Blogging the Hunt '05: Post 4. Thru FRI. 2:30 PM

EVENT

This morning I woke up at nine and played MegaMan 8 for about twenty minutes.
Then I cleaned up, dressed up, and walked to campus to sit down and write the post I posted earlier this morning.

Wait a minute!

Item #51. Play the ScavHunt theme song on the carillon. [39 points]

Incoming email at 10:10 said that Snell-Hitchcock said that they had someone to play the Carillon at 10:15. So I hurried out, spilling coffee all over my hand several times, and hurried over to Rockefellar where I met a small but dense group of judges and teammates. After about another ten minutes of commniques running back and forth between ourselves and the tower, the bells broke out in a complete rendition of I Get Around, by the Beach Boys.

As Jessica said, "I only expected to get the melody. This was the whole song." According to reports, somewhere else thereabouts a couple had been walking along and one as heard to say, "Isn't that the Beach Boys?"

SALON AGAIN

I returned to the Mac Lab, wrote the last post, and hurried into campus to catch the Salon, Part deux. The highlight of today, personally was a very effective thirty-minute massage and nail-buffing by Broover, and the only price was a 'kick me' sign, affixed to my back:

Item #151. Apply a "Kick Me" sign to a Judge. Said Judge must not be aware of the application of the sign, and the sign must be worn for a sensible period of time before gentle kicking proceeds. Said Judge must not be asleep, unconscious, or otherwise have impaired mental faculties. Kicking must commence for full points, and must surprise the Judge. [18 points]

Meanwhile, other items had come into play:

Item #106. "Dads" dilly-Daddle(TM)ing during Friday's Salon en Plain Air, aux Quads. Bonus points if non-scavvies are the Dads. [12 ponts]

Snell supplied two faculty for the job. Best of all was "Ed" a professor who, despite a slight countenance, had strong knees, and really got into the act. The dilly-Daddle, by the way, is a harness you strap to yourself like a saddle to give horsey rides. Ed petitioned for bonus points, insisting that he was effective "Mr. Ed."

There was also a TBA, which involved teams contributing their most stressed-out team member to the center quads at 12:30 for an extreme makeover by another team. Strategies varied, as some teams were kind and a couple were not. Also, some makeovers were sufficiently extreme, and others were X-TREME! Participants were required to avail themselves of all services, except perhaps haircuts. Even so, we finished out with two mohawks, one drastic hair-straightening, and a dye job.

OTHER AFTERNOON ITEMS

At about 1:30 (many of the salons had kept going, even though the item had filled the required duration) we met up, again with Snell-Hitchcock for the completion of Item 198.

Item #198. A thin section of Fraggle Rock under a polarizing light microscope. We should be able to see inclusions of Doozerite, Gorgotile, and simple twinning of the Great Heap's henchrats. [9 ponits. 2 bonus points for the geological term for Fraggle Rock]

Admittedly, some of the joy of this item was climbing the stairs to the third floor of Hinds, the Geosci building, which is craggy and unintuitive, and seems about as much like a cave as you could accomplish with brick and concrete.

I know next to nothing about Geology, but the minerals they'd "supplied" were clear and bright and the twinning henchrats in particular seemed like something out of the show.

On the way back through the main quads, Shoreland(?) had an item for us to judge:

Item #67. Ever since the GSB left Stuart, the Gargoyle Cafe seems to have lost its personality. Now that it's capable of having a soul, give it an identity that's in sync with the U of C (and while, yes, the "in need of repair" motif is in sync with all U of C faculties, I mean spiritually in sync; it is the Gargoyle Cafe, after all). [29 points]

The judges and teammates overhwelmed the local cashiers and grad students, and they gave a, a capella rendition of Swing low, Sweet Chariot. It worked.

We discussed our plans for the evening, and split. I walked a ways with Clinton and Jessica, and headed down here.

This isn't a long or incredibly momentous post, but it's insurance for later, when I won't have so much time. After all; tonight is the party, and the party always leaves plenty of stories to tell...