There’s a new technology that some of you may have heard of by now, called “compact discs,” which you can now purchase to listen to a tiny portion of our prank phone calls. We’re pretty sure these are the next big thing, so get ready to start re-purchasing all that music you’ve been buying as mp3 files these past few years. Anyway, a brand new PLA CD, titled “Can I Help You?” is now available for you to buy. This CD features calls by murd0c, Carlito from Madhouse, RBCP and The Spessas. You’ll get to hear about 73 minutes of our customer service calls from the past 10 years.

Yes, these calls are all available already on our website and from the PLA Media Pack torrent. You won’t be getting anything new or unavailable by buying this CD, aside from a cool CD with original artwork on it. If you want to download the full album for free, click here. If people like the CD and buy enough of them, that will motivate me to put together a few more of them soon. I’m mainly making these for the same reason I made the newer PLA ‘zine archive book – because some people will think this sort of thing is neat to have.

Click on the PayPal button above to buy this CD directly from me for $5.00, or click here to buy it from our supplier with PayPal or click here to buy it from our supplier with a credit card. The supplier charges too much for shipping, but at least I don’t get your address and your CD isn’t all sticky with my DNA.

Thanks, whoever made that Futurama photo. I think it was Trevor, but I’m probably wrong. Speaking of Trevor, though, he uploaded Tabachi’s billions of edited prank calls from our 24-hour prank call marathon to YouTube a few days ago, denying my request to leave out the one where I made a girl cry. Click here to join the 2012 Marathon Facebook page, which I assume will eventually contain information about next year’s 24-hour prank call marathon. (Click here to watch my video of Trevor’s videos.)

Are you a Pinterest user? Wow, so am I! Here’s my board for the Phone Losers of America. I doubt you’ll see any updates on there that you haven’t seen on PLA’s Facebook first, but you never know.

One last thing – because I’m incapable of making a post without mentioning Rappy McRapperson these days, I should mention that he visited my house last week and he accidentally left a bunch of his stuff behind so I created a blog called Comics From Space where I will display scans of the pile of drawings I have here, before throwing them in the trash. Starting next week, I will begin selling articles of his clothing on eBay. Also, me and him put together a pretty good music video for a song from his new album, called Punch The Wall. I’ve embedded it below.

ONE MORE LAST THING: The Phone Show is tonight! 9pm Pacific.

Earlier this week, I was having a nice romantic dinner with Rappy McRapperson at Red Robin, and we noticed an advertisement on the table encouraging everyone to tweet with the hashtag of #banzailoveyou to win free meals and other prizes. Rappy, who was clearly a victim of my bad influence over the past few days, immediately suggested that we tweet something horrible about Red Robin, using their hashtag. A few moments later, using all 3 of my Twitter accounts on my smartphone and then Rappy’s, the following twats were posted.

Now, I have nothing against Red Robin and I think their food is awesome. I eat there with my kids and my friends several times a year and have had nothing but great experiences there. So please, don’t think that my tweets are out of retaliation for poor service or rude staff. Red Robin is a great place and I highly recommend them to everyone that reads this. I’m just an asshole, though, and I think the idea of writing horrible things about them is hilarious. So I started a thread on the PLA Forums, encouraging others to join in the fun and tweet crazy things.

You’ll notice that these first few tweets have two i’s in the hashtag. This apparently is incorrect, as you’ll see on the official contest page, but I swear there were two i’s on the card we saw on the table. I had to look at it each time I made a new tweet from the restaurant and there’s just no way I made the exact same mistake all three times. Legitimate customers were tweeting with 2 i’s too, so it’s not just me. No really!

Right around here is when things got completely out of control. Our wacky tweets are now outnumbering the legitimate contest tweets. Prepare yourself for a gigantic list of hilarious tweets, all by people who noticed our tweets and began writing things 500 times more awesome than we could come up with.

As all of these hilarious tweets were coming in yesterday, keeping me and Rappy LOLing most of the day, Carlito began messaging me from a Red Robin in Pennsylvania. He just happened to be eating there and managed to get an awesome picture of him and the Red Robin mascot. Then he sent me the picture of his Banzai burger, which you saw at the beginning of this post.

Having pictures coming in from Carlito as all of these tweets were happening just added to the hilarity for me and Rappy. The tweets are still continuing today and show no sign of slowing down yet. So a ton of thanks goes out to all the people who’ve given us nonstop lulz these past 48 hours.

I’m not going to say you all should continue doing this, but the contest does last for another month, until February 19th, and it sure is making a lot of people laugh. We’re fairly certain that even the Red Robin corporate people are snickering about it in their corporate meetings (you guys are welcome for that!). If you’d like to enter Red Robin’s contest, all you have to do is follow @redrobinburgers and then tweet something (the contest rules don’t specify what should be tweeted) with the hashtag of #banzailoveyou. You can read all about the contest at redrobin.com/banzailoveyou.

Once again, RED ROBIN IS AWESOME! Don’t believe any of the craziness that you’ve read above. Well, except for the part about the staff stealing my wallet and shooting my wife in the foot – that shit is totally true. If our silliness is making you laugh, though, then you should definitely go eat some overpriced food at the Red Robin nearest you.

Thanks to Rappy McRapperson for making this happen and to Carlito from Madhouse Live for the pictures. Most of all, thanks to all the Twitter users that have given me and us other PLA’ers lots of hysterical laughter these past 48 hours!

Below is a live Twitter feed of all current #banzailoveyou posts.

Pretty please subscribe to these PLA things: Cacti Radio Facebook, PLA Facebook, Prank Calls Facebook, Redbox and the Chilipeppers Facebook, PLA Twitter, RBCP’s Twitter, phonelosers.org (PLA Radio) RSS feed, Phone Show RSS feed, Big Beef Bueno RSS feed.

January 17th Update! Just a day after posting this entry on phonelosers.org, Red Robin suddenly began heavily promoting their Banzai Burger contest by emailing people on their mailing list and encouraging them to tweet with #banzailoveyou. They also began constantly tweeting, “Put your tweets where your mouth is. Head to Red Robin, enjoy a Banzai Burger & Tweet the love! #BanzaiLoveYou” to get people to respond with the hashtag. As a result, our crazy tweets have been quickly scrolling away for days now, making it pointless to even do it anymore. Well played, Red Robin. Well played.

Another odd thing – when we started doing this, the description on the Red Robin Twitter account had the name of the guy who ran it. As in, the personal name of the guy in their public relations department, or whoever runs it in corporate Red Robin Land. But as soon as they started fighting back at us, his name disappeared from the description. Now it just says “Official Home of Insanely Delicious Gourmet Burgers.” We’re not sure if taking the name off had anything to do with us, but we’re going to pretend it did because we’re such scary people and he just didn’t want any trouble.

Happy 2012, everyone! It’s time to start your year with a brand new episode of the PLA Radio podcast! This episode tells you all about our adventures of irritating Target shoppers during the 2011 holiday season. Prepare to be surprised at how easy it is to create your own cordless phone extension at your local Target store so that you can answer calls for customers. After that you’ll hear some of our old car ding calls that we were doing way back this past November. Here are the show notes.

• 00:00 Boy George Karma Chameleon Telephone – here are a bunch of video links.
  
• 01:00 Background music is Thanksgiving Sucks by Rappy McRapperson
  
• 01:05 Original Black Friday PLA Radio episode and YouTube video.
  
• 03:00 Uniden D1660 cordless phones
  
• 13:10 Walkie talkies were Motorola CLS1810T (UHF). Frequencies were 467.750, 467.775, 467.875 and 467.900. Click here to listen to extended Target security shit-talking.
  
• 13:45 Voicemail background song is Technical Writer by The Doubleclicks
  
• 17:00 Leave a voicemail by dialing 814-422-5309
  
• 17:20 Car dings video link. If you leave your own notes, only use this phone number for it: 425-243-7565.
  
• 21:50 This car ding call is by Samantha. Say hi to her on Facebook and Twitter.
  
• 26:25 This car ding call is by Carltio, from Madhouse Live.
  
• 28:33 Here is our official page for car ding calls.
  
• 29:09 Cacti Radio.com
  
• 29:17 www.cactiradio.com/phoneshow and madhouse and prank show
  
• 29:40 myspace.com/plaradio still exists, but I was lying about the rest of the links. Email PLA radio at rbcp@phonelosers.org and don’t forget AOL keyword PLA!
  
• 30:20 Closing music is from Rappy McRapperson’s brand new album. Download it for free from rappymcrapperson.com.

As always, please subscribe to these things: Cacti Radio Facebook, PLA Facebook, Prank Calls Facebook, Redbox and the Chilipeppers Facebook, PLA Twitter, RBCP’s Twitter, phonelosers.org (PLA Radio) RSS feed, Phone Show RSS feed, Big Beef Bueno RSS feed.

Hi Chris! I’m far from being a lawyer or a cop, so keep that in mind when listening to my legal advice. A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to keep prank calls legal, which should answer most of your legal questions about prank calling. Basically, it says that you should never prank locally, you shouldn’t make threats, you shouldn’t impersonate government employees and you shouldn’t prank someone more than a couple of times. I really need to add that article to the sidebar of this site so that people can easily find it.

I’ve also written an article on how to record phone calls, which mostly deals with cellular phones and land lines. I need to update that page to include Skype recording, because Skype is about the only thing I ever use anymore for prank calling. I don’t even know how to begin to explain how I have things set up in the Cacti Radio studio, but it involves broadcasting software, a mixer and 2 sound cards hooked together in a loop that should explode the universe, but doesn’t. When I’m not on the air, though, I use mp3 Skype Recorder, which is a free program that automatically records all of your Skype calls. It sucks and it has issues and I will replace it one of these days when I feel like testing out other options, but for now it does the job. Sort of.

Finally, about your friend who makes embroidered stuff – tell her I would love for her to make a ton of PLA shit! Here’s the thing about PLA merchandise – I make barely any money at all from it. In fact, between all the time I spend packaging things up and driving to the post office and all the free stuff I include with orders and all the PLA stuff that I give away because I’m such a nice guy, I’m sure I lose money in the end. Luckily, phonelosers.org supports itself with the advertisements on this page, so I don’t really lose money at PLA.

Here’s what I’m getting at, though – I would like your friend to make any cool things she can think of that would be related to the PLA. She can use the PLA logo or PLA quotes or cacti or anything she wants. She can send me links to things she makes and I will help her sell them, using phonelosers.org and the PLA Facebook page. And here’s the best part – she can charge whatever she wants and keep all the profits for herself!

Samantha had this great idea a month or two ago – she wanted to knit things with PLA symbols on them, such as gloves or hats or whatever. I loved the idea and told her to go for it, but knowing how lazy Samantha is, I immediately set about creating a competitive market for her knitting by contacting random ETSY shop owners and suggesting to them that they make PLA things and sell them.

The image you see here is the first result of that. This is a cell phone cozy, made by MarikaHandKnits in Toronto. She makes custom party wristbands, fingerless gloves, iphone cases and more. Ideally, the etsy owner would put the item up for sale so that I could link people to it and they could easily buy it, but for whatever reason, this shop owner didn’t do that and didn’t tell me how much this cell phone cozy costs, so all I can do is tell readers to visit her shop and ask to buy the PLA cell phone cozy.

I would like for everyone to do this! If you know someone who makes things and sells it on sites like etsy.com, tell them to make PLA things! I want to see PLA hats, gloves, sweaters and underwear! I can’t guarantee that anyone will buy these things, but I will do my best to link to their PLA merchandise from this site. I’d like to even set up a section on the PLA Store page for things that other people make. Do this, people!

Thanks for the email, Chris!

RBCP

But my secret ulterior motive for posting this today is to tell everyone that Rappy McRapperson is having his album release party on Cacti Radio this Saturday! At 7:00pm Pacific / 10:00pm Eastern, Rappy will join RBCP for a 2 hour live interview as we play his new album, Live at the Amway Arena. We’ll be talking about Rappy’s new album, taking your phone calls, and maybe even making some prank calls. You can preorder an autographed physical CD at rappymcrapperson.com or you can just steal the album from the internet when it comes out on Saturday.

Below are the show notes from this week’s Phone Show. Listen and read along!

• B. Reith – Old School
• Rappy McRapperson is having an album release party this Saturday, December 17th at 7:00pm on Cacti Radio. The new album is called Live at the Amway Arena and you can preorder CDs or digital albums at rappymcrapperson.com.
• This is a recording DOT COM!
• RTH pitches a Cacti Radio idea for a new show about underground infoz. Now he’s obligated to do it.
• Everyone buy PLA Harley shirts!
• 425-906-5744 is a weird number that TheN “found.”
• Cacti Radio will be hosting a 24 hour prank call marathon soon. Here’s the planning thread.
• Here is Samantha’s Pylons Call which is awesome. Also, Samantha has agreed to marry RBCP if they reach 100 mutual friends on Facebook. Her Facebook URL is www.facebook.com/thesamantha.
• LTmatt is a firebug.
• Here is a link to the “new” PLA book, which is a collection of all the old ‘zine issues from the 1990′s.
• Random thought while I’m editing: If you have that many enemies, YOU are the problem.
• The URL for book donations for Christian schools is actually phonelosers.org/book/donations/ – I gave the wrong one on the show.
• We call fake Kevin Mitnick – aka “The Audi Guy” from Madhouse Live
• We call real Kevin Mitnick and he’s incredibly nice to us.
• www.mitnicksecurity.com/nudephotos/
• Buy Kevin Mitnick’s book!
• The aftershow was really boring, so it was not saved.
  

Subscribe to these things: Cacti Radio Facebook, PLA Facebook, Prank Calls Facebook, Redbox and the Chilipeppers Facebook, PLA Twitter, RBCP’s Twitter, phonelosers.org (PLA Radio) RSS feed, Phone Show RSS feed, Big Beef Bueno RSS feed.

Holy crap, it’s Christmas! Do you want a Christmas gift? I want to give you a Christmas gift, so here’s the deal…email me your address and I’ll give you a special PLA button that you’ve never seen before. I’ve never seen it either, because I just thought of this dumb idea, but chances are it will be holiday-themed and it might have a cactus on it or a PLA bell or some boobs or something. You know you want one.

This offer is good until the end of December 2011 and just so it doesn’t get out of hand, I’m going to limit this to just the first 50 people who email me. One per person, please. If I reach the limit of 50, I will post here that I’m out of them.

