CONCEPT
I’ve decided that I might as well blog this hunt, as well as I can. I think it would be fun to give the judge’s perspective on the whole thing.
If you are interested in a team’s perspective, check out Colin’s account.
If you are from another team (which some of my visitors should be… consult Item #62), and are writing on the Hunt, let me know and I’ll happily link to you.
All these warm-and-fuzzies aside, our blogging has taken a hit, albeit a flattering hit.
The Scav Hunt website has been linked to by Slashdot, which I am not personally familiar with, but which evidently links to various items of interest to nerd and generates millions of hits a day.
Well, our modest webhost was unable to handle the gazillions of resultant hits, and so the site went down and took everything with it, including our online version of the list.
I have managed to upload a .pdf of the list (the story is long and boring). If you like you can read it here, albeit with ghetto formatting..
But enough of this crap. On to the Hunt.
LIST RELEASE
While the list is always released at midnight sharp going into the Thursday prior to Mother’s Day, it has become a tradition in recent years to “test” teams with a series of obstacles to claiming a list. The competion, thus, begins immediately at midnight, hours before most items have been discussed, because the most resourceful teams will start out with an immediate advantage.
This advantage is more important that is immediately clear. Even small teams usually have twenty or so active members, and large dorms can have several times that at the beginning. Holding the attention of these players and reading through the list is important for morale, first and foremost, and a team’s success at the list release can either double or halve the size of their team. Furthermore, events and meetings begin promptly at eight in the morning on Thursday, usually requiring some construction, research, preparation, and recruiting. The difference between acquiring a list at 1 AM and 4 AM is the difference between seven and four hours in which to do this.
The road trips have to rest. The teams have to get started. The captains have to develop a strategy.
Most years, the list release takes the form of a sort of “wile goose chase” around the University of Chicago and Hyde Park.
Last year’s release, however, was considered particularly severe. Teams have to meet up with bitter rivals to assemble a “puzzle” which than led them to the beach, where the lists (shredded into 1/16 page strips) were buried a foot deep in manilla envelopes. We didn’t count on the incliment weather, the size of the area dug, and the depth of the lists. After three full hours of digging, only three or four lists had been found. Some of the teams still bring this up in slightly resentful tones.
This year we thought it appropriate to shake it up a little. We wanted the list accessible right away, but we didn’t want to give it a way. We decided the teams could determine their own limitations best if we made the test psychological rather than deductive in nature.
Here’s how it happened:
Midnight.
The team captains enter the West Reading Room on the 1st floor of Ida Noyes Hall to find the judges standing Matrix-goth-zombie style in front of a screen. The screen is removed, and between blacklights and before a cauldron of bubbling fog sits the stack of lists. The top list is worth 0 pts. The second earns 1. The third… 5. And so on, until the 9th list is worth 100 points.
Max Palevsky, two time winner in the last two years, attempted to negotiate the game by stepping forward and requesting the bottom list. As per the rules we had posted, they had thus committed to take the first list available, the list on top. They walked out after a minute or two with a list worth zero points.
An unnamed independent team took the next big step, saying “fuck it” and claiming the list for 1 point.
They were soon followed by FIST (Federation of Independent Scavhunt Teams) who exited shortly after (though much more noisily) for 5 points.
Five more minutes or so passed,
The other teams had all committed to wait for more points and so the competition became more interesting.
Pierce, Shoreland, and Snell-Hitchcock, all large dorm-teams that have dominated the hunt until the recent rise of the Palevskians began jostling and joking one another. They talked like, and to some extent resembled, the three stooges, chattering with their home bases on cel phones, playing ro sham bo across each other, or setting their pants on fire (yes, pants were set on fire).
The Vegan team cut to the chase, their male captain demanding a mop bucket which he promptly urinated into, evidently intending to stay as long as it took. This did seem to slightly unnerve the captain of the small Vincent House team, standing feet away who, to her credit, reacted with an air of calculated disdain.
In the end, though, for most teams the fear of inertia was more power than the lure of points. Hitchcock-Snell and the Shoreland soon gave up, claiming lists worth 10, 25, and 40 points.
At 12:45 the judges began taunding captains with the dangers of wasting time and team members losing interest and, under duress, the Vincent house team claimed a list for 60 points.
Both Pierce (whose captain was wearing an old school Proletariat flag) and the Vegans had committed to a long wait. We allowed them to stand in place until 1:30, at which point the value of the last two lists was totaled and divided evently for 87.5 points each. We had to do this. Ida Noyes Hall had closed.
ROAD TRIP and CAPTAIN’S MEETING
I’m running short on time, so I’ll have to be more succinct for the rest.
On Thursday Morning, the road trips prepared for their I-80 College Tour. The item is worded as follows:
225. Thursday morning: The Conclave of the Captains. But outside a new day is dawning, suburbia’s sprawling everywhere,
and it’s time for senior pictures. That’s right, we have the Brain, so you bring the Athlete, Criminal, Princess, and
Basket-Case, with photocopies of their driver’s licenses. The Criminal should be falling through the ceiling, or at
least fooling around under the table. The Princess shows us how to feel sorry for her. The Athlete takes a hit or two,
while the Basket-Case giggles and pours out some unexpected confessions. A photograph of this group including us
as Neo-Maxi-Zoom-Dweebies is, of course, required. Now you’re ready for your East Coast College Tour! Have fun!
