Electonic Rape Whistle Equals Sonic Grenade!

Have you ever seen one of those little personal alarms that people sometimes carry with them when they travel? I was shown one several years ago and saw no need for it at the time. The device is a tiny little box with a pin in it attached to a lanyard. If you pull the pin out, it begins emitting a 100db alarm.

I am not sure how effective these are at personal defense, but I came up with an ingenious way to turn them into highly effective mischief makers. Think of them like sonic grenades: you pull the pin and throw. At $10 each, it is still less expensive than a real grenade, and not as likely to get you into big trouble.

The purpose of the exercise, in my mind, is to address noise pollution problems from a fight-fire-with-fire approach. However, instead of going the standard route of bass-volume competition, you can simply win the one-up-manship of annoying noise with an ear splitting scream from one of these.

Keep reading for some creative ways to deploy one!

I think it would be most difficult to retrieve from the tailpipe of a car, but it requires that you get close. This is best tried late at night.

Why would you be concerned about creating noise late at night? Perhaps that is when the locals decide it is time to play tejano music on overpowered truck speakers. Perhaps they woke you up once too often with their car horn when they were too lazy to go knock on a door at 7am, and you feel it is only fair to provide them with an annoying noise to wake up with when they are sleeping.

Setting one of these sonic grenades up with a tripwire would be effective too, and allow you to get distance before it goes off. Just switch out the lanyard for some fishing line. Superglue the device to the underside of a car and tie the other end of the line to a nearby pole or a big rock or something.

One of the great things about this prank is that, if you play it on a vehicle, anyone who comes to see what is causing all of the noise will typically think that it is the vehicle's own alarm system going off, and the owner of the vehicle will finally have a chance to catch some of the well-earned flack that they've got coming to them for waking you up.