If you want to get yourself a nice Christmas present, I suggest buying a PLA Harley shirt or anything else from the PLA store as soon as possible so you get it by Christmas.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Hugs and kisses,
RBCP

Chris S. from California, webmaster of The Octoshow, suckered some girl named Alyson Bender to draw this awesome rendition of Grouchy Old Man. Thanks, Chris and Alyson! You can view more of Alyson’s artwork on her DevArt page.

You can view more PLA-inspired art on the PLA art page or by looking at past PLA art posts. If you’d like to send in your own PLA artwork, email it to rbcp.

And don’t forget to visit Chris’ website!

Earlier this week, Trevor became the first person on Earth to declare “PLA 4 LYFE!” by having a PLA bell logo tattooed on his butt his arm. Those of you who hang out on PLA’s Tinychat often enough have probably run across Trevor, also known as rasterdragon, from time to time. Trevor often runs PLA Movie Night whenever RBCP is too strung-out to do it himself.

Trevor will undoubtedly be cursing PLA’s name 10 years from now as he’s paying exorbitant amounts of money to have PLA’s logo lasered off his arm. If he’s smart about it, he will sue RBCP for corrupting his mind enough to let this instant of bad decision making happen. If you’d like to learn more about someone who would desecrate their body with our ridiculousness, visit Trevor on Facebook, then look at more tattoo pictures on his tumblr and be confused about his .info page. Trevor also runs his own Rappy McRapperson page to confuse people trying to find the real one.

If my answering machine offends you, call my answering service and leave a message on my voicemail. It also hates my machine and will understand.

• The Cactus commands you to LOL at the confused people here.

• The Cactus commands you to go listen to the latest Phone Show and LOL whether it’s funny or not.

• The Cactus commands you to join PLA’s Facebooks and their Twitter. Oh, and the Prank Call Facebook account that promises daily prank calls but actually delivers more like one every week.

• The Cactus commands you to go read the Dino story, because, come on, you haven’t read that in ages now.

Not since Dear Arby Volume 1 have I made a post with so many letters to…me. In this edition you’re going to see an exciting array of the things that have arrived in my P.O. box, which is my sad an obvious attempt to cause more things to show up in my P.O. box.

The above postcard is a good example of how I would prefer people not send me mail – by tracking down my home address and sending a “I FOUND YOU” card to my home without a signature. Quit it! Use the P.O. Box, please.

A guy named z09 was a regular on the PLA Forums and the inspiration for the Blockbuster episode of PLA Radio. He was also really into stalking me using the methods he learned from phonelosers.org. He loved sending me pizzas and taxis and even talked my local Blockbuster Video out of my account information. He once sent lunchmeat to me and Countykid in the mail, and soon after that he sent me this letter with a $20 bill enclosed.

z09 didn’t include his home address so that I could send him a PLA shirt, so I was able to blow his $20 on cheap hookers without having to give anything back. Soon after this I stalked him back, which seemed to freak him out and caused him to disappear from our community forever. I thought about sending a shirt to his address, but he seemed so unhappy at being exposed that I decided against it since I didn’t want to get him in trouble at home. If you ever see this, z09, tell me where to send a book or a shirt!

Earlier this year I received this strange letter. It was from overseas with no return address. Inside was a single dollar bill so crisp that I suspected it was counterfeit. In place of George Washington’s face was a sticker of a man identified as Bonn Scott. With the dollar was an extra Bonn Scott sticker, which I stuck on another dollar bill of mine before spending them both.

I had to Google who Bonn Scott was online and I ended up finding several other pictures of dollar bills with this same defacement. I also found this website that sells the Bonn Scott stickers. Maybe it was all just a ploy to get me to advertise that site. But from overseas? God, you PLA people are weird.

Finally there’s the extremely nice gift that Darkstranger sent me this week – a book of Sir John Hargrave’s Prank The Monkey, the book from the awesome website zug.com. I’ve been reading it all week and it’s awesome. Thanks, Darkstranger!

I swear I’m not fishing for gifts, but it’d be awesome if you decided to send weird postcards or drawings or other non-valuable things to my P.O. box so that I can post them in a future update. To write to me, just track down my home address write to PLA (or Brad Carter) at P.O. Box 465, Albany, OR, 97321.

The picture above is by Sebastian, who posted it on the PLA Forums with this message: “I colored this picture of a pepper at the local Chili’s restaurant. I believe that, through this artwork and those of others, Phone Losers has a chance to live forever, maybe above the fountain drink machine or in a corner somewhere, and perhaps slightly overlapped by a better picture. We must all do our part.”

Click on the image to see it full sized so you can read it.

The comic above was done by Patrick Q. and posted on his Facebook photo album. I could be wrong, but I think it might be in response to a story we did on this week’s Phone Show about possibly the world’s first prank callers.

The story, from io9.com, says that a newspaper in 1884 printed the following paragraph: “A GRAVE JOKE ON UNDERTAKERS — Some malicious wag at Providence R.I. has been playing a grave practical joke on the undertakers there, by summoning them over the telephone to bring freezers, candlesticks and coffin for persons alleged to be dead. In each case the denoument was highly farcical, and the reputed corpses are now hunting in a lively manner for that telephonist.” This was 8 years after the invention of the telephone.

This Far Side comic was re-worded by cyko. I’m not sure what it originally said, but I bet cyko’s version is much funnier.

Finally, below is a picture that I created earlier today and posted on Facebook. Some people seem to think the quote is inaccurate, but they clearly know nothing about hacker culture or history.

If you’re the kind of person who likes humorous pictures that are nothing like the pictures above, then you’ll probably like Jeremy’s House of Funny. This is a new project started up by Heywood, the guy who used to run major-losers.com and has brought all kinds of wonderful things to the PLA this past decade. There’s nothing on the main page yet, but you should join us on the forums! You should also join his Facebook page which brings you humorous pictures throughout the day.

During last week’s Phone Show, I asked listeners to leave notes on cars in their neighborhoods, claiming that they’d accidentally dented the car and to call me. Over the past week I’ve received about 10 calls from angry and/or confused car owners, asking what happened. You can listen to a few of their reactions to our crazy stories in the video below.

If you’d like to help us out with this prank, write a note and leave it on a random car with the 425-TWO FOUR THREE-7565 phone number. Don’t actually damage a car, though, as tempting as it may be.

What would you say to a person who called you, thinking you’d damaged their car? Leave your ideas in the comments below!

Happy Halloween, everyone! And thanks for the cool PLA pumpkin, Patrick.

If you’ve been thinking, “Man, I just don’t have enough PLA books on my shelf!” this past year, then are you in for surprise! A brand new PLA book has been released this week! And by brand new, I mean it’s a collection of all our old e-zine issues from the 1990′s.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been formatting all the old ‘zine issues of PLA into Kindle format, for no reason at all really. I finished that up and you can download all 47 issues of PLA for free right now. Formats available are Kindle, PDF, DOC and HTML. I plan to add versions for the Sony reader and the Nook very soon to that list.

As I finished up the ebook, though, I decided to go ahead and release an actual book of the ‘zine too, mostly just because I thought it’d be cool to have one for myself. Here’s a video of the finished book.

I’m not making this book available on Amazon, just so it will be a few dollars cheaper for you to buy it. Instead you have to go to CreateSpace and buy it directly from them for $13.93. I know that sounds like a lot for a book of old, outdated information, but it’s 800 pages of old, outdated information so it’s totally worth it. You may want to buy this as soon as you can because I can’t make any guarantees on how long this book will remain available. It’s filled with things that could probably get it removed from the market.

This book is completely non-profit for me. The high price is just 40 cents higher than the minimum CreateSpace will allow me to sell it for. I spent $40.00 to make the book $10 cheaper to sell, so I’m kind of hoping that 100 people will buy it over the next year so that I’ll get my $40 back. After that, the price will be lowered to about $13.50. I’m only mentioning this so that you don’t think I’m desperately trying to make a quick buck off of the writings of a bunch of wannabe hackers from the 90′s.

For the most part, this book is completely unedited. All of the original phone numbers and other personal information of people we harassed back then is still included. A few small items were rearranged or taken out to fit in the book better, but it’s pretty much all there. The biggest items I removed were 3 giant articles from Dr. Hate’s Issue #099, which included a beastiality FAQ and a video game instruction manual. Hopefully you can live without those things. I didn’t correct any spelling or grammatical errors, except in a few titles, so it’s super authentic.

So go buy this! Or go download it for free!

And while you’re downloading the ebook, you’ll probably notice that I’ve made the first PLA book available for free too. Enjoy it! Give it to as many people as you can! Distribute it on torrents! Print it out and sell it to people! And then, to thank me for your free ebook, go to the PLA book page on Amazon and leave a review.

Join PLA’s Facebook page!

Join our new prank call Facebook page!

Join Cacti Radio’s Facebook page!

Subscribe to PLA’s YouTube!

Go post on our forums!

This is a comic submitted by Bookapoo, based on PLA’s recent new hobby of calling convenience stores and convincing them to do ridiculous things. Thanks, Bookapoo! If you can’t read the tiny writing in the comic, click on it to make it regular size, where you will still have a hard time reading the tiny writing.

If you’re into comics about hacking, phreaking and the PLA, you should look at our page of comic strips.

A recent forum post motivated me to create a new torrent of everything PLA has ever done. Thanks to the nonstop Phone Show episodes, the torrent is now up to 15 gigs. You’ll also get every episode of the PLA Radio podcast, the Big Beef Bueno podcast, and thousands of prank calls, pictures and text. Download it right away and seed it for as long as you possibly can! And later this year when I try to sell a prank call album, be sure to laugh at me and remind me that I already gave it all away for free.

You might also be interested in the torrent I put up last year that contains every prank call album I have. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. Download my prank call torrent.

And speaking of prank calls, I’ve created a new page on phonelosers.org of the PLA’s prank calls. On this page you’ll find all the categories of prank calls available on phonelosers.org, with samples and links to each section. I tried to make the samples the best of each section, but you should let me know if you think something else belongs there instead of what I’ve put up. I’m too old to be making important decisions like this!

Today a guy on YouTube named idiotcomic told me about a band from the early 2000′s that found an old answering machine at a thrift store filled with messages from the previous owner. This group of guys took the audio from the answering machines messages and turned them into an album full of songs based on the messages! The machine was a Sanyo TAS1000, so they named their band after the machine – TAS1000.

The music, while just a little repetitive, is still pretty catchy and the fact that it’s made with some unwitting lady’s answering machine tape makes me love them. The ex-owner of the machine apparently wasn’t as amused as I am, though – she sued the band for using her messages without her permission, according to this message posted by the TAS Facebook page.

Here are a couple of their songs…

You can listen to the entire album, called A Message For Marta, on YouTube by clicking here or you can download their album in mp3 format from here for free.

A member of the band plays the keyboard and the answering machine

The band’s old website at TAS1000.com is gone, but you can still view it through archive.org where you’ll find photos and a history of the band. And you can visit the band’s Facebook at facebook.com/TAS1000. Here is some information about them that I found on archive.org.

“It was at a Value Village in Kelowna that an answering machine, the Sanyo Telephone Answering System 1000, was purchased in August 2001. When the previous owners’ tape was discovered inside, the musical potential of the messages became immediately clear.

TAS 1000 played its debut show on October 31, 2002, at Ms. T’s Cabaret in Vancouver, which was followed by a CD release party hosted by local English as a Second Language students.”

Of course, I’m putting this letter first because, unlike everyone else in the world, WiFiPunk actually likes the layout of this page and he points out how awesome I am at including extra shit when people order things from me. Thanks for that, sir! And have fun doing all your phone work in the Army! Be sure to set some phone lines on fire as a homage to PLA.

I should probably point out that people don’t really address me as Dear Arby when they write me emails. I’m simply stealing that idea from Lord Nod because he called me that once. Another thing I should point out is that I get a lot of emails like this one. At least 1 per week and sometimes more, all because of my page on recording phone calls which also gives advice on finding a physical tap on their phone line. The only thing people love to ask me more than if their phone is being tapped by the government is how they can tap the phones of their spouse or kids to find out who they’re having sex with. The letters are nuts and you can read a bunch of them on this thread at the PLA Forums. Here’s what I wrote back to her.

Hey Scott. I’m not really into video games so I wouldn’t get much use out of those forums. Thanks for the invitation, though! I’m posting this on phonelosers.org, though, so maybe people who are into video games will get some use out of it. Because I’m doing this, I’ll probably get a dozen emails a day from people asking me to do the same thing. Ugh, what have I done. Thanks a lot, jerk.

I do like this idea, but I just don’t have the time to start messing with something like that. The problem is that I would enjoy it too much and I would become obsessed with it, just like I did a few years ago when I set up an Asterisk box. My other reason for pooing all over your idea is that while phone bridges are cool and they let you chat with people, our Tinychat room does the same thing, but also has streaming video and text chat and it’s free. Plus we’ve already got TheN’s voice bridge at 253-397-1819. He’s really into telephony and could put a lot more love into something like this than I could. You should track down TheN at afterthetone.org and force him to do cool new things with the stuff he’s got set up.

And that’s it for this edition of Dear Arby. Do you want to send an email to be included in the next exciting edition? Send your questions about how to spy on your wife’s phone calls to … ugh, no. Fuck that. Find my address yourself. I’m not making it that easy.

This drawing by TheN won’t make a lot of sense to you unless you’re a dedicated listener of The Phone Show and know about that one thing that happened with that one 7-Eleven clerk involving Twinkees, Gatorade and a mop bucket.

To see more PLA art, visit the PLA art page. If you’d like to submit something of your own, email it to RBCP.

As always, Defcon was freakin’ awesome, but this year it was an entirely different level of awesome because there were a bunch of PLA people there to hang out with, such as Rob The Hyena, Sudo, Staci (or whatever the I’m supposed to call her this week), Laugh Track Matt, Jenn, Afreak, Jammie, Blue Boy, murd0c, and of course, Scanner Mel!

Staci wasn’t going to be able to make it, but at the last minute a bunch of people chipped in some cash and made sure she got to sit on a Greyhound bus for more than 24 hours straight! It was the best hax ever, putting her through that kind of hell. A ton of thanks goes to the people who donated, including Tombstone, Spacebison, Trevor Burdick, Rob The Hyena, Richard H., djskott, pfelon, Blaise, and most importantly, ME! Also, tons of thanks to io, who suckered some guy into giving Staci a free Defcon badge to get in. Some people donated with expectations of having Staci write URLs on a t-shirt that she would wear all weekend. She went through at least a couple of shirts throughout the weekend and I’m going to attempt to list the URLs below. If your URL has been forgotten, leave a note in the comments or email to get it added. Thanks a ton for allowing me to meet the infamous Staci Stack!

