Perhaps most impressive is the string of one-way rivalries that extends all the way from the East Coast to the West Coast. MIT thinks they are rivals with Harvard, CalTech thinks they're rivalling MIT, and meanwhile, the little-known tech school Mudd half an hour or so away in Claremont thinks they rival CalTech. Mudd finds the one-way-ness rather amusing, given that we certainly do rival them academically, and compete with them over prefrosh (I preemptively rejected CalTech to get into Mudd Early Decision). Nonetheless, Mudd cares about making fun of CalTech far more than the reverse is the case.
After the infamous CalTech Cannon incident (http://people.bu.edu/fmri/somers/cannon.html), one would think the latter school would have taken more notice of the former, but no, not really. All that resulted was an ultimatum that Mudd was never to touch the cannon ever again, or move it in any way.
Hence the plan that led to the creation of this writeup: Mudd's official (ok, not really official) embassy to CalTech. The plan had been discussed for many years, but nobody had the guts to put it into action until today. Clearly, if Mudd can't bring the cannon back to it, it has to bring Mudd to the cannon - and the nice thing about an embassy, is that their interiors are actually on the same ground as their home countries are... A perimeter was made, a Mudd flag was flown, and transfer forms were freely given. From what I've heard secondhand, the prank went flawlessly. In fact, not only were the CalTechians, for the most part, amused, the embassadors also managed to parlay their status into some free In&Out burgers and Doughnut Man strawberry donuts that just happened to be being given out that day, right near the cannon.
The other famous prank, or at least famous at Mudd, involving CalTech didn't actually take place there, but rather at a freeway sign on the edge of Pasadena. The sign read "California Institute of Technology / Pasadena City College / Next Exit". For a while it was changed to read "CalTech / (Pasadena City College) / Next Exit."