JUDGMENT DAY!

Judgment Day is the culmination of about 80 - 90 hours of effort on the part of all the Scav Hunt teams. If we count individual man/woman hours over the four day period for all of the captains, page captains, road trip members, devoted team members, and others and multiply it by the nine participating teams, we have a large number. My back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest about 30,000 hours, give or take 10% or 15%, excluding the work of the judges. That's pretty damn sweet. It's also irrelevant to the present discussion, which concerns Judgment Day!

Judgment Day starts at 10:00 am (supposedly). As rule 11 says "Like in the Bible, Judgment Day should take, like, 45 minutes." I don't remember that from the Bible, but the Judges may have read it more carefully than I have. Anyway, it is outrageously wishful thinking. I arrived at Judgment at about 10:15 and left at 4:30. The winner wasn't announced until sometime after 6:30. On the other hand... In a non-literal interpretation of the account in Genesis (i.e., "it's not really exactly seven of our days"), we might be able to translate 45 minutes in the Bible into about eight or nine hours of regular time... But this is not an exercise in Biblical interpretation. For that, you should talk to Libby (AB '05 - Religious Engineering and Symbological Engineering).

The first items to be judged are the Road Trip items. Then the Judges judge the "Showcase Items," which are marked on the list with a dagger (e.g., 234, 256, and others). Finally the Judges get to the regular items, which we will see later. Here the Max P team is setting up. The road trip captain is one of the three people in this picture in green. Marvin is sitting on the floor in the front as he and Jeremy and I talk about Ted Stevens' internet, which no one had built.



The Thinker, in duct tape, holding a hand grenade. If you can tell me which item this is, I would be grateful because I can't find it. I took a picture a few days ago of this item under construction. I think the artist did a pretty excellent job.



The Gingerbread House of Ill-repute (item 71). I suppose the White House is a house of ill-repute for some people. I do not know whether the roof could be removed to reveal generous donors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, but I didn't want to touch it and risk breaking it. That would not have made me very popular with the team.



How many items can you find in this picture? I keep finding more! The pancakes in the page captain's hand are item 59 - "Pat Robertson's Age Defying Protein Pancakes," (another page captain actually took a bite of said pancakes and I wish I had taken a picture of his face), the bicycle in the background is item 38, the "triple-high" bicycle, you will also recognize item 3, the "dixie cup icosahedron," and on the ground in front of the trunk is item 214 "a chainsaw carving of a chainsaw" (ok, kind of... but it counted!). The trunk itself is an item I'm not finding on the list right now. You had to have as many of your team members as possible stand on a 'dead man's chest', and had to prove that it belonged to someone who was actually dead. Oh there's another one too: right next to the chainsaw carving of a chainsaw is the homemade theremin.



This item ruled. Item 55 - "Construct the periodic table in its native table form: a coffee table." This was worth 25 points, plus bonus points for each element (or compound including the element) included on the table. It looks like they found more than 40 elements. No other team did a job that good. At least one team just drew a periodic table on a coffee table and put some quarters and pennies on their various elements. Lame. Note that they did not get the lanthanides or actinides. Too bad.



Another view of this same amazing coffee table.



This was a funny item, not so much for what it was as for what people said about it. Items 300 and 301 were 3-D twister and 4-D twister respectively. Of course the first thing everyone said about "3-D" twister was something like this: 'well regular twister is played in two dimensions plus time, so it IS 3-D twister!' If you needed any more evidence that you are going to attend a nerdy school... well, you probably don't, especially now.



The John Wilkes Photo Booth. Ha ha.



Item 153 - "I know how much you like clowns, so I built you this bed. Now you can laugh yourself to sleep! (70 points)" I think this is making reference to a movie, but I can't remember which one. Anyway, here is another scary clown bed.



The Internet according to Ted Stevens. This one is better than Max P's, probably because they actually put it together before Judgment Day. "It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes." I keep quoting that because I keep finding it funny.



Four-trampoline Simon. Item 256 - a Showcase Item. Not just for show either... every team built a working Simon made out of trampolines. The problem with Max Palevsky's was that it did not notice if you made the wrong move, but most other teams fixed that.