• facebook.com/thesamantha
  
• twitter.com/danport
  
• hyenateeth.com
  
• twitter.com/iameltonjohn
  
• j.mp/theattentionwhore
  
• dc214.org
  
• rbcpraped.me

Both The Phone Show and The Fun Show on Cacti Radio did Defcon wrapup shows this week, so you should check those out when the new shows go up on the websites and podcast feeds. You also might want to keep an eye on our Hotel Pranks page for a few new pranks to be added, since we spent about an hour a day listening to the hotel staff on a scanner and then called the rooms involved to mess with them. Apparently Defcon attendees are just as full of legal threats as normal people are!

The book vendor was nice enough to carry the PLA book on their table, but I’m too much of a jerk to remember who they are or what their URL is. Thanks, book vendor people, for helping to spread the gospel of the PLA to Defcon attendees!

Cell phone service was a huge failure for my cell phone while I was inside the Rio, so I missed a lot of texts and tweets, making me miss out on meeting a few people. I couldn’t even say hi to RijilV because our texts were delayed by about 15 minutes and we ended up giving up on each other. If I missed you, that sucks. NEXT time we’ll all have to work out a better system for daily PLA cactus worshiping at a specified time/place since the Rio seems to be one giant Faraday cage.

Thanks, everyone, for showing up and saying hi to me. And huge apologies to everyone that I neglected because I was so busy all weekend. If you weren’t able to make it this year, start planning for next year! And just to make you feel like you were there, here are a bunch of photo albums from a few of us PLA folks.

• RBCP’s Photos
  
• Sudo’s Photos
  
• Laugh Track Matt’s Photos
  
• Rob The Hyena’s Photos
  

Let’s get the boring “rules” out of the way first. All of my rules revolve trying to keep the authorities uninvolved in your prank calls, which is good for everyone. Involving the police in your pranks is not only a threat to your own freedom, but it also ties up emergency services. Even if you live in a small town that never has any crime, you still shouldn’t bother the police with your prank calls. Trust me, there are plenty of ways to have fun with prank calls that don’t involve the police. Follow these guidelines for a long, illustrious, jail-free career in prank calling…

• Don’t involve emergency services. This is rule #1 and should be common sense, because when you start involving emergency services, your local police are suddenly interested in your prank calls and you may find yourself getting fined or arrested. So as hilarious as you think it will be, don’t send the police or fire department to your victim’s house and don’t make silly prank calls to 911 or local police stations. Prank calls should be fun, not felonies!

• Don’t make threats. Why? Because making threats, even when you don’t mean it, is a crime. Threats scare people and then they call the police over a silly prank call, and suddenly you’re breaking Rule #1. Don’t threaten to kill anyone. Don’t threaten to slap anyone. Don’t threaten to blow up cars and houses. Don’t call Wal-Mart and attempt to convince employees of a Code Red or a Code Blue. (That’s Wal-Mart’s internal codes for bombs and fires.) Threats are bad and can result in your arrest.

• Don’t impersonate the police. You can’t pretend to be a police officer or an FBI agent over the phone. Not only is this illegal, but once your victim becomes suspicious of your call, they might call back the agency that you’re pretending to be with to confirm your identity and guess what? The police become involved in your pranks. The police don’t like it when ordinary citizens pretend to be them.

• Don’t call emergency hotlines. Suicide hotlines are off limits. Come on, do you really want to tie up the lines at a place that tries to keep people from killing themselves? Don’t mess with hotlines that are designed to help people. You’re not being original at all when you pretend that you want to kill yourself to a hotline worker. It’s been done a bazillion times before. Check out this article where Carlito from Madhouse Radio was arrested for prank calling an anger management hotline.

  

• Don’t cause damage. Some prank callers have shown us that people are gullible and will fall for absolutely anything if you sound authoritative enough. This tidbit of information is good to know and will aid you in making hilarious, epic prank calls. However, you should never exploit this fact to cause another person damage property or hurt people. PrankNet is known for causing people to pull fire alarms, set off sprinklers and break hotel windows. Members of PrankNet are also known for doing serious jail time for calls like these. Other prank callers have succeeded in making store employees cut wires on their computers with scissors or destroy items around them. One prank caller even convinced fast food managers to sexually assault his employees while he listened. Don’t do things like this! It’s fun to exploit the stupidity of humans, but you should stick to making them do things that are hilarious, rather than things that are harmful or destructive and things that will get you arrested.

• Avoid the police at all costs. Your prank call victims will often overreact and call the police even if you’re doing your best by not making threats and not involving the police. When you think this is a possibility with your victim, maybe it’s time to let them know that they’ve been pranked. Explain to them that you’re not really who you say you are and that you’re simply a prank caller who chose them at random and that their calls to the police will be pointless since you’re on the other side of the country. Apologize, laugh at them, and move on.

• Don’t steal personal data. It’s easy to trick people out of their personal information, but you should be careful when doing this because once the victim finds out that you’re not who you say you are, they might assume that you’re an identity thief. I know this is unlikely, but once you’ve talked them out of a bunch of information, your victim’s imagination will run wild and they could begin assuming the worst and end up calling the police to report a case of attempted identity theft. Talking someone out of their credit card numbers or other account numbers can get you into trouble, even if you didn’t write them down and had no intention of using them.

• Don’t prank locally. The easiest way to get yourself arrested for prank calling is to make calls in your own city. When you make local prank calls, it’s easy for your victim to call the local police and work with the local phone company to find out who called them. By sticking to far away places, you’re confounding the entire situation and making it nearly impossible for anyone to track you down. I don’t mean technologically impossible, but legally pointless. When you prank someone on the other side of the country, it’s no longer the simple act of calling the local police to show up at your house and talk to you. Suddenly your victim has to deal with multiple police departments and multiple phone companies and it’s just not worth the time or effort for anyone to deal with it. Unless you’re threatening people or doing any of the other horrible things mentioned in the rules above, it’s extremely unlikely that any authorities are going to help your victim since they know that they can’t drive 3,000 miles to arrest you. If you prank locally, especially from your own phone line, you are approximately a billion times more likely to have the police show up at your house.

• Only one call per victim. Don’t keep calling the same guy over and over and over, no matter how much he makes you laugh when he screams at you. When you keep calling the same person repeatedly, you’re suddenly harassing your victim instead of making a simple funny prank phone call to them. Try to keep it to a single prank phone call, maybe two, and then stop forever and move on to someone else. This will help keep the police completely uninterested in you.

One of the most important aspects of prank phone calls is keeping yourself somewhat anonymous. If your victim sees your name and phone number on their caller I.D. display, it’s going to be harder to convince them that you’re calling from a major company. And if your victim knows your phone number, then they’re obviously going to try and take some kind of action against you. Here are a few ideas on keeping your number hidden from the people you call.

• Dial *67 before you call anyone. *67 is the universal code for blocking your number from a person’s caller ID display. While this is the most primitive method of keeping yourself anonymous, it’s still an effective way of hiding your number if you’re making a single, harmless prank call to someone. *67 will not protect you if the police become involved. *67 usually doesn’t protect you against *69 (automatic call back) and never protects you against *57 (call trace). *67 will rarely protect you when you dial a toll-free number since they use a different system. Some internet-based telephone services such as Skype and Google Voice won’t let you dial *67 from their lines. So *67 is best used from a home phone or from a cell phone.

• Use internet telephones. Services like Skype and Google Voice are perfect for prank calls. Since they’re not tied to a physical location, it’s harder for your calls to be traced by authorities. (Not that you’re doing anything that would warrant the authorities attention, right????) As of this writing, Skype is only a few dollars a month and Google Voice comes free with your free Google account. When you initially set up Skype, it should let you chose if you want your number to display for people or not. Choose not! Google Voice doesn’t let you hide your number (or even use *67), but since you’re using an internet-based telephone number, it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to be found as long as you’re making prank calls that adhere to the rules of prank calling on this page.

  Don’t think that you’re completely anonymous and unfindable just because you’re using these services, though. Once you start breaking laws, the police know how to figure out which services you’re using and how to obtain warrants on those companies. They will trace the phone calls you’ve made to your email address and/or your home IP address (and every IP address you’ve ever used with that account) and they will find out who you are. I’ve read many news article about prank callers who’ve been arrested for making prank calls with Skype. It’s not that difficult for them to find you if you give them a reason to.

• Use caller I.D. spoofing. Companies like Spoofcard allow you to actually change the number that people see on their caller I.D. display. This is a really great service to use when you’re pranking someone and pretending to be from a certain company. When their caller I.D. display tells your victim that you’re calling from the local Domino’s Pizza, they have no reason to think that you’re not. Many people are completely unaware that caller I.D. spoofing exists, so this is a good thing to use to your advantage. The only downside is that spoofing services will charge you a few cents per minute to use this service. And don’t forget, even with caller I.D. spoofing, you’re only anonymous until you involve the police in your pranks.

• Use a pay phone. Back when I was a kid, there were these mystical devices outside of most businesses called “pay phones.” You could drop a few quarters into one and make completely anonymous phone calls with them. Pay phones are rumored to still exist today in some areas and you might be able to find one to aid in your prank calls. If your prank call causes enough grief and anguish, be prepared for the police to start looking a security camera footage and lifting fingerprints from the pay phone to put you away for life. Because of this, it’s best to wear a ski mask and mittens when prank calling from a pay phone.

• Use other phones that aren’t yours. You can sometimes find yourself with access to a phone inside of a department store or other business, which could be used to make prank calls. You could borrow a cell phone from a friend or a stranger, so that they’ll be left to deal with the fallout from your prank calls. Some people have even been known to carry a small phone with them and plug it into unattended phone jacks inside of a Wal-Mart or in the back of a neighbor’s house. But come on, we’re getting ridiculous here. No prank call is worth this much time and effort, right?

• Prepaid cell phones. It’s easy to buy a prepaid wireless phone from any department store or even a 7-Eleven. When you sign up for service on these, they don’t require you to give them any information. They’re completely anonymous, unless you’re using it from your home since they all have GPS in them. The downside is that they cost money.

• Be prepared. Know exactly what you’re going to say as soon as they pick up the phone. If you hesitate or stutter or sound unsure of yourself, you’re letting them know that you’re a prank caller. I’m not saying you need to script out your entire call, but at least be prepared with that opening line. First impressions are important. After that, just wing it.

• Be silly, not serious. This is important. Too many prank callers take themselves way too seriously, which, in my opinion, kind of takes the fun out of it. Don’t worry about if you’re believable or not or if they catch on and bust you. Who cares? Just call your target, be as weird as possible, and have fun. If you’re trying to trick your victim, do that first and then be silly at them. Personally I’m a fan of prank calls that fall apart at the end and you get to hear the victims find out that they’ve been had. Or better yet, the victims attempt to outsmart you.

• Don’t Laugh. Especially right at the beginning of the call, because your victim will immediately know that it’s a prank call and hang up the phone. Know where your mute button is and learn how to use it when you start snickering! Only begin laughing at them when the prank starts falling apart and you know that they’re not believing you anyway. Also, laughing at the end of a prank may help your victim understand that it’s just a dumb prank and they shouldn’t feel stressed about it or bother the police with it.

• A conversation is not a prank call. I hear a lot of “prank calls” that are nothing more than a guy having a conversation with his victim, occasionally throwing in moderately funny things into the conversation. The entire prank consists of the prank caller thinking it’s funny that he’s pretending to be someone that he’s not. Put a little more effort into your calls than this! Make sure the call is funny to other people who will hear it, not just you and your friends who know the victim.

• Keep it short. Extremely long prank calls can sometimes be funny, but who has time to listen for that long? People have short attention spans, so keep your pranks short. Try to keep them under 5 minutes if you can. If you go longer than 10 minutes, a lot of people will never hear the end of it. If you’re putting the recording of your prank call up for other people to hear, try to edit out the slow parts to shorten the call.

• Be prepared for police involvement. Even when you play by the rules, people are jerks and will claim that you threatened them, even when you didn’t. This isn’t common, but I’ve heard it happen many times. Because of this, the “don’t prank locally” rule should almost always apply.
  

We all know about the standard prank call, where you call up a phone number and you start talking to the victim. There is a lot more you can do than that, though. Here are some other types of prank calls that you’ve probably never thought of.

• Incoming Prank Calls. What’s better than making a prank phone call? How about receiving one? There are many ways to trick a victim into calling you so that you can mess with them. The easiest way to accomplish this is to place a free ad on Craigslist so that people call you. If you’re inside of a business and you have access to their telephone, you can pick it up when it rings and talk to their customers, just like RBCP did at Wal-Mart all day on Black Friday. If you want to spend money to receive prank calls, you could place an ad in a local newspaper. You could even take a job where you answer phones and screw with the customers that call in until you get fired. Here is a good example of an incoming prank phone call.

• Craigslist Prank Calls. As mentioned above, Craigslist is an invaluable resource for prank callers. Not only can you place an ad on Craigslist and mess with the people who call in, but you can browse the ads and call people who are selling their things or their services. That lady selling her baby stroller is always surprised when you offer her meth instead of cash.

• 3-Way Calling. Connecting people together can often result in confusion. Using the 3-way calling feature on your home phone, your cell or on Skype, you connect 2 people together while you silently listen to them each insist that the other called them. Timing is critical on these calls and it’s difficult to get them to both pick up at the same time. One way to avoid this problem is to tell the first victim, “This is AT&T, please hold while I connect your call…” and then you connect the other person. It’s fun to connect businesses to each other, such as a couple Chinese restaurants or some taxi dispatchers. Or what can really cause confusion is connecting two of your own friends together. Sometimes they’ll both assume that they were the one called and they’ll have a normal conversation. Better yet, connect people together that hate each other. Such as a nerd and a jock from school.

• Sound Boards. If you’re not good at coming up with anything to say to a victim, then a soundboard prank may be the way to go. Soundboards are nothing more than a huge screen of buttons on your computer that each play a different phrase when pressed. You can find a sound board for just about any movie or television character you can think of, such as this one for Chris from Family Guy or Arnold Schwarzenegger saying phrases from many of his movies. You can use these sound boards to prank people by setting your speaker phone close to your computer’s speakers and attempting to make the sound board have a conversation with your victim.

