark — to see if he'd fall for them all. We planned out five jokes on Tuesday and set our plan in motion early Wednesday morning.

Mark generally gets up at 6:30 for school. Jason and I got up at 5:30 to set a trap in the bathroom — at the door, to be exact. We'd seen it before on the show and it was a classic. We taped a sheet of plastic wrap across the door so he'd walk face first into it. We set the video camera up and waited.

Here's the thing. He walked out of his room, but the slug Mark is, it never really did any damage. He hit is face on it, regrouped, then ducked underneath and went in. Vapid, as in lacking animation or interest.

We were never gonna win the $10,000 with that. So we had to make the rest of the tricks really count. While Mark was in school, Jason and I (who have both graduated high school) planned the next one.

There are these plastic mats that you often see in offices with carpet. They provide a hard surface, making desk chairs easier to roll. On the underside are these sharp little spikes that keep the mat itself from moving around once placed on the carpet. In the den, where Mark plays his guitar every day, there is one of these.

The trick was that we turn it over so that when Mark walked in the room to turn the lights on, he'd step on it and jump around a little bit — or wince at the very least. The camera was rolling and none of those things happened. He walked in, stepped on it and got annoyed. He turned the light on, flipped the mat, and played his guitar. Zero reaction. Vapid.

We couldn't believe it. If the plastic wrap thing was a bust, this was astronomically bad. We were basically 0 for 2 and we only had three ideas left. One was to tie a tripwire in the hallway to a pair of party poppers to shock him a little.

Another was to tie a rubberband to the spray nozzle on the sink so it would spray him in the face. And the last was to have believe he was coming home from school to an empty house while I dress up in a scary costume, then jump out and scare the pants off of him.

If you want to know if any of those ideas were successful, if the vapidity subsided, you're going to have to wait until tomorrow. I feel I've written enough for tonight.

Á íslensku: Here are some phrases to know in Icelandic, as translated by Jeff Feeley. "Hallo, komið þér sælir?" means "Hi, how are you?" "Bless allir" is "good night." "Talarðu ensku?" translates to "Do you speak English?" And "Hvar er salernið?" is how you ask "Where is the bathroom?"