In this picture you can see three versions of the coolest item in the Hunt this year: the Strandbeest. The one closest to the camera was the coolest. I linked to a few pictures and videos of this item yesterday and I will say again that it's one of the best ScavHunt items I have seen in seven years. While some of them had to be pushed along by groups of three or more people, the Strandbeest in the foreground practically walked under its own power. It needed just the slightest push to start actually walking. I wish I had taken a video, but at this point my camera was running out of space and battery power.



Max P's effort. The creator is in the red shirt to Louis' right. While this contraption looks like it might just fall apart, it actually worked.



This one walked... kind of. It was far, far too heavy to be very graceful, but it did technically move, albeit with some human help.



A close-up of the really awesome Strandbeest, with another Judgment phenomenon underneath - a sleeping Scavvie. Despite the high level of noise and light, people could be seen basically passed out all over Ida Noyes. After staying up for 70 hours, you'd probably do the same. This guy was probably protecting his beautiful creation too, which he had walked over to Judgment from his dorm. Full points for these guys.



Ha! You call that a 'Wheel of Fish'? We'll show you a real Wheel of Fish in a little while.



Here Judgment actually gets underway. The Judge on the left is quizzing the Road Trip captain about the items. Because all of the Judges are in Chicago for the whole Hunt, Road Trip teams take pictures and videos of their various items.



Item 310 - "Solve a Rubik's Cube with your feet, and no cheating like the dastardly Michael Gondry." Michael Gondry is a French director whose most notable film is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You'll see another picture of this same guy working on the same project taken about three or four hours later. It's not easy to solve the Rubik's Cube with your feet, but it was worth a whole 15 points.



Now THIS is a Wheel of Fish. Item 126 - "Wheel of Fish! [U62/2 points.]" Why build such an elaborate contraption for such a small-point item? Because it's cool. As you can guess from the picture, just building a wheel and painting some fish on it would be considered very lame. People on the Max P team bought three fish to put on the wheel itself for Judgment Day. Unfortunately when the time came two of the fish had disappeared. Who stole the Red Snapper? Who stole the other fish? We will never know. Anyway, as you can see this fish is much too large to nail to the wheel. What was the solution?



Ew. That is the solution. Chop the fish up into pieces with a machete. Ew.



This is about the most disgusting thing I have ever done - definitely top five or ten. This fish was dead, frozen solid, and actually quite tough. It was NOT easy to cut. Basically I had to swing at it with the machete a few times to cut pieces off.



Once the fish had been cut into pieces, it had to be nailed to the Wheel of Fish. This was also pretty nasty. While this was not a Showcase item, we decided it would be best if we left it outside. In the end it was judged about three or four hours after the fish was nailed up. You can imagine how it smelled then. We did spin the Wheel of Fish for the judge, which he found very amusing. If you want more of this nastiness, I am pictured in this issue of the Chicago Maroon nailing a chunk of fish to the wheel (it's on page 8 or 9). Let us never speak of this again!



The World's Largest Newton's cradle! I would reprint the supplementary letter (which I cannot describe on a family blog), but it is highly inappropriate. Rest assured that it was very, very funny.



Inside the Hall of Judgment, which is where you all stored your luggage during our first overnight program.



When Judgment of regular items began, each Judge was assigned a page (here is the page 10 Judge), teams looked for the pages they wanted judged, prepared the items, invited the Judge over and had them evaluated. Because our Internet according to Ted Stevens was taking up a lot of space, we decided to have page 10 judged first. Here we are sending "internets" to ourselves using this "series of tubes." (In case you haven't read the wikipedia article about this, Ted Stevens used the phrase "an internet" when he meant to say "an email" or "a message," and for this he has been relentlessly made fun of (for good reason!).)



The Page 10 Judge talks to the Page 10 Page Captain about the Four My Little Ponies of the Apocalypse (on the table in the foreground). (Item 204)



Using a strobe light we make droplets of water stand still. You can't tell, but they were.



A Page Captain and a Judge.



A home-made theremin is at the bottom right. At the top is "The Anarchists' Cook-book, complete with the Anarchists' Crock-pot." Ha ha ha. I can't find it on the list right now, but it's there.