• Automated Prank Services. PrankDial.com will let you make prank calls to any phone number and you can select from hundreds of different prank calls. Some of their pranks will simply Rickroll a person while others will pretend to have conversations with them. PrankDial even lets you spoof your caller I.D. and records the phone calls so you can listen to them later. And best of all, PrankDial works from your cell phone, so you can prank people or businesses right in front of them and they’ll never know it’s you. This is great for walking into a 7-Eleven or a Deli, being able to watch the clerk’s confusion as he/she attempts to deal with a crazed phone caller. It’s also a great way to amuse yourself while you’re waiting around at the DMV or sitting in a bar.

• Wikipedia article on prank calling. There’s a few historical things that are worth reading on the wiki page.

• Cacti Radio. This is a prank call radio station that plays prank calls 24 hours a day and has 4 live shows every week.

• Madhouse Live. Here’s a place for thousands of prank calls, prank call forums and a prank call podcast.

• PLA Radio. This is our own podcast that contains lots of prank calls and other humor.

So what are you waiting for? If you really just read this entire guide to prank calling, then you owe it to yourself to pick up a phone right now and do it! That’s right, pick it up and start dialing. There you go. Wait! What the hell, man, you’re dialing locally? Have you not learned anything here??? God, I hate you. Go back and read all this again right now!

I know that this guide is far from being complete. That’s why I’d like you to help me complete it. If you feel that something is missing, please post it in the comments below and I will eventually add it to this page. If you don’t want to post it in the comments, then email it to me instead.

Thanks for the pic, cyko!

Defcon is a mere one week away! Are you going? You should be. Quit your jobs, drop out of school and dump your girlfriends so that nothing will stand in your way of making it to Defcon to hang out with some of us other Phone Losers. Move to Nevada permanently if that’s what it takes. If all goes well, you will be able to meet 3/4ths of the entire Cacti Radio DJ staff, including Rob The Hyena, RBCP and Laugh Track Matt! Rob says he’ll even be doing a special edition of The Prank Show on Saturday night. Other people who claim they’re going are Rappy McRapperson, Sudo, afreak, DBK, RogueClown, Jenn, blu3b0y, Jammie, ApprenticePhreak, i-ball, lmnk, Evie, gnnr, and a bunch of other people who have messaged me, but I can’t remember. This is going to be a fairly huge meetup, so be sure to track us all down and say hello.

Defcon 19 will be at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, from August 4th to August 7th. Admission is an outrageous $150 per person, so bring lots of badge counterfeiting supplies with you. A few of us aren’t even buying admission into Defcon since there will still be plenty to do on the outskirts of Defcon. And if you buy some of us enough beer, we might even loan our Defcon badge to you so you can get in for a bit. So don’t let the entrance fee deter you! Come to Defcon! Visit defcon.org for official Defcon information and visit PLA’s Defcon planning thread on the PLA forums to make plans with us.

During this week’s Phone Show, r0xy called in and asked for some donations to help her make it to Defcon this year. Surprisingly, a lot of people took her seriously and sent in some very generous donations to help her make it and it looks like she’ll actually make it. A ton of thanks goes out to everyone who is helping to make this happen, including Tombstone, Spacebison, Trevor Burdick, pfelon, Richard H., Rob The Hyena, podjackel and, of course, ME! She hasn’t quite met her goal to make it from Texas to Vegas, though. If you’d like to help out, send anything you can to rbcp@phonelosers.org and I’ll forward it to r0xy. If r0xy happens to not make it to Vegas, all money will be refunded. But at this point, it’s looking likely that she’ll make it, so thanks a ton everyone!

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER! Following us on Twitter will help ensure that you can effectively stalk the PLA while you’re at Defcon. RBCP’s twitter will likely be updated often, just as it has been at previous Defcons in recent years. You can keep an eye on PLA’s twitter, but that probably won’t be updated at all. You might also try following Jenn, Jammie, RogueClown, afreak and i-ball. I guess we could all hashtag #phonelosers too, but I’ll probably be too drunk to remember to do that. I’m sure I’ve forgotten people, so if you’re the type likely to be getting thrown out with us, then post your Twitter link in the comments below!

Oh, and one last thing…bring your PLA book with you! Trevelyn had the amazing idea of turning his copy of the PLA book into sort of a yearbook, having all of his PLA colleagues sign it. This is pretty much the best idea ever, and we should all steal it. I’ve already had my personal copy signed by a couple of people and I’m looking forward to having it signed by a lot more.

Holy shit, only one week! See you all there!
RBCP

All the recent submitted PLA art from people like HBB and Alex Cooper has made me decide that I really need to set up a page on phonelosers.org just for submitted art. So I did. Visit www.phonelosers.org/art/ to see the latest PLA drawings that have been emailed to me.

The page is looking a little bare right now, but I plan to keep adding to it from drawings that have been sent to me over the years. If you’d like your own PLA drawings to be added to that page, then email them to me. Besides being featured on that page, your art might get used on other sections of this website.

UPDATE #1: Have you joined PLA’s Facebook yet? Because you’re a stupid dumb newb if you haven’t. Sure we post updates on this website and on our Twitter, but most of the hardcore PLA action happens on the PLA Facebook. I just made the title of this update RED and BLINKING so this is obviously an important issue. GO JOIN THE PLA FACEBOOK!

UPDATE #2: Are you going to Defcon with us? In just one month, the biggest PLA meetup in the history of the world (since our Jonbenet murder meetup) will be happening in Las Vegas and will include amazing people like RBCP, RogueClown, el_jefe, Jammie, Chris Ellerbeck’s mom, io, Laugh Track Matt, Rappy McRapperson and a lot of other people who are only of moderate importance so I won’t mention them because they’re newbs and don’t really matter.

Defcon 19 will be at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, from August 4th to August 7th. Admission is an outrageous $150 per person, so bring lots of badge counterfeiting supplies with you. A few of us aren’t even buying admission into Defcon since there will still be plenty to do on the outskirts of Defcon. And if you buy some of us enough beer, we might even loan our Defcon badge to you so you can get in for a bit. So don’t let the entrance fee deter you! Come to Defcon! Visit defcon.org for official Defcon information and visit PLA’s Defcon planning thread on the PLA forums to make plans with us.

UPDATE #3: Okay, shit’s getting real now because I’m using the scroll tag AND the blink tag, so you know this part is important. Here it goes…PLA has their own Minecraft server now! That’s right, back in the day we were doing crazy illegal things with telephones and having epic adventures on the streets of Corpus Christi, but in 2011 we’re reduced to nothing but a bunch of nerds who play Minecraft all day. Awesome, right?? You can learn more about our Minecraft world by visiting this thread in the PLA forums or just point your Minecraft client to 96.44.162.50:26026

UPDATE #4: Did you notice that The Phone Show didn’t happen last week? I mean, it sort of happened but it wasn’t done by ME so the dumb stuff that Aikison did in my absence is totally insignificant. There won’t be a Phone Show this week either. And maybe even none the following week. I might be able to squeeze one in before I leave for Defcon, but don’t expect a lot of Phone Show antics until after Defcon.

The good news is that there are at least 2 other shows that you can listen to on Cacti Radio during the week during my absence. Rob The Hyena does The Prank Show every Saturday night at 9pm Pacific and Staci Stack is still doing her Fun Show on Wednesday nights at 8pm Pacific. There are other shows that happen too, like Aikison and Badfish’s live show on Fridays at 9pm Pacific and Carlito’s Madhouse on Thursdays at 7pm Pacific which he hasn’t done in MONTHS NOW so I don’t know why I’m even posting it.

UPDATE #5 WHICH ISN’T REALLY AN UPDATE BUT A QUESTION: What do you think of the new design on phonelosers.org? Doesn’t the pea green background just make you want to throw up? And that pay phone menu over on the side? Have you ever even seen it? I never have because it takes 3 years to load, and I designed it! I bet it’s cool though. If you dial the standard Bell secret code into the keypad, a bunch of money is transferred to your PayPal. Try it! Let me know what you think about the design in the comments. Critique your hearts out and let me know how it could improve. And, oh yeah, GO JOIN THE PLA FACEBOOK!

Love,
Brad

I received this amazing picture in my email today, along with a message reading, “Greetings RBCP. Been lurking your site for a few years. Wanted to say thanks for the entertainment and information; so I drew you a picture of naked, siamese twin, zombie Mildred Mondays trying to kill each other. Keep up the good work.” The artist’s name is Alex Cooper and you can visit his DevArt page here to see the full-sized image and his other awesome illustrations. Thanks, Alex! This has made my day and I’m sure other fans of Mildred will love it too.

If you don’t know who Mildred Monday is, then you don’t spend nearly enough time on this website. Here is our memorial to her, which includes clothed pictures of Mildred and songs that praise her awesomeness.

And speaking of PLA art…I recently added about 100 images to the PLA Photo Album. Because I’m so lazy, I got rid of that dumb Coppermine photo album software we’ve been using for years and just sorted everything into directories. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, a lot of it that I’ve never put on the net before. Go enjoy it!

And holy shit, Alex, thanks again!

This morning I received the following email from a guy who ordered a PLA book and t-shirt from me earlier in the week:

So besides making me feel all warm and fuzzy for the kind donation, this email has motivated me to finally enact a suggestion by John Sever (yes, the John Sever from the PLA book) – we need to donate PLA books to needy Christian schools! Imagine that you’re a child in a Christian school and there are no PLA books for the students! This is a reality for many Christian schools across the U.S.A. With the help of people like Saurabh and John and you we can provide PLA books to many students that can’t afford them.

Right now, the absolute cheapest I can send out hard copies of my book is $9.00. I’m going to use Saurabh’s $10 donation toward the first copy I send out to a Christian school, and then I’ll have $1.00 left over towards the next donation to go out. $9.00 pays for the book, the shipping box, and the post office’s shipping costs. I will track all money donated on this page and I will include the names of people who’ve donated and which schools and other organizations I’ve donated to.

If you’d like to donate right now, type in the amount of your donation (in U.S. dollars) below and click the PayPal button. Or you can send your donation directly to me at rbcp@phonelosers.org.

I’m confident that in time, we will be able to equip all needy Christian schools with PLA books. I’ve created a thread on the PLA Forums where we can discuss ideas on specific Christian schools to donate to. Thanks so much, Saurabh, and a huge thanks goes out to all future supporters of this cause!

Of course, I can’t complain too much about a group of guys who call up a show and yell a single phrase at the host. Our phone mobs against AM radio stations were mostly people calling in and working the word “cactus” into some form of weird joke that only PLA people would understand. If anything, I deserve to be harassed on my own show, but they should at least have put a little more effort into it than simply yelling their URL and hanging up. People wouldn’t still be listening to our old What’s Your Bid prank every day if all we did was call them up and yell, “PHONELOSERS DOT ORG!#!@##!@” at them.

So pbx411 disappeared for a couple of years as their domain name expired and disappeared as well. But then, just a month ago, they came back! This time they had a new domain name, called phonewinners.com (get it? because they’re not losers like us!), and a renewed irrational hatred for all things PLA. The campaign of phone calls started up once again, only this time they were yelling “PHONEWINNERS DOT COM!!!” at us instead of “PBX411 DOT INFO!!!”. They did the same to OhEmGee’s Fun Show and they began spamming the Fruit Wall on phonelosers.org with their URL nonstop. They seemed completely desperate to make their URL known, something that most people accomplish by simply asking me to post their link on the page for them.

So why do the Phone Winners hate me so much? This is best part – apparently it’s because I deleted a post of Harry’s (he’s the head Phone Winner) on the PLA forums years ago. That’s it. I deleted a post. I haven’t been told which post I deleted and I don’t even know if it was me that deleted it or one of the other mods there. The only thing I’m certain of is that a deleted post from more than 2 years ago isn’t worth this much time and energy. If you’re still seething with hatred after 2 years just because some post was deleted, then you have some issues. But if you’re dedicating a large portion of your day to harassing the guy who runs these forums, then…I dunno. That’s just weird. Pretty much every time we’ve called into their voice bridge, they 2 guys on it are ranting about what a horrible person I am. For deleting a post.

Stuff like this happens to me all the time, of course. Harry and the Phone Winners are just the latest in the harassment that’s taken place against me during the past 15 years of doing PLA. There’s always some guy that makes it his life’s mission to bring me down forever, usually for no reason at all and usually someone who thinks he’s completely anonymous and that I can never do anything about it. This thing with Harry mostly reminds me of the StLSD2000 incident from about 10 years ago, where a guy named StLSD2000 decided that I was the most evil person in the world because I banned the use of numbers on the PLA Forums in an attempt to stomp out the problem with people posting credit card and calling card numbers there. StLSD2000 began calling me at home and charging items to my phone bill, certain that he would bankrupt me and that my life would be over. When I promised him that I would post the calling cards he sent me on phonelosers.org, he was really surprised to find out that not only did I figure out who he was, but that I posted all of his personal information on phonelosers.org along with the calling cards. I don’t think I ever heard from him after that.

The best course of action for people like this has always been to just completely ignore them. They quickly get bored and go away, usually forever, but some of them keep at it until I figure out who they are. Like z09, a person that a lot of you probably remember from the PLA Forums, who began stealing my account info from local businesses like Blockbuster and sending me pizzas and mailing spoiled food to my PO box. He disappeared forever after I tracked him down and changed his forum avatar into his boy scout photo. Or Compudroid, who hacked my site and was tricking everyone into dialing his ANI trap until I gave all of those people his home phone number, or Brice Carlson who dared the PLA to harass him and then began calling the police on me when I complied, or Jason H after he tried to get my sites taken down. And, of course, there’s that little incident where Richard Cardo tried to frame me for a high-profile murder case.

Lately the Phone Winners have graduated from harassing me online to posting the personal information of PLA people on their site, threatening to assault me at Defcon this summer, calling my hosting company to social engineer MySQL info from them, and attempting to run up the bandwidth limit on my Cacti Radio host so that I’m charged an extra $10 per month, an expense that I just don’t see how I’m going to be able to ever afford. Don’t worry, they haven’t even come close to reaching my limit yet, but they are still trying their best and I’m extremely worried about this. The funny thing is, Harry doesn’t seem to know much about proxies, because while the logs on my website showed that he was using a free proxy service called sslbrowser.com to access my web site, they still displayed his real Comcast IP address in New Jersey.