Be safe! And remember, when, er, visiting the Ivies, you may have to don more “appropriate” apparel. Oh, did we
forget to mention that the Neo-Maxi-Zoom-Dweebies want to inspect your car before you leave? Have it ready at
8:30 AM. [0 points will be awarded to all road trip items if this item is not fulfilled]
Can you figure it out?
Every year we make the road trips do this for two reasons.
First, we don’t want teams starting a drive at one in the morning… it isn’t safe, especially given how sleep-deprived these students tend to be in the first place.
Second, a lot of the items on the road trips are verified through photography. By taking pictures with the teams in costumes only specified in the list we guaranteed that road trip items are procured by the road trip teams during the hunt. It’s a cheating deterrent.
The captains’ meeting coincides and is basically a Q&A for team captains before the major events get under way.
For me, it’s about the most tedious moment of the Hunt, but this year we had muffins and OJ, which sure beat last years Cookies N’ Cream Ice Cream. At 8 AM after a severely sleep deprived night of sleep, some things just don’t taste so great.
QUAD ITEMS
This is what we call euphemistically items that take place on the U of C campus during class hours. Euphemistically because it’s an opportunity to “assault” the mundane world with the chaotic potancy of the Hunt. (For notes on “chaotic potancy” see the bylaws… once our website’s back up.)
This year, there are two items, both of which have been realized with extraordinary success:
95. 37: He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they say unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred
pennyworth of bread, and give them to eat? 38: He saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? go and see. And
when they knew, they say, Five, and two fishes. 39: And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon
the green grass. 40: And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties. 41: And when he had taken the five
loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to
set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. 42: And they did all eat, and were filled. 43: And they
took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes. 44: And they that did eat of the loaves were about five
thousand men. And by “fish” we here mean the finest two words in the English language: “encased meats.” From 11:30
PM to 3:00 PM on Thursday and Friday, erect your hot dog stands in order to promote and distribute your tasty hot
dogs between Cobb and the Reynolds Club. Hot dogs, buns, ketchup and mustard will be provided. Space yourselves
out evenly, teams, as we’re not looking for Nash Equilibrium here. Advertising is a must, as is a Subservient Weiner.
The latter’ll do whatever it takes to hawk your dogs. There are three key rules for this item: 1.) teams may not eat
their own hot dogs, 2.) all allotted hot dogs must be evenly divided between Thursday and Friday, and 3.) no hot
dog shall remain at the end of either day. [201 points. 10 bonus points for showing us what a Chicago style hot dog
is. 11 bonus points for showing us what a University of Chicago style hot dog is]
Essentially teams had to set up hot dog stands and hawk there wares, which we provided and which must be given away for free (note: we gave the Vegan team vegan hot dogs).
The thing that’s so much fun about items like this is that each team will come up with a wildly different interpretation, many of which are successful. For example, today, the Snell-Hitchcock team set up a grill right in front of the main undergraduate classroom building, grilling hot dogs in front of the open windows of classbound students. They offered a massive array of condiments, including the topping for a Chicago-style dog and a University of Chicago-style dog (ie. with shredded Marx). Needless to say, they gave away all of their hot dogs very soon after classes had opened.
The FIST, while they didn’t have the condiment array, set up in the center of the quads, which meant they drew not only many students, but also administrators. FIST boasted a “homemade” grill of several scavenged electrical appliances soldered (spliced?) together, and distributed from an authentic “stand.” Other teams had movable vendors, political slogans, and eager-to-please subservient wieners based on Burger King’s promotional subservient chicken.
144. Corinthians 13:1 – If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong
or a clanging cymbal. Cupid, in Greece, is called Eros, but since this is The Passion of The ScavHunt, we’ll call
him Little Agape, and, demonstrating our more progressive religious developments, we won’t require single gender
characterizations. Beginning Thursday morn all will rejoice as Little Agape descends onto our earthly campus to
induce periphesence at will, or at the holy command of the Judges. He is omnipresent, omniscient. Remember that
even in the most conservative depictions, our angel only wears a cloud or two. Little Agape should also be equipped
with a bow, arrow dipped in his or her heart-shaped flask of ambrosiac Agape Potion #9, and prepped Hallmark-esque
cards for composition and delivery. Teams are thereby encouraged to love thy neighbor, or fall victim to the pang of
Agape’s archery. [131 points]
Again, these varied tremendously, and each team had a different take. The large number of male and female hotties flitting about scantily clad mae things momentarily awkward for some judges. Still, the effect was cute, and we got to sample some fine “ambrosia” and deliver valentines to many people and institutions.
You can probably tell I’m slipping a little bit here.
I’m very tired, and the day has only begun.
I’ll try to post later on, after the game show tonight!
~ Connor