My daily activities consist of two things - rummaging through garbage and grunting. Most of the time I'm doing one or the other and half of the other times I'm doing both. But lately I haven't been doing either and it's all because of a piddle-butt book called Prank University by some lousy turd named John Austin. My tale is a sad one, but I'm going to lay the truth out here for you like a swollen, severed penis decomposing in the sun.

     That metaphor reminds me: John Austin's book severed my penis. You'll see how when you read my story.

     Two weeks ago, one of my thirteen mangy dogs was making noise on the front porch and I stepped out to give it a quick compulsive kicking. That's when I saw a package, inside of which was a copy of Pranks University with a note that read, "Ha! Gotcha! Happy birthday, bro! - Greg." At this point, I noticed that the package wasn't addressed to me and I also noticed that I was on somebody else's front porch.

     Was this book sent to someone else as a prank? Did my dog know that this book was in the package? How did I get onto this porch? Now I had drank a cup or two of turpentine the night before, so maybe I was out of sorts. Or maybe someone really was playing a prank on me. Someone like one of those damned dogs of mine!

     Either way, I grabbed the book and ran away, disoriented and angry.

     When I got home, I began flipping through the book, finding page after page devoted to the setup and execution of elaborate juvenile pranks which I reckon you're supposed to pull on your roommates. But I know full and well that my only roommates are a dozen or so diseased, half-starved, semi-rabid mongrels.

     "Am I supposed to pull these pranks on my dogs?" I thought.

     "Yes," I answered myself, and I set out to do just that.

     The first prank in the book said to put some crap in a paper bag, light it on fire, put it on a doorstep, and ring the doorbell. Well, lucky for me I crap in paper bags on a daily basis anyway, so I just found the one I had used that morning and set it in front of my door. I don't have a doorbell, so I hollered for all the dogs to come out and it took them about an hour of jumping on the feeble door to break through it. Once outside, they just ripped open the bag and ate my stale doodoo like they always do and that started me cussing and kicking like I always do. Outsmarted by my own dogs!

     What kind of a prank was that? At this point, I determined that I would get those dogs and get 'em good, even if I had to pull every prank in John Austin's stupid book to do so. So I began flipping and tearing out the book's pages, as is my typical fashion when I read a book.

     As many of you may remember, I don't have the attention to read more than a couple of words strung together at a time. I just look at pictures. And by God, there was a drawing on every page of this book and each one showed me what prank to pull and how to do it. Hell, if I was his publisher, I would've just left out all those crummy words and just had the pictures in there, one after the other. Come to think of it, I didn't need the book cover, either, so I would've axed that, too. Yep, just a pile of fancy pictures is what this book should've been instead of some wordy, book-binded kind of book.

	Above: This is a picture of me, back before half my face was burned and before I began to distrust cameras.

     Anyway, from that moment forward, I undertook an ongoing prank war with my dogs and I wrote this here list to illustrate some of what transpired in that war:

- The Toothpaste Sleeping Prank (Day 2) - The book said a good prank was to put toothpaste on someone's face as they slept. I've never had the money or gumption to buy a tube of toothpaste, but I have plenty of industrial floor wax that I stole from a warehouse years ago. So I rubbed that all over the dogs whenever I caught one of them napping. Pretty soon, we were all lubed up and falling all over each other and breaking stuff, so I'm not sure if this one was a success. Some of the dogs seemed inconvenienced by it, but some seemed to like what we were doing.

- The Shoe-Tying Prank (Day 4) - This prank involves tying all of your enemy's shoelaces together so they are in one big messy knot. Even an idiot knows that dogs don't wear shoes so I had to improvise and create thirteen pairs of stylish and comfortable canine footwear to pull off this one. Of course, I couldn't get any of the damn penny-pinching mutts to buy any of the shoes once I made them, so I ended up just tying all of them together and chasing the dogs around the yard with the knotted mess of dog shoes for a couple of hours. Again, I think they liked this.

- The Plastic Forks Prank (Day 6) - One of the pranks called for sticking hundreds of plastic forks, spoons, and knives into your enemy's yard at night when the ground is wet. This one seemed like a sure-fire winner, so I stuck every plastic doodad I could find into the ground and waited for the sun to rise to see the dumb expressions on my dogs' faces. Just before sun-up, though, I remembered that I had to write several angry letters to the city council, so I headed back toward my house, slipping in the wet grass and impaling my anus on some of the plastic eating utensils I had just planted. I slipped another 8 times before I made it back inside, somehow severing my penis on some real knives and large pieces of glass I had also stuck in the ground. To make matters worse, half the dogs didn't even look at the front yard that day. If that prank wasn't a stinker, I don't know what a stinker is!

- The Glued Lids Prank (Day 7) - I went to take my weekly dosage of my heart medication, but found that I had super-glued all the lids of my jars shut in a prank earlier in the week, so I had to throw away all my pills and condiments and I probably have less than a month to live now. But I saw one of my dogs sniffing at a sealed-up jar of peanut butter, so I reckon I got him good!

- Baloney Prank (Day 8) - One of the book's prankings tells you to put baloney slices on your enemy's car to eat the paint off. I have five rusted-out, engine-less cars on my property and the dogs sometimes sleep or urinate in them. It took me half a day and two social security checks' worth of baloney to cover those cars. The dogs kept eating it as soon as I'd put it on there. Sometimes I think those flea-bitten things are hungry enough to eat every damn day! I hated this prank because the dogs just didn't look disappointed or tricked when the prank was over.

- Itching Powder in the Pants Prank (Day 11) - Again, a prank called for something I don't own - itching powder. So I thought about what else could make you itch - FLEAS! Quickly, I harvested a bunch of fleas off the dogs, and ground them into a fine powder which I then sprinkled over the poor, stupid dogs' coats. I sat back and waited for the magic to happen. Nothing. If anything, I've noticed the dogs scratching themselves less frequently after I did that prank! What is this Austin fella thinking when he writes this stuff?

- Fish in the Mailbox Prank (Day 12) - On this day, the city sent some fella out to my property because my neighbors were complaining about a stench. I told him that wasn't nothing new, but he didn't like that joke. Instead, he followed the stench to my mailbox, which had a bunch of dead fish in it because that foolish damn book had guaranteed that the fish-in-the-mailbox prank never fails. I explained to the city fella that my dogs hadn't been checking the mail since I put the fish in it and he just looked at me all cock-eyed for a minute before driving off. Hell, maybe the prank didn't work on the dogs, but it sure worked on him, the bastard!

     So that brings us up to date on the prank wars. Right now I'm writing this Studio.8.com book review with one eye while watching those sneaky old dogs with my other. Some of 'em have been laying on the ground motionless for days now with little worms crawling out of their mouths. But I know what kind of head games they're playing. They're cooking up something big, and I'm not sure that this Prankster College book will help me out any, so I'm probably going to put what's left of it on the burn pile out back.

     I think this James Austin fella is trying to pull a prank on all of us readers by making a book of worthless pranks that don't work on nobody with half a brain. So if you see this Prank State University book laying around your house or library or bookstore, you'd be better off not having anything to do with it. Mine will be in the burn pile before you're even done reading this sentence.

     I've just got to pull these 15 plastic forks and spoons out of my infected rectum first.