1) This is a boom pole. On the end is what we call a zeppelin. you put your microphone in there. You use it to record audio of people in movies and terrible reality television shows.

This is a house fly.

If you put a house fly in a zeppelin you can really frustrate sound mixers. Or so I've heard.

2) This is a Yamaha PM4000. It has lots of knobs. It is used for mixing many, many channels of audio.

This is a Yamaha DM2000. It has even more knobs than a PM4000, but since it's digital all the knobs are hidden in arcane menus written by the Japanese for people that are not only technical, but think like Japanese console manufacturers.

On large-scale reality television shows it's not uncommon for multiple mixers to trade off extremely complex sessions as shift work. On these large-scale reality television shows one occasionally finds sound mixers pranking each other by, say, sidechaining a pitch-shifter inline with the host's microphone such that, say, Dr. Phil only goes an octave deeper when he shouts. And since the effects are buried deep in a section of the console you never, EVER use you might find that it takes 10 minutes to fix. On one of the most stressful sets in television. Unfortunately it's also easy to think that you're "pranking" someone when in fact you're sabotaging their mix. By, say, cracking open the microphone in the bathroom over someone's channel.

Or so I've seen.

3) When one works on large-scale reality TV shows one is often exposed to technical directors and other professionals whose careers are long and amazing. It's not exactly uncommon to find terrible films and shows and add them to their IMDb profiles in moments of boredom. Or so I've heard.

Me? I don't prank. Part of it is I recognize it only leads to escalation. Part of it is my parents grew up in Los Alamos, NM during the height of the Cold War and they didn't play.

My father was a cigarettes-in-the-sleeve, lead-sled-driving, slicked-hair thug. He and his buddy owned the auto shop in school. When they graduated, they welded the doors shut. Prank.

My mom's best friend (and my guidance counselor in high school - fuck small worlds) used to go underneath the guard towers and whisper Russian to each other until they'd drawn fire from the soldiers above. Prank.

And as far as senior pranks go, Somebody managed to remove a 60 ft flag pole (complete with 9' diameter 2 ton concrete base) and place it in the middle of the hallway of an entire wing of class. The mystery remains unsolved. They had to demo a concrete wall and cut the pole into sections to get it out because they didn't know how it was done. Prank.

My mother was a grad student at the University of New Mexico in the early '70s. One of her weekend pastimes was going out into the desert and burning down billboards.

In 1975 Edward Abbey published the seminal "Monkey Wrench Gang," which starts out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It contains this passage:

The Highway Patrol arrived promptly fifteen minutes late, radioing the report of an inexplicable billboard fire to a causally scornful dispatcher at headquarters, then ejecting self from vehicle, extinguisher in gloved hand, to ply the flames for a while with little limp gushes of liquid sodium hydrochloride to the pyre. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating.

Doc Sarvis by this time had descended the crumbly bank of the roadside under a billowing glare from his handiwork, dumped his gas can into trunk of car, slammed the lid and slumped down in the front seat beside his driver. “Next?” she [Abbzug] says.

Not exactly a prank but it certainly instills an ethic of "go hard or go home" and "going hard" is often pretty goddamn destructive.