So yesterday I called Comcast and asked, “Hey, Comcast, who does this IP address belong to?” and they’re like, “LOL, it belongs to some girl named Deborah Garretson in Jersey City.” And I said, “Oh? Well what’s Deborah’s phone number?” and Comcast says, “It looks like the same Google Voice number that Harry used when he registered voipwin.com.” This was exactly the moment that I began spending a large chunk of my work day researching Harry’s home. I was able to find out that Harry’s real name is Joseph W Princiotta Jr and that although Harry loves bragging about making $3,000 IN CASH for making a single service call, he still can’t seem to scrounge up enough money to move out of his mother’s house. Yep, Harry is 44-years-old and still lives with his mom, Loretta. Hasn’t moved out yet. That’s gotta be hell on his dating life.

And it turns out that Harry is a huge internet celebrity too, featured on FARK.com for nearly blowing his hand off and sending some other guy to the hospital. So Harry is 44, still lives with his mom, enjoys civil war reenactment shows, and is dumb enough to set fire to tubes of gun powder in his hand. And, oh yeah, he doesn’t know how to use a proxy.

So now I just feel kind of bad for Joe and that’s why I’m giving him the attention that he’s been so desperate for all these years. Visit his website at phonewinners.com, where he’s put a ton of effort into bashing the PLA because he hates us, yet he’s been stealing all of our pranks and reposting them on his site. Don’t write anything hateful in the comments section, though, because even though Harry will flip out and harass you for 2 years when you delete a forum post of his, he will still delete your comments if they hurt his feelings.

Call up Harry’s voice bridge at 212-389-1318 and talk to him and his life partner, Joseph Moskalshi in Easton, Pennsylvania, who pays for the web site and helps Harry call into the show and scream their URL at us every Tuesday and Wednesday night. Once you tire of listening to The Joes complain about me all day, you should hang up and join the 21st century by hanging out with PLA on Tinychat or Skype.

Harry, please accept my apologies for deleting whatever forum post of yours that I deleted 2 years ago and please don’t throw a bag of piss on me at Defcon for that heinous crime. If you want to join the forums and post it again, I’ll let you. I sincerely hope that you appreciate that I’ve finally posted your URL on phonelosers.org and that you’ll stop trying to run up my bandwidth bill at PRQ, because if you manage to succeed, they’re going to charge me an extra $10 and that will totally ruin my life forever. I make very little profit from selling PLA dog tags and I honestly don’t think I can sell enough dog tags to cover the expense that your hacking may end up costing me. Please stop refreshing my page. Please! Oh, and test out free proxy services before you use them.

Oh, and look at this. Something similar also happened to voipwin.com, another domain name of Harry’s that currently forwards to phonewinners.com. A month ago, the domain belonged to Harry Mann in Texas City and used the same Google Voice number as the other, but today that domain suddenly belongs to the fake name of D. Sanchen in Hoboken, New Jersey with a new phone number. Isn’t that odd? He must have changed that days ago and we didn’t notice. Oh wait, no, he changed it immediately after we dropped his docs on The Phone Show.

It’s strange that Harry would suddenly be scrambling to change all of his whois info so early this morning when he vehemently denies that he is Joseph Princiotta from Jersey City, New Jersey. If I’m wrong about his information as he claims I am, then why all the sudden changes in whois info? It’s funny, last night during the aftershow I was commenting about how it’s too bad that I don’t have any actual proof that Harry is Joseph Princiotta. All people have to go on is trusting me in my confidence that I have the right person. It’s pretty much my word against Harry’s. I say he’s 44-years-old and still lives with his mother and likes to set himself on fire, while he says he’s a cool guy, living the high life and doing PBX consulting jobs that net him $3,000 in cash per night. But this is almost as good as actual proof, having Harry freak out and change all of his whois info. Thanks, Harry!

Oh, I should also mention that strangely enough, my cactiradio.com domain is suddenly not being refreshed nonstop today by Harry. Funny that should stop all of a sudden. Guess he’s got his hands full with changing whois info everywhere so he doesn’t have time to refresh my page all day.

Today we happened across Joe Moskalshi’s Myspace page and found some interesting photos on there. There’s a civil war group photo and there’s a civil war blow job picture and a picture of Joe Moskalshi wearing a Victorian suit for Christmas caroling. It sure is crazy that even though I got the wrong person and Harry isn’t Joseph Princiotta, his web site just happens to be hosted by a guy who really seems to be into Civil War reenactments. What are the odds of that?

We’ll never again get to see Harry’s gripping videos, like the one titled, “Pedophile Michael Jackson Left a Witness – Breaking Story!” where the description says, “Join the Michael Jackson Partyline! (212) 389-1318 It’s free, just a standard long-distance call.” (Haha, “long-distance” like this is still the early 2000′s.) A Google search for their phone number finds all kinds of fun stuff like this. (And so does a search for GibbedHGR.) Harry used to troll Yahoo Answers to promote his bridge number too. Check out this one where he tried to get 15-year-old girls to call their bridge. Wonder how that worked out for him. Sad that his hard work went to waste, now that he’s locking the bridge. MrX tells us that their bridge is often locked now. Why would they lock their bridge? Wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of a bridge? They may as well just be calling each other on the phone to chat all night, like teenage girls do.

Joe Moskalshi’s Myspace page has been deleted. Surely he deleted that because nobody uses Myspace anymore and it was pointless to even have it. It wasn’t because he didn’t like people seeing the awesome pictures of him. At least we helped Moskalshi earn a Myspace badge before he killed his account. His pictures received so much attention because of PLA that Myspace awarded him the “In The Spotlight” badge. Check it out.

Other than all the account deletions and the whois domain info changing, things have been really quiet on the Phone Winners front. There haven’t been any new posts on their website, when before they were making new posts every few days. In fact, a few posts have even been deleted. Their forums haven’t had a single post on them in over a week now and their Facebook page is dead. Come on, Phone Winners, I finally give you all this attention that you’ve been begging me for for years now and then you just clam up and ignore me.

Next is a 9 minute borefest of the Cacti Radio studio, which will give you a tour of the equipment used for The Phone Show each week. I made this just before I packed up the entire studio and moved it into another room so that the video was instantly out of date.

If you’re a fan of the old Curtis Lee Jones prank calls, you might enjoy my attempt at a music video for the 2009 top-40 hit Play The Game by Redbox and the Chilipeppers.

Once you’re done watching those, visit PLA’s YouTube page, where you can see Rob The Hyena’s Cacti Radio iPhone app, the Will It Blend episode of The Phone Show, my attempt at a commercial for Touch Tone Tunes from thisisarecording.com, Evie reading a chapter of the PLA book, my failed attempt at red boxing and our antics at ShmooCon in 2009. So yeah, watch all that stuff.

Today I was in 7-11, and in a very very bad mood. The cranky old counter-lady was eyeing me suspiciously, in a “that young man is wearing a black trenchcoat, he must be stealing something” way. This was the icing on my bad day of a cake.

So I retaliate by bringing the orange juice I’d come for to the counter, and calmly asking her to add to my purchases a copy of each and every porno magazine from behind the counter, one at a time. “Oh, and that one, ‘Biker Sluts.’ Yes, thanks. And say, what’s that one there? ‘Black Hot Rods?’ Yes, one of those. And the next one over, ‘Pussy Parade.’ Yes, put it here, with the others. And the one over there, I can’t read the title but it has that blond guy with his face in the other guy’s- yes, that one..” etc.

Soon I had a towering stack of about 20 porno mags next to my orange juice. “Will there be anything else?” she barks at me.

“You know, I hope you don’t judge me or anything based on this stuff I’m buying,” I offered. “I just like them for the dirty pictures.”

“Look, is that it or WHAT?” She really wanted to get rid of me.

“Actually… I’ll tell you the truth, okay?? I only read the articles, but I’m too embarrassed to say!!”

Then I ran out crying, leaving everything on the counter. I walked around the block and collapsed on a bench, laughing myself silly for about 5 minutes straight.

I felt much better afterwards.

(I found this story while rummaging through some old directories. It was originally posted to PLA’s old email list and I had intended to publish it in the next issue of Dark Fluffy Phreaking Bunnies, which I apparently never released. Rob T Firefly is known around these parts for illustrating the PLA book and making awesome PLA songs. Visit his website at www.robvincent.net.)

On a completely unrelated note, don’t forget to PHONEWINNERZ.COM!

One of my favorite online comics, Toothpaste For Dinner, recently gave us a crazy idea for a prank phone call – calling up our landlords and demanding that they reimburse us for all the sand we had dumped into our apartments. For the most part, land lords were just confused, but a few of them got really frustrated and angry when they heard about our amazing sand renovations.

Clearly our prank calls are making apartment managers and landlords really appreciate the mundane problems they have to deal with every day. Once the initial shock wears off and they finally check their tenants apartments and find no sand damage, they realize how good they’ve had it. Sure they have to deal with noise problems and tenants who can never pay their rent by the first, but at least nobody is filling up their apartments with sand!

If those calls above aren’t enough for you, then listen to a lady tell RBCP to get out of her life, another one get mad enough to do a “24 hour walkthrough,” one who laughs at RBCP’s problems and then he threatens revenge on another. Also listen to OhEmGee run into some confusion with commercial property, then get upset because a lady won’t believe her story, then she accidentally admits that she has a cat and demands use of the landlord’s shovel and a lady refuses to knock on OhEmGee’s window since her door is blocked with sand.

And most importantly, be sure to go take a look at toothpastefordinner.com for his extensive collection of prank call ideas!

If you’re a regular listener of The Phone Show, then you’ve probably heard Rob The Hyena calling being a regular caller/host these past few months. Rob is the guy who made Cacti Radio’s iPhone app, using his AppCitement website. He’s also done a bit of PLA/Cacti art on his DeviantART page and sells weird tshirts on HyenaTeeth.com.

But why I’m really writing this post about Rob is because he’s been editing a ton of audio lately, mostly related to prank calls done outside of the regular Phone Show and Fun Show hours. He’s got directories full of calls to a phone mob we did yesterday and a Subway we’ve been bothering and, of course, the infamous Weather Girl pranks. There’s a lot more than that too, so go visit his page and browse the directories full of fun audio.

While you’re listening, be sure to add Rob as a friend on Facebook so you can get to know him before you meet him at Defcon this summer. You’re going to Defcon, right? RIGHT??? Cause all of us sure are.

Er, I mean, goodbye for a day or two maybe. I’m going to move phonelosers.org to my other server and that’s probably going to make it disappear for a day. I’m updating my backups of it all right now, so it will probably be gone Thursday and/or Friday. If all goes well, everything should be back to normal before the weekend is over. Wish me luck!

Don’t cry too much, though, because all of the other sites will still work. You’ll still be able to visit Cacti Radio and the PLA Forums. And Sign Hacker and Old People Are Funny, not that I ever update those sites anymore. And, most importantly, my homepage. Spend 100% of your time on those sites while we’re gone and it’ll be like we never left.

Love,
Bradley

May 5th Edit: The move has happened. Some stuff will be broken for a few days, but should hopefully all be working again before the weekend is over. Keep us in your prayers as we work as quickly as possible to restore all the advertisements that are currently missing. Those are the most important part of the site!

For the past few months, OhEmGee, aka a long-time PLA girl whose name we are never again allowed to utter, has been doing a live prank call show on Cacti Radio. The show airs each Wednesday night at 9pm PST. Listeners meet in our tinychat room and on efnet’s #phonelosers. OhEmGee guarantees that each show will have at least 25% more fun than the last. You can listen to old episodes by visiting cactiradio.com/funshow/ or you can subscribe to the RSS/Podcast feed if you’re lazy. Or forget about her dumb website and feed and just listen to a few of the episodes below:

the FUN show – 04/20/11 – Four Twenty! – I prank call some people that are selling items for $420 and accuse them of hiding their pot selling business. It doesn’t work out well so some people “from the internet” call in and Aikison continues to spam the show with “420″ in a computer voice. Lots of other stuff happens but I’m lazy so I guess you get the general idea. At about 50 minutes in, it gets hilarious when we call foreign taxi guy. He gives Americans some great advice at the end of our show. Included is an aftershow! After the show, there’s a talk with Rappy and his friend Shinobe. I end up getting my heart broken, but the wedding is still on. Phractal, my virtual boyfriend, calls in while I am talking to Rappy and shit gets REAL…

04/06/2011 – Movie Theatre Confessions – We call up movie theatres and confess to terrible things! It’s a spin off of the gas station confessions, but equally as funny. Guests include RBCP (who broadcasted the show for me and edited it,) Rob the Hyena, LT Matt, and a failing Corwin.

The FUN show – 03/30/11 – Rob the Hyena coshosts. This is the one that we prepped a prank call and then…well you’ll see what happens. I didn’t know we were so mainstream! Then we call best buy but I hate it so I cut most of that out. RBCP interviews me about my biege boxing date. There’s an aftershow but I’m not posting it yet.

The FUN show – 03/23/11 – Cat Lady! – Phractal calls in talks about actual phreaking stuff but he gets bored with it so we call weather girl. Aikison discusses his dealings with a 14 year old relentless girl who called him over and over. We check on a guy whose voicemail was hacked last week. The outgoing message is still there! Bowling alley prank call failed but it was a good idea…maybe we’ll do it again another time. Snarky’s at it again. Skype problems! Leet fails to be leet. Other stuff. Aikison confesses to a guy’s voicemail. Snarky. TheN uses a phone with a curly cord. Fix nipples. You can’t hack iphones. Chris Chan’s voicemail. Lady has a cat problem but the show ends. You can’t hear the outro music and I don’t care. She calls back after the show ends and is going to the cop shop right now!

That’s Woodstock Pizza in Corvallis, Oregon. Oh crap, that’s the only picture of a re-purposed pay phone stand I have. God, why did I even bother. Here’s an amusing picture of a pay phone handset getting the more use than it normally does, just so I feel better about posting this.

Check out Ten Repurposed Phone Booths on 1800recycling.com and this news story about a phone booth that was turned into a library. Good stuff! Oh, and then go read my 2008 whine-fest about how all my beloved pay phones are disappearing.

