Ping-Pong Balls of the Heavy-Metal Apocalypse

One fateful day, my dumpster-diving brother Chris discovered a radio-controlled power-outlet gizmo that allowed him to turn appliances on and off by remote control.

1. Some random scary-sounding Anthrax song I forget;
2. Pink Floyd's "Time", which begins with a horrendous barrage of clanging alarm clocks; and finally:
3. Metallica's "Fight Fire With Fire", which we set up to play in double-speed tape-duplication mode, thereby making it sound as if it were being performed by an extremely pissed-off Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Naturally, our idea was that we would turn on the stereos remotely when my stepsister was asleep and in the dark, thus waking her up and scaring her shitless. She shared a bedroom with my sister Juliette, who was therefore undoubtedly going to be woken up and frightened as well; while my brother and I bore Juliette no ill will that particular day, we decided the extra casuality would be well worth it.

By itself, this remotely-activated "music" would have been insufficiently devious to be worth bragging about, but what I added next was a touch of inspired evil genius if I do say so myself. After setting up the steroes, I taped five threads to the five blades of the ceiling fan in the middle of the room, and to the other end of each thread I taped a ping-pong ball. The lengths of these threads were carefully selected so that when the ceiling fan was on, the ping-pong balls were whooshing by right above my stepsister's bed, such that if she were to sit up in that bed -- as she might, for example, upon abruptly waking up to three steroes blaring forth the sphincter-loosening sounds of the apocalypse -- the ping-pong balls would wind up bouncing right off of her face.

I turned the ceiling fan back off again and placed the strings and ping-pong balls on top of the fan's blades where they would be relatively inconspicuous. (The fan was almost never used, so there was little worry of anyone turning it on before night and sending the balls whirling prematurely.) We left the room and waited for my sister and step-sister to go to bed and fall asleep. Once they had, I crept back in, took the ping-pong balls down from the fan blades to let them hang from their strings, turned on the fan, and crept back out to the hall where my brother waited. (Both my sister and my step-sister were sound sleepers, so this could easily be accomplished without waking either of them up.) Everything was in place. One final push of the button, and terror and chaos would reign supreme over my stepsister's world for one brief, shining moment.

My brother pushed the button to activate the boom-boxes' power supply gizmos, and a thunderous cacophony of bells and distorted guitars erupted from my stepsister's room.

If went according to plan, this sound would be joined shortly by a shriek, followed by the sounds of ping-pong balls merrily bouncing around the room after being ripped from their strings by my stepsister's head. My brother and I chuckled fitfully, and waited -- along with my father and stepmother, who apparently thought the stunt was funny enough that they actually let us go through with it after catching us in the process of setting things up -- and waited...and waited...