Now THIS is the sweetest series of pictures I have. "Item 134 - Diet Coke and Mentos Jetpack." If you have never put a mentos in a diet coke, you should try it but BE CAREFUL. You will get soaked if you are not careful. If you have, you already know what I am talking about. You can find videos on YouTube easily enough. (There's one in which a guy pretends to die, which is silly, to which a response has been posted which is even lamer - don't watch those.) Anyway, Louis and Alan devised a pretty cool method for creating Diet Coke and Mentos Missiles. There are probably liability issues involved with my describing it in detail, so you'll have to ask them yourselves. Here they have started the reaction and are shaking the bottle to make it more intense. They will wait until the top of the cap starts to bulge from the pressure in the bottle, then they will unscrew it a little bit and then...


They throw it right at the ground. The cap blasts off and the bottle takes off like a rocket. I saw this with my own eyes. This bottle went 20 or 30 feet into the air and over 50 feet horizontally. I really, really wish I had taken a video instead of just a picture. This was probably taken about a quarter second after the bottle hit the ground. You can kind of tell that it is moving quickly because it's blurrier than the rest of the picture. If you are going to try something like this at home, be really, really, really careful. Louis (on the left) almost got blasted in the chest by a flying Diet Coke bottle on Saturday night as he and Alan (on the right) practiced.



Here is where the bottle came to rest. It actually landed about one foot away from a tourist taking pictures of Rockefeller Chapel. He looked at us with shock and horror, as if to say "you almost killed me... with a bottle of Diet Coke!" Before he could recover from his surprise, we picked up the coke bottle (= "the murder weapon") and ran back into Ida Noyes. That was a COOL item.



These fools tried to make an actual jet pack. I gave them a box of our Mentos... unfortunately they didn't really know what they were doing. Their plan was to drop the mentos into the bottles, close them, let the reaction get started and then open them again. I warned them that it would move much to quickly for that, but they didn't believe me.



As soon as the Mentos were added to the Diet Coke, all the carbon dioxide came out of the solution, bringing most of the Diet Coke with it. They succeeded in completely soaking this guy in coke, but not in anything else. Nice work!



He he he... Item 122 - "A painting of Invader Zim's [ = President Zimmer's] mama. Note: mama must be depicted with the wings and teeth of an African bat, a glass eye with a fish in it, a peg-leg with a kick-stand, and an afro with a chinstrap." These, of course, are components of your-mama jokes (and of a song by that name by the Pharcyde). Previous ScavHunt lists always involved President Don Randel, who was referred to as Tony Randall. Bob Zimmer's tenure (so far) has been a bit stormier, shall we say, so the Judges are not being quite as nice. I hope they donated it to the President when Judgment finished...



At least four hours later the Rubik's Cube is still unsolved, but he's getting closer.



And this was the last picture I took before leaving to go home with Judgment far from over (it was about 4:30 at this point). Someone was supposed to jump out of this cake and probably did, but I had no space on my camera, no battery power and no energy. Happy 21st Birthday, Scav Hunt!



In the end, the winner was announced at about 6:30 or 7:00 pm, about 9 hours after Judgment began. Snell-Hitchcock was victorious, beating out Max P by about 200 points (out of about 4,000). While this was sad, it is not good to have any one team win too frequently, and many of my friends who are graduating this year have now promised to come back next year to ensure that Max P beats Snell-Hitchcock. They will not be satisfied until victory is ours again!

Max Palevsky came in second and The FIST (Federation of Independent Scavenger Hunt Teams) came in third. This is notable and important... The FIST has made great strides since coming into existence about five years ago. It's good to have a third serious contender to balance out the recent dominance of Snell and Max P. My hope is that when the New Dorm opens in two years it will have an enthusiastic community of ScavHunt participants and so will be a third serious contender. We will see! If you are living in Shoreland next year, be sure to participate! From winning as recently as seven years ago they have fallen to second to last place this year. They should do better. (When I'm not working in admissions I'm a ScavAnalyst for ESPN...)

To conclude, I hope you have all enjoyed my chronicle of the Hunt and are excited about participating next year!