Your friend,
RBCP

Some jerk named TheN has created a voice bridge to compete with the PLA’s TinyChat room. The phone number to reach it is 253-397-1819. As if people ever use phones anymore. Get with the times, TheN! It’s all about flash-based chat rooms that crash your browser and slow down your computer to 1996 speeds. If you’d like to talk to then about his outdated thinking, you can usually find him in PLA’s TinyChat room in the evenings.

TheN also runs a website called After The Tone, where you can leave a voicemail at 253-242-8995 and it will immediately be available to listen to at afterthetone.org, which is nice for phoning reminders to yourself throughout the day, but we’re sure this violates some kind of privacy or anti-terrorism laws and will be reporting him to the appropriate authorities very soon. Enjoy your freedom while it lasts, TheN!

Aren’t they beautiful? Don’t you want one more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life? I’ve been wanting to have PLA keychains made for a long time, but never could find anything I really liked for a reasonable price. I’m really happy with these laser-etched dogtags, though, that are the perfect size for sticking on a ring of keys. Both sides have the “Phone Losers of America” with the PLA bell logo etched on it, with “Cactus?” on one side and “Cactus!” on the other.

Right now they’re $6.00 each, which includes shipping. When I get around to adding them to the PLA store, I’ll probably make them $7.00 just to punish those who weren’t fast enough about taking advantage of this amazing offer. Screw you, people who don’t watch this page every day! Use the form below to get your own.

Color

Silver Black Gold Camouflage Red Orange Green Dark Green Purple Tan Pink

Each dogtag includes a 24″ chain, perfect for wearing around your neck during Defcon this summer. If you hate the idea of contributing to my crack rock habit, or if you’d like to personalize your PLA keychain with your name instead of “Cactus?” then visit our supplier, Etch Plus, and have them make your own for a slightly cheaper price, just as I did in this video. You can use this PLA logo on their ordering page.

As long as I’m making a post here, I’m going to throw in a sound file to either annoy podcast subscribers or make them happy. It’s a weird phone song that you should all enjoy about a neurotic man who falls in love with a 411 telephone operator and spends the rest of his life calling 411, hoping to talk to her again. You can learn more about this song on my music page.

Your friend,
RBCP

Any of you Phone Loser types going to Defcon this summer? Quite a few of us PLA people are planning to make it, such as RBCP, afreak, DBK, RogueClown, Jenn, blu3b0y, CountyKid, el_jefe, Jammie, ApprenticePhreak, io, Rappy McRapperson, Laugh Track Matt, OhEmGee, lmnk, Evie and Drolley. This year’s PLA group photo should be a lot bigger than just RBCP and Drolley. In fact, this might be the biggest PLA gathering ever. Defcon 19 will be at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, from August 4th to August 7th. Admission is an outrageous $150 per person, so bring lots of badge counterfeiting supplies with you.

Visit defcon.org for official Defcon information and visit PLA’s Defcon planning thread on the PLA forums to make plans with us.

There’s a story I’ve been meaning to post here on phonelosers.org for the past 8 years or so. The story of some guy we used to have fun battles with back in 2003, just a year after all that insane Curtis The Superhacker stuff happened. Both inspired, in fact, by Heywood. He’s the guy that used to post funny stories on major-losers.com and messedup.net and who I really wish would start doing that again.

The problem with posting this guy’s story, though, is that every time his story is posted anywhere, he flips out about it and starts making phone calls and writing emails to hosting companies, usually succeeding in getting these stories taken down. He claims that we’ve been harassing him or that the stories are slanderous and that we’re just making up things to try and ruin his life. So here’s what I’m going to do, just to keep everyone happy. I’m going to tell the story as best as I can remember it, but I’m not going to put his name anywhere in it. Not even his first name. Not even in pig latin. Not even a palindrome of his name. Not even his initials. Not even in meta tags or hidden HTML. This is simply a true story of an anonymous guy who I’m going to refer to as Spaz. He can’t complain about that, right? RIGHT??

I can’t remember what part of 2003 it was that this all started (it could have even been late-2002, but I’m not sure), but the whole Curtis thing seemed to be winding down and I’d become a regular on the messedup.net forums. Heywood started telling me about this guy named Spaz and what an incredible, uh…spaz he was. One of my favorite stories I’ve heard about him is when Heywood & Co. spotted him in a store and he was wearing a police scanner on his belt. An emergency call sounded over the scanner and Spaz jumps into action, ripping the scanner from his belt and yelling into the scanner, “This is Spaz, I’m on my way!” and running out the door. Keep in mind that a police scanner can’t hear a person at all. It’s only for listening. Also keep in mind that even though Heywood just told me that story again less than a month ago, I’m sure I completely butchered it.

You get the idea, though. Spaz is living in some bizarre fantasy world where he’s an important guy who has to fly out of stores because someone needs him. He always had this odd fixation about being an EMT, yet never could seem to make such a seemingly easy thing happen. He even ran an EMT website back then, with all kinds of information about being an EMT. (Yes, I know I have no right to make fun of anyone for having odd fixations, since I’m writing this on my phone-obsessed website.)

So it all starts with Heywood writing an update on one of his websites about Spaz. Spaz sees the article and immediately calls up Heywood’s webhost and causes Heywood’s site to be yanked from the internet. From what my aging mind can recall, they go in circles like this for awhile – Heywood posts a hilarious article about Spaz and then Spaz spazzes out and gets the hosting company to completely remove the website. I like to think that this was easily accomplished because it was back in 2003 when this interweb thing was still relatively new and that webhosts just didn’t know any better, but I guess we’ll soon see if it’s still that easy since Spaz is currently in the middle of dealing with my host’s abuse and legal departments. (More on that soon…)

Keep in mind that at this point Heywood was doing nothing more than posting funny stories about Spaz on his website. Yes, they were stories that used Spaz’s real name, but they were all in good fun, there just to entertain fans of the website by making fun of Spaz. Having Heywood’s websites taken down meant that we were losing hilarious content about Spaz, Curtis The Superhacker and other random musings from Heywood. We were also losing all of our forum posts since Heywood sucked and never made backups of anything.

One of the articles about Spaz detailed how Heywood was Googling Spaz’s name and email addresses, looking for other fun gems on him. He ended up finding something that surprised all of us – an old post on the usenet archives where Spaz asked if anyone had any pornography of 9-to-14-year-old girls. (I might be slightly off on the ages, but you get the idea.) The post was made in a binaries group, where people often traded pornographic pictures with each other, including child pornography. The email used to make this post belonged to spaz and was also used to ask questions about Linux in other usenet groups, which was another thing Spaz was into at the time. The post was made in 1999 and I’m guessing that Spaz was new to the internet, just like most people, and didn’t realize that his post would remain in the archives forever.

Well, not quite forever. Spaz was able to contact Google (or maybe it was still DejaNews back then) and convinced them to remove that post from the archive forever, probably claiming that someone posted it on there by spoofing his email address. We were all thoroughly impressed with this feat, because it seems like getting a 5-year-old post removed from usenet would take quite a bit of effort. We never even got to save the original text from the post either. Well played, Spaz…

I think we ended up finding out that Spaz worked at a grocery store’s bakery when a friend of Heywood’s happened to see him working at the counter. (Heywood and Spaz lived in the same town and often bumped into each other.) Realizing that we now had a way to get back at him for taking down a website we loved, we immediately began calling up the bakery. In most of the calls I personally made, I asked for him by name and said I was calling about the car he advertised in the paper. I used different voices and had the staff there convinced that Spaz had placed his 1979 Dodge Colt for sale and had listed his work’s number for it. His boss wasn’t happy about this at all. When I called her to ask about the car, she began lecturing me that Spaz should not be listing a work number for personal use, and then she gave me his home phone number. I was kind of shocked at this being dropped into my lap without even asking for it. We now had Spaz’s home phone number, which he shared with his roommate. The next day, Spaz quit his job, walking out during his shift. (There are recorded phone calls of all of this, which I won’t share here out of complete admiration and respect for Spaz.)

Of course, Spaz’s home phone number spread and people began calling him there. By the time Heywood called and talked to his roommate, the roommate had already decided that he was going to kick Spaz out. The roommate was really nice and talked to Heywood for awhile, telling him that he was sick of Spaz’s shit and he was kicking him out not only because of our calls, but because of “other issues that he needs to deal with” and that “he’s made too many of his problems my problems.” This was after just 3 months of being roommates. The way this guy talked about Spaz in the recorded phone call convinced me that Heywood’s stories about Spaz were completely legit. Spaz had some crazy issues.

Since we had so much fun with his phone numbers, I decided to try and find out where he moved to. I began acquiring phone numbers to random family members of his, asking them all where Spaz was. None of them had very good information for me, but everyone I spoke with seemed to completely hate him. His aunt told me, “He better not come around here because I don’t wanna see him.” and his stepbrother said, “I would never let him over here.” and also told me that his mom kicked him out of her house for stealing from her. (We later found out it was for assaulting his mom.) When I called his mother, she told me that she had a restraining order against him and that the police came and removed him from the home. She didn’t seem sad by this; she seemed pissed that she even had to talk about him with me. She was clearly disgusted with her son.

Months passed and we heard nothing from Spaz. I’ve completely forgotten how we ended up finding out where his new job was, but we found that he was working at a wireless phone store inside a mall. I found a mall directory and began calling all the other stores in the mall and sending them to the wireless store to ask for Spaz. I’d use various ruses, such as telling a store manager that we caught a shoplifter who also appeared to have a lot of merchandise from their store or I’d beg Subway to deliver a sandwich to me. I think we ended up sending some pizzas there too. Anything to cause random people to come into the store and ask for Spaz. I’m going to have to ask Heywood to remind me how he found out about Spaz’s reactions to this, but he told me that Spaz would go nuts when these people showed up, and would yell things at the other employees like, “You see!?! You see what they’re doing!?!? I told you!!!”

Around the end of 2003 is when I wrote a perl script that would text random cell phone users with Spaz’s new phone number. (I can’t remember how we ended up with Spaz’s new phone number this time.) I ran it for a few days so that Spaz’s phone rang nonstop with people wanting to know why he was paging them. This was a time when the term “texting” wasn’t too common and most people didn’t even know their phone was capable of text messages. I called his number a few times myself, pretending to be a person who was paged, and Spaz gave me all of Heywood’s contact information and encouraged me to press charges against him. Someone else who answered the phone at his house told me I was “the 90th caller,” so I guess the script was really effective.

It was soon after this that we completely lost interest in Spaz and left him alone more or less forever. Heywood and I would still talk to each other occasionally and we’d laugh about all the horrible things we did to Spaz. Occasionally he would tell me that he bumped into Spaz in a store or something and that they’d talked to each other, but we never tried to track him down again. Spaz will tell you that we’ve harassed him nonstop for 13 years straight, but it actually ended at the very end of 2003, with the text messaging script.

And that’s where we come to more recent events, here in 2011. Once again, this is not my story to tell, so I hope that Heywood will someday write out all the details about this on one of his own websites so he can correct all the factual errors I’m sure to make. It was about a month ago that Heywood walked into a bar, not noticing that Spaz was in the bar too. Spaz saw Heywood first and he jumped up and ran out the back door of the bar. The guy who was with Spaz approached Heywood and asked what that was all about, then told a confused Heywood what just happened.

The man turned out to be Spaz’s landlord and he lived in the same apartment building as Spaz. Heywood told the truth about his past with Spaz and the landlord found the whole thing really amusing. In fact, the landlord mentioned that he really wanted Spaz kicked out of his complex for various problems, including creeping out the other residents and randomly giving gifts to little kids that lived there. Spaz had told the landlord all about our harassment and told him that he legally changed his name because of us, but he wouldn’t tell the landlord what his name used to be.

Let me repeat that – Spaz legally changed his name because of us! Today I found out that this occurred in 2005, which was at least a full year after Spaz had any contact with me or Heywood, aside from occasionally bumping into Heywood in public, where Heywood would do nothing more than smile and have a conversation with him. I could be wrong about this, but I don’t believe that Spaz’s legal name change had anything to do with us. I’m betting it was more likely because he did something that he needed to hide from. It makes no sense at all that a name change would do any good against us, especially with him and Heywood always seeing each other. If we were seriously out to get Spaz, Heywood would follow him whenever he saw him in public.

Heywood gave the landlord Spaz’s old name and they both had a great time drinking beer and swapping crazy stories about Spaz. The landlord even handed over Spaz’s current cell phone number. Heywood began texting all of this brand new hilarity to me and we decided that the next night’s Phone Show would be dedicated to our war with Spaz. It ended up being a really fun show where we discussed our history with Spaz and Heywood updated us on the new events. A couple of regulars, r0xy and cyko, joined us, turning the show into a messedup.net reunion. The live show even had a few extra listeners that night – Spaz’s landlord and a few of the landlord’s friends.

And, of course, we attempted to prank call Spaz on the air. He didn’t answer our calls, but we left a few messages on his voicemail. And I should point out that these were the last calls we made to Spaz and that we don’t plan to call him again. We didn’t give out his number to the listeners and I threw his number away after the show was over. It’s not that I’m suddenly trying to be mature by not bothering people all the time, but the Spaz stuff happened so long ago and I don’t see what can be gained by making any new calls to him. And no, I’m not trying to protect myself by saying that we will never bother Spaz again. If I were worried about that, I wouldn’t be typing out this giant confession of the horrible things we did to him in 2003.

Spaz was pissed about the prank calls, but somehow didn’t realize that they were from us. He thought that the landlord was fucking with him and he began caller I.D. spoofing hangup calls between the landlord and some other guy. The landlord continued to keep in touch with Heywood, telling him about all the Spaz craziness he had to deal with. A week later, the building’s property mangaer called Heywood to ask questions about Spaz. They were hoping to find lies on Spaz’s rental application so that they could throw him out.

I stopped hearing new Spaz news for the next week, but then just last weekend, Heywood sends me a text late at night, telling me that he just ran into Spaz at a completely different bar. Heywood spotted Spaz first this time and walked right up to him, drunkenly asking, “Hey, Spaz, have you gotten any interesting phone calls lately?” Spaz had a meltdown and began screaming at Heywood. Bouncers came over, trying to understand what was going on. Details are spotty for me, but I think it ended with Heywood volunteering to leave the bar.

I really don’t understand how Spaz didn’t immediately know that those prank voicemails were from us since he’d just seen Heywood at the bar that previous night, but now Spaz knew that Heywood had his phone number. This, of course, caused him to look into phonelosers.org, where he found Cacti Radio’s website and The Phone Show archives with an entire episode dedicated to him. He probably even listened to this week’s show live, where I did a short, drunken update about him.

All this leads up to the email I received today. Keeping up with his reputation of kicking ass at getting websites taken down, he wrote my host to tell them that I’d been slandering him and harassing him for 13 years. I’m not sure where the 13 years comes from since that would be around 1998 and I’d never even heard of Spaz until 2002 or 2003. Time travel, perhaps, from the time we traveled back to 1999 to plant that fake kiddie porn request on Usenet. Here’s the letter I received, his real names replaced with Spaz:

The abuse department forwarded a copy of his email to me, and they suggested to Spaz that he forward a formal complaint to their legal department email. I wrote back to the abuse department, explaining to them that I run an internet radio show whose guest a couple weeks ago talked about the Spaz things that happened in 2003, but I’ve yet to hear anything more from anyone at my hosting company. I did email Spaz with a simple “LOL,” though. He wrote me back with this:

I replied with an “LOL U MAD?” and I’ve yet to receive a reply with anymore superhero quotes. Who knows why he doesn’t understand why I would have an issue with him attempting to remove content from my site. This is the first time I’ve ever had someone try something like this with me, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. Hopefully my host will be more understanding than Heywood’s numerous hosts in 2003.

I may come back and update this story with more details if Heywood or the other people involved back then decide to remind me of other things that happened. And I will definitely keep everyone posted on any further happenings regarding Spaz. I’d like to thank Spaz for motivating me to finally write out these events. I wish I’d written about them back when they were happening so I could have remembered more details, but this will have to do for now.

A couple nights ago I was on a conference call with Nick Walters and he happened to casually mention that Jim Bayless had died years ago. You all remember Jim Bayless, right? He was the subject of PLA issue #009. He was mentioned in my Mildred Monday song. There’s an illustration of him in the PLA book and he used to really have it in for a guy named Alex Carbon.

I had a hard time believing Nick, so I started searching Google for any news about Jim’s death and eventually found his tribute page on findagrave.com. He died all the way back in 1997, just a couple of years after my last contact with him. His memorial page says, “James L. Bayless, 53, of Brownsburg, died at 9:09 am Friday in his home. Mr. Bayless had resided in Brownsburg for 22 years. He worked for Ameritech for 30 years, the last years in corporate security.” He died at the young age of 53.

I only wrote a couple of quick, short paragraphs about him in the PLA book, but as Nick, Adrian and aikison pointed out last night, I should have given him at least a few pages to tell the real story of Jim. So that’s what I’m going to attempt to do in this post.

In 1993, I worked with a guy named Jon Spencer at a movie theater in Indianapolis. Jon was the guy who pretended to be my supervisor in our initial prank call to Mildred Monday. We spent a lot of our free time at work playing on the pay phone in the lobby. Just days before I quit my job at the theater and moved to Celina, Ohio, Jon gave me the phone number of some kid from his school named Roger that he didn’t like and said I should harass him. This was long before the days of PLA, where I get asked to harass some random person every week, so I was happy to be given an assignment like this.

Once I was in Ohio, I began to harass Roger. I began making collect calls to his house for him, driving him and his parents nuts. Both his mother and his father angered easily so he was a fun subject. They constantly threatened me with phone traces and the police, but I just laughed at them and continued bothering them every evening.

While living in Indianapolis, I’d began playing with voicemail systems. Telephone voicemail was still kind of new for average telephone users since most people still used answering machines on their home phones. Voicemail companies were starting to pop up everywhere and I began guessing people’s passwords and playing around with different company voicemails. An alarmingly large number of people used the last 4 digits of their home phone number as their password. Other people I would call up at home and pretend to be with their voicemail company, tricking them into giving me their passwords. It kept me entertained for hours each day, changing people’s messages and prank calling the people who left messages for them. I would also make calls from one person’s voicemail box to another, imitating a user’s voice and leaving bizarre messages. The next day I would check back and hear angry and/or confused messages from each of them wondering why the other was calling them.

One voicemail service had a very cool feature – when the customer received a voicemail, the system would call their home and tell them to call their voicemail and check the new message. But just to ensure that this automated message reached the customer and not someone else in the family, the system would ask for the customer’s voicemail password. The system could be set to notify the customer every 10 minutes if I chose. And I could even change the customer’s home phone number to anything I chose.

So naturally, I put in Roger’s home phone number. I changed the customer’s password to lock them out of their voicemail and then and called their voicemail and left a single message. This caused the system to begin calling Roger’s home every 10 minutes, prompting him for a password. Because Roger’s family didn’t know the password, there was nothing they could do to stop this automated call from happening every 10 minutes. And because I started this process on a Friday evening after the voicemail company had closed, they couldn’t even call the company and make them turn it off. They were stuck with their phone ringing every 10 minutes all day and night, at least for the next 2 or 3 days.

But that’s not all. They didn’t even know what company was calling them. The automated system didn’t identify itself when it called them. It only informed them that they had a message and to please enter their 4 digit pin number. Since this was in 1993, it’s possible they didn’t even have caller I.D. yet. I called Roger’s father on Monday morning and he confirmed that their phone had been ringing approximately 144 times every day since Friday and hadn’t stopped yet. I pretended to be with his phone company to get him to talk to me about the problem, but soon let him know that I was the guy harassing them, just to hear him explode at me. On Tuesday, the owner of that voicemail box called his voicemail company and regained control of his box, locking me out. I still left him occasional messages, though, hoping that he hadn’t noticed that his notification calls were being sent to some poor kid across town.

Meanwhile, my old friend Jon in Indianapolis was getting into trouble for my harassment of Roger. He had probably let on to Roger at school that he was responsible, not realizing how out-of-control it would become. He had no way to contact me and tell me to quit, so him and his parents got to deal with Roger’s family, the phone company and the police. The police were actually at Roger’s house once when I prank called them and the cop tried to talk sense into me, but I just made lame donut jokes at him as he swore that I would be arrested.

Around this time is when I was introduced to Jim Bayless. I’d set up a voicemail box and changed the outgoing message to say that I was Roger and I wasn’t available, but they could call my home phone and talk to me there instead. I’d been leaving horrible messages for other voicemail users on the same system, which would tell them what voicemail number I was calling from. They would call back and hear my message, then they would call Roger’s house to yell at him about the messages. Some of the users must have passed along the voicemail number to Roger’s parents, because Jim left a message on it for me saying, “This is Jim Bayless with Ameritech Corporate Security here in Indianapolis. I’d like to ask you to give me a call, please, relative to your contact with the number you’ve referenced on your voicemail.”

I was beyond thrilled to have a phone company security guy take an interest in me and overjoyed when I noticed that one of the extensions in his office was 265-ALEX. To talk to Jim I only had to dial my own name! I was in the process of leaving my small apartment in Celina because I’d run up a $15,000 phone bill and was sure that GTE was going to send someone out to arrest me for that huge of an amount, especially since I used a fake name and social security number to set up the account. I headed south and began exploring Cincinnati. One day I was wandering around Cincinnati’s Skywalk and found a few pay phones next to a bank, so I powered up my red box and placed a call to Jim Bayless.

I knew that it would be awesome, saying ridiculous things to Jim as he tried to reason with me, and then being interrupted by AT&T asking me to deposit another $1.25. When it happened I informed Jim that I was using a red box and had to deposit fake money, then I beeped in the money with my tone dialer. He seemed completely unfazed by my law-breaking interlude and continued lecturing me about my prank calls and stealing voicemail service. While it was fantastic having a real phone company security guy rant at me about these things, I was still disappointed that he didn’t seem to catch on that I was red boxing.

Earlier in our call, when I told Jim that I was Alex and that I was returning his call, he talked to me for about a minute before asking me to hold on for just a second, saying, “I need to do something here.” A series of weird clicks and then having him pick up a completely different phone (the background noise changed) made me feel like I was having my call recorded and traced just like in an old 70′s TV show with the giant reel-to-reel. He’d just need to keep me on the line for a few minutes longer for the trace to complete! He immediately began asking me questions about Roger and I happily admitted everything to him. Soon after I red boxed in my money and he didn’t explode in anger at me, I told him I really had to get going and I quickly left the Skywalk just in case a crack-team of Cincinnati Bell linemen were on their way up to take me down.

Months later I was enjoying Spring Break with my friend Shane in San Diego. Shane had worked with Jon and I at the theater, and we laughed about all the craziness that I caused in Roger’s life and how Jon had to deal with all the fallout and, of course, we talked about Jim Bayless from Ameritech Corporate Security. Shane told me how Jim showed up at the movie theater I used to work at and convinced my old manager to give him a copy of my W2 tax form. I’m not sure if he had the police help convince him to hand over the forms or not, but it didn’t really matter since I was living and working under a fake name. Jim received a W2 form which listed my name as Glen Alexander Carbon with a post office box address that I’d closed months ago and the social security number of an old man in Seattle named Alex Carbon. (Yes, THIS Alex Carbon.) By the time Jim got my tax forms I was living under the name Michael Kelly, thosands of miles away from him. As we sat in a cafe, Shane drew this picture of Jim on a napkin.

More months passed and I was living in Portland, Oregon. I’d just purchased my very first cell phone from a shady guy who often came into the AM/PM store that I worked at. He was always trying to sell me stolen merchandise and drugs. I think he even tried to get me to buy a gun from him once. It wasn’t until he offered me an NEC cellular phone for $50 that I finally did business with him. I handed him $50 from the register and the phone was mine. It didn’t come with a charger since he probably stole it out of a car or mugged some guy for it, so I had to make my own out of an old power supply and paper clips. I was constantly overcharging it and heating the battery up to scary levels. But this cellular phone lasted me for nearly a year until I upgraded to a new one.

Of course, I wasn’t paying for the service on this phone. I was using stolen credit cards to make calls on it. At the time, it felt amazing to be able to carry around a phone at all times, making free calls on it that were untraceable. I soon put this fancy new technology to work by making a prank call to Jim Bayless in the middle of the night. It was around 3 o’clock in the morning when I called his office and was connected to a lady named Sylvia. I convinced Sylvia that a huge emergency involving phone phreaks was occurring and Jim Bayless needed to come into the office immediately! Sylvia patched a call through to his home, waking him up and explaining the situation to him as I listened.

When Sylvia finally left the line, I told Jim that it was Alex. After a little initial confusion and Jim sleepily realizing who I was, he tried to scare me by letting me know he’d traced my phone call before.

“Are you calling me from that pay phone by the bank in Cincinnati again?” he asked.

“No, I’m calling you from Oregon. I mugged some guy and stole his cell phone and I’m using a stolen calling card to call you! Is that okay, Jim?”

“No, I don’t think that’s okay, Alex…”

Those quotes are about all I remember from this conversation with Jim. He wasn’t happy to be woken from his sleep, but he played along until we finally said our goodbyes. When I first talked to Sylvia and told her that Jim needed to come in, she told me that he was at home in Brownsburg. So the next morning I called information to find Jim had a listed phone number in Brownsburg. Throughout the next year, I prank called him once or twice at home and a few times at work, but left him alone after that. I would always work some crazy phreaking story into my calls to him. I’d claim that I’d opened up a phone box and had been making overseas calls on other peoples’ phone lines all night or that I was blue boxing calls so that he could never trace me again. He never seemed that angry with me, but I could tell that my calls were more irritating than amusing to him.

A couple of years later, a guy named kcochran would begin researching all the names that he read about in the PLA ‘zine and Jim Bayless would be one of the people that he called to ask about me. Kcochran recently told me that Jim seemed very unhappy about my contact with him and that he took it very personally that I called him at home. It would be less than a year later that Jim Bayless would die.

And I guess that’s it. That’s the story as well as I can remember it. There may or may not be things about the whole thing that I’ve forgotten that nobody will ever know about since we can’t exactly call up Jim and ask him about it. Rest in peace, Jim! Soon you’ll have your very own spot on PLA’s Memorial!

Recently I received an email with some pictures from a secret mysterious anonymous source. It said, “I’ve been doing construction for Malt Europ, previously known as the company Froedtert Malt. They make the malt that goes into Miller beer. I was in one of the buildings today and spotted this phone on every floor. From what I can guess, you turn the knob to select the floor you want to ring and then crank that handle.”

After exchanging a few emails with the secret mysterious anonymous source, he told me, “I talked to a worker there and learned in another building they still use them to talk to the control room. The reason they used these phones in a time when cell phones didn’t exist is due to the moving barley in the plant. Moving dry barley makes dust. This dust made from the grains mixed with the oxygen in the air and a source of ignition will cause an explosion. It’s no joke around there. A dangerous place to be. These days cell phones can be used in these areas if needed.”

The phones are powered by sound and the wikipedia page about them says, “A sound-powered telephone is a communication device that allows users to talk to each other with the use of a handset, similar to a conventional telephone, but without the use of external power. This technology has been used for at least six decades for both routine and emergency communication on ships to allow communication between key locations on a vessel even if power, including batteries, is no longer available.”

It’s kind of hard to read the directory cards on these phones, but the other stations they list are Malt House #3, Elevator #3 West, Dumper, Office, 6th Floor, 7th Floor, etc. Neat stuff! Thanks, secret mysterious anonymous source!

Oh yeah, speaking of this secret mysterious anonymous source…he also sent me some PLA-themed long time exposure pictures. The “PLA” one is drawn with the light of his iPhone with a 15 second shutter time. The “Roy” one was done in some drain tunnels and a “super bright light.” Thanks again, secret mysterious anonymous source!

And one last thing – the SittingNow Podcast interviewed me in their lastest show. Click here to learn a bunch of stuff about the PLA that you probably already know!

At the request of Chris Ellerback, after a 3 year hiatus, the Big Beef Bueno podcast is back! You may remember BBB coming out around the same time that PLA Radio originally did, but then I lost interest in it…UNTIL NOW! The latest episode celebrates the awesomeness that is Rappy McRapperson by interviewing him and playing a few of his songs. If you’re a regular listener of The Phone Show, you’ll know that Rappy is something I force on my listeners often. Click here to listen to the Rappy interview, where you’ll hear an unreleased song from him (it ends with the word Cactus) and he tells us how it was partially inspired by the PLA.

Sitting Now PLA book review! Rumor has it that this website will also feature an interview with RBCP soon.

HNN mentions the PLA book! And they also mention WeakNet Labs blue and red box programs for the Android.

Unshelved reviews the PLA book! One of my favorite web comics reviewed the PLA book a couple weeks ago. If you’ve never read the Unshelved web comic, then go do that.

Why haven’t you reviewed the PLA book yet? Get on Amazon or B&N right now and review the hell out of the PLA book. Jerk.

After months of false promises, r0xy is finally going to start up her own show on Cacti Radio! It’ll be a weekly show, though details are still sketchy right now. If you’ve been listening to Cacti Radio this past weekend, then you’ve probably heard her broadcasting for most of it, playing worse music than I do and prank calls mostly by her and Tombstone. Keep an eye on Cacti Radio for details. And speaking of r0xy – HAPPY BIRTHDAY, R0XY! I’m too cheap to give r0xy gifts, so instead I’ll just post RTF’s gift to her:

Why don’t you just have a seat over there…

ZUG.com interview with RBCP: Think you know everything about the PLA? This interview on ZUG.com has brand new lies about the PLA in it!

WeakNet Labs PLA Book Review: Trevelyn, a faithful employee at WeakNet and the man behind a lot of music you’ve probably heard on PLA Radio, does a great review of the PLA book!

El Gordo’s PLA Book Unboxing: Ever wonder what it’s like to receive a PLA book in the mail? Let El Gordo show you!

PLA Book photo album: Relive the precious moments of the the PLA book’s first arrival and being shipped out to everyone!

Will It Blend? On this week’s Phone Show, we destroyed the first edition PLA book stamp, live on ustream.tv!

Buy the PLA book! Don’t you wish you could be a part of all the excitement of owning a PLA book? Well you can by buying it!

Believe it or not, the announcement of an upcoming book about the PLA actually wasn’t an elaborate April Fool’s Day prank. The book is now officially released and you can buy it right now from places like Amazon and CreateSpace!

The Phone Losers of America book is a collection of stories, based around the original issues of PLA, RBCP’s homepage and other things found on this website. It’s written by RBCP, with a foreword by Rob T Firefly. The PLA book covers important topics that are relevant today, such as red boxing! Oh wait, that doesn’t work so good anymore. Well, there’s cordless phone eavesdropping and answering machine hacking and…crap, forget relevant.

The PLA’s 310 page book is a collection of short stories which take you on a twenty year journey of high-tech humor, culture jamming, and criminal mischief. From remotely controlling the overhead paging system of a large supermarket, to confusing the phone company with various call forwarding stunts, this bizarre collection of pranks will not only make you laugh, but will make you question the security and sanity of common, everyday business procedures. The stories contained in this book are based on the writings from this website, some which have been featured in USA Today, the Boston Herald, 2600, on CNBC, CNN, TechTV, and countless other websites, books, magazines, radio shows and police reports.

All of the content has been rewritten for the book so you’ll only think you’re reading the same shit that you’ve been reading here for the past 16 years. You’ll get all the classics, like the Dino story, Fred Meyer, the Boulder News Frenzy, Curtis Lee Jones, and more. There’s also plenty of new material, based on PLA themes, along with illustrations by Rob T Firefly, RBCP, Napalmoliv, Sakerobot, and Aftershocks. For a somewhat complete chapter list, visit the PLA book page.

The retail price of the book is $15.00, but you can get yours for $12.00 by going to CreateSpace and entering the coupon code of DCMP29NN. The PLA book is also available on Amazon.com and can be ordered from all major book stores if you’re the type of person that still shops offline. And, of course, you can find the book in the PLA Store. If you read your books on a Kindle, you can get the PLA ebook for just $7.50.

So you are hereby commanded to drop whatever you’re doing right now and buy the PLA book! And don’t forget to buy several extra copies as Christmas gifts for each and every member of your family. And buy at least one copy to burn at your church’s Wednesday night youth service. And one to keep in your bathroom. And don’t forget to send a few copies to your favorite inmates in prison. Oh, and one for your coffee table. And one to balance that annoying uneven leg on your washing machine. And a couple to keep by the door to hand out to the pizza delivery guys as tips. Do it!

(To you people that preordered – thanks! If you haven’t received your book already, it should arrive any second now!)

Below is a video of El Gordo Uno unboxing the PLA books he preordered.

Thanks for the arts and crafts, Erin G!

An April Fools joke to a grouchy old man goes awry. This episode of PLA Radio is all about him and his harassing phone calls to us, his impersonation of a law enforcement officer and his heart attack and untimely death. Enjoy!

00:00 Clip from Futurama S06E06
01:30 Mildred Monday is Dead
02:00 PLA Media CD
02:20 Twitter Complainers
04:50 PLA Book
05:07 Grouchy Old Man news report (Click here to read the forums post that Jenn posted)
12:57 Voicemails – 814-422-5309
13:37 Trevelyn is the fuckin’ man – Blackhat Life
15:50 How to Steal Money from Pay Phones
16:37 The Birth of Cactus
17:17 Back to Grouchy Old Man. Clips from the 3-30-2010 episode of The Phone Show
20:07 Grouchy Old Man gets his revenge in the 4-06-2010 episode of The Phone Show
28:00 T-Mobile runs Unix
30:00 gnnr’s song can be downloaded on our PLA Soundtrack page

Today I was paging through the RSS feeds of the many blogs I read, when I came across this post by Retro Thing called The Death of the Telephone. It made a good point about something that we don’t really think about too much any more, which is how God-awful phone call quality is today compared to 15 – 20 years ago.

Retro Thing says, “Call quality peaked in the mid 1990s. Many ordinary folk still relied on landlines, and computer-based calling services like Skype were a decade away from widespread acceptance. We grumbled about the lack of competion and high prices, but at least we could make decent calls using our telco’s recently upgraded digital switching systems…..Latency, compression artifacts and dropped calls were once relatively rare. Now, it’s commonplace for me use Google Voice while the person on the other end struggles to understand me on their Skype-equipped iPod.”

Remember those commercials in the 80′s by Sprint where they claimed to have phone connections so good that you could hear a pin drop? I’d like to see Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile try that today. We’ve all ditched our land lines for cells at the cost of quality audio. I’m not saying I’d want to go back to the days of having my phone number tethered to my house and having to worry about getting AIDS when putting a pay phone up to my ear, but I kind of wonder how long it’ll be until cell phone quality catches up to what land line quality was 20 years ago.

With my “when I was your age!” rant out of the way, I should mention that Mondays are now PLA Movie Night. Last week R0xy and Tombstone got us all together on tinychat.com to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It was a bonding experience and, as expected, a circle jerk followed. We’re still not sure what the movie will be tonight, but chances are it’ll be geeky and you might even like it. It starts at the same time as The Phone Show does on Tuesdays – 9:00 pm PST, 12:00 am EST. Keep an eye on PLA’s Twitter and/or Facebook tonight for the URL to watch with us.

Speaking of The Phone Show, it’s on tomorrow night and rumors have it that Evilgold and Eviegold will be stopping by the studio to cohost again. You might remember them as the ambassadors of Free Geek that were on the show earlier this year.

Guess what will be arriving in the mailboxes of all the people who preordered the PLA book before the end of this month? Yep, the PLA book will be available around December 1st and the people who preordered at the discounted price should hopefully have their copies by then. There are still a few more days to preorder the PLA book before I up the price a few bucks. BE EXCITED ABOUT THE BOOK!

R0xy has got a bunch of us PLA people vlogging on YouTube like it’s 2005 recently and you should join in or at least leave mean comments on our videos. This thread on the PLA Forums has some links to the videos from people like Laugh Track Matt, Tombstone, me and others. It’ll give you something to watch tonight as you wait for PLA Movie Night to start.

I’ve also updated our page of PLA music with gnnr’s new Mildred Monday song, my Curtis Lee Jones song, RTF’s Bell Odyssey and Trevelyn’s Ode to the PLA Forums.

And speaking of Mildred Monday, I’ve updated the PLA Memorial with a page dedicated to Mildred Monday. Go there and you can listen to most of the calls we made to her in the 1990s.

If you’ve been watching our YouTube page you’ve probably noticed a lot of answering machine hacking contests to win the PLA book. Congratulations to Mario, Finn and Liz for winning free copies of the PLA book! We’ll probably keep having answering machine contests as long as I can continue to find more old answering machines. If you’re too lazy to hack an answering machine for a book, you can still preorder books for just $10.

This week I was at Goodwill and picked up an old answering machine, just for the hell of it. When I got home, I made a YouTube video, challenging people to hack the machine for a chance to win a free PLA book. I expected the machine to get hacked by morning, but it’s been several days now and still nobody has managed to hack it, despite receiving over 500 calls to it so far. What the hell, people?

So now I’m posting about it on here, in hopes that more people will try and it’ll get done before next week, because that’s when I’ll be boxing up the answering machine and returning it to Goodwill to exchange it for another machine that I will also hook up to a phone line and challenge people to hack. Goodwill has a nice selection of old answering machines, all priced under $5.00, so my plan is to keep doing this until the book comes out. After each machine is hacked, I’ll get a new one and you can try again. Maybe I’ll find some cool cassette tape machines for you to play with.

So give it a try. The phone number is 213-787-5552. The current machine on my phone line is a Radio Shack model 43-3829. To let me know that the machine has been hacked, you have to change the outgoing message on it, then immediately email me to let me know exactly how you did it. Hopefully I’ll be able to confirm that you really hacked it before someone else comes along and changes the message again.

If you’re too lazy to hack my answering machine, you can always preorder the book instead.

People have been telling me that Mildred Monday died for months now, and I thought they were just making it up, like when a few people were trying to start the rumor that I died. Well, this morning s1acker and matt showed me the newspaper obituary, proving that Mildred Monday is in fact dead.

Mildred has been around longer than the PLA has, first coming into contact with us when I flipped to a random page in the phone book and called her from a pay phone in Indianapolis. This was in 1993. Various friends and I continued to call Mildred for years and she never failed to say amusing things to us, like when she threatened to shoot me in the hind end with a shotgun. For years Mildred defended herself by loudly proclaiming, “I am Mildred Monday!”

There’s a small tribute to Mildred Monday in episode #16 of PLA Radio (about 14 minutes in) where a few of her calls are played and the Mildred Monday song is introduced. To hear most of the other Mildred Monday calls, click here for a PLA Forums post about her. Searching the PLA Forums finds quite a few other posts mentioning her too.

Now that Mildred is gone, I’d really like to see a picture of her. She must have kids and grandkids that are on Facebook or Myspace, and those people might have a picture of Mildred in their photos. Everyone reading this should drop what you’re doing and search for the Monday family on Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, and any other social networking site you can find. Look for Mondays in Indianapolis and strike up conversations with them to see if you can get a picture of Mildred.

Join us on Tuesday night for The Phone Show, where we’ll be hosting an hour-long vigil to celebrate the memory of Mildred L. Monday.

EDIT: Matt found her picture! It’s now included at the top of this post. Also, click here for a memorial page on Mildred, where you can leave your thoughts and memories about her. That page includes a lot of her family names, so lets check some Facebook profiles for more Mildred Pictures!

ANOTHER EDIT: I just added this week’s Phone Show episode to this post. It’s a great show that talks about nothing but Mildred Monday and plays all of the prank calls that we made to her in the 1990′s.

Also, during my fit of torrent creating today, I made another torrent of all the prank call albums I have. So if you have time to listen to about 2.4 gigs of additional prank calls once you’re done with all the PLA material, here’s the link:

In other news…the PLA Book is on track to be released before Winter. The finishing touches are going into it now, so you may as well go ahead and preorder the book by going to www.phonelosers.org/store/ where you’ll save a few bucks off the regular price and you’ll receive your copy about a week before anyone else gets it. For now, the $3.00 shipping price is good for all countries.

The PLA book has been finished for a while now and the finishing touches are going into it. Chapters are being proofread, pages formatted, covers designed and pictures added. If all goes well, the book should be available long before this year is over. The book will contain stories based on the original PLA issues, such as the Dino story, Fred Meyer, the Boulder News Frenzy, revenge and more. All of it has been rewritten for the book so you’ll only think you’re reading the same shit that you’ve been reading here for the past 16 years. There are also a few new items in the book that you hopefully haven’t heard of. For a somewhat complete chapter list, visit the PLA book page or to talk about the book project in the PLA Forums, click here.

Here’s the part where I need your help. At the beginning of each chapter, below the chapter title and before the chapter actually starts, there is a quote about the PLA. These quotes aren’t necessarily related to the content in the chapter, but they’re all about some aspect of what makes the PLA awesome or why a particular person loves the PLA. Like this one and this one. I have enough quotes for about 10 chapters, but I need about 10 more of them. Say something great or witty about the PLA and you just might make it into the book.

The first few quotes I used were from this thread on the PLA Forums, so reading that might give you an idea of what I’m looking for. You can post your quote there, or post it in the comments below. Or you can email them directly to me.

If there’s something you’d like to see in the book or you have any other ideas for it or maybe if you want to contribute some artwork or anything else, you can post your ideas here or email them to me and hopefully it won’t be too late. Keep an eye on this page, though, because the book will be here very soon. No really, I mean it this time!

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update about The Phone Show, so here it goes. There’s a show. It’s called The Phone Show. It’s on Cacti Radio once a week, each Tuesday, at 9pm PST. RBCP hosts along with whoever he can sucker into coming on the show with him, which most frequently includes Spessa and Linear.

Recently there have been a lot of in-studio guests, including old-school PLA’ersJammie and kcochran (and you too, Chad, I GUESS) where we talked about some PLA history, such as the birth of #rock, Spee’s lawsuit and death, the Fred Meyer pranks that kcochran just happened to hear while inside a Fred Meyer, Jim Bayless and more. The show ends with an on-air suicide. It’s a good show to listen to if you’re into all that PLA stuff. Here is a link to it.

A full archive of the show can be found at www.cactiradio.com/phoneshow/

Cacti Radio has recently been taken over by Carlito from Madhouse Live, which may or may not be a permanent situation. But the Phone Show still runs on Cacti Radio each Tuesday at 9pm PST, so start listening to us and calling in each week! Please?

UPDATE: Oh yeah…I guess I should have mentioned that the very week I make this update about The Phone Show, I’m taking a 3 week hiatus from the show because I’ll be out of town, jetting all over the planet. We’ll be back sometime in August. I was way too lazy to Tweet about my absence before last night’s show, so people were tuning in and wondering why they were hearing Madhouse Radio. Sorry, everyone!