Saturday PM: The Scav Olympics!

[A Note - After remaining neutral for two days, it was at this point that I decided to start helping my old team, Max Palevsky. If you feel this compromises my journalistic objectivity and integrity, you are absolutely right!]

The first event in the ScavOlympics was 'Super Mario Street Luge'. That's not what the judges called it, but that's what it was. This is item five on the ScavOlympics list. Max P's contender is second from the left, wearing a helmet and some really snazzy white pants (which, by the way, he liked so much he didn't take them off for a while after the race).



All the competitors take their places at the starting line. Even though this will spoil the ending, the guy at the top left with two black plungers was so good at this I have only to suspect that he is a champion Super Mario Street Luge-r. He beat all of the other competitors by many, many lengths.



And they're off. The above-mentioned Street Luge Machine from Snell-Hitchcock took off with the assistance of his rocket-powered plungers and had basically finished the course by this point. Louis (pictured here) showed grit and determination. Sadly it was at about this time that he ate a rock accidentally. He finished third.



On the final stretch! I don't know who is in second place, but whoever that person is he or she does not look as cool as the first or third place finishers. Style points matter, as you all know.



At the finish line, Louis celebrates. You can't tell because he's still tied to the skateboard.



As I'm sure you can guess if you are following along on the list, this is item 1 on the Olympics list: "Whip it. Whip it good." The object was to whip only the middle bottle in a group of three and leave the other two standing up. Unfortunately none of the contestants were any good at this game, so I'm not going to waste much space on it.



Nope, you missed.



And you missed too.



This dude issues a challenge, I think. Or maybe he's saying 'no one is any good at this game, so let's do something else'.



Something else indeed! This guy from the Max P team (whose name is Hercules (or Herakles, actually)) is chilling out waiting for event #4: "Foot race, only your feet are watermelons."



This event is item 7: "We whisper, you draw, you write, you draw, you write, we read. It's four person telephone Pictionary." The results were funny in the end, but I don't remember them and there's not much to look at, so I didn't waste pictures.



Now this was much more fun. Item 2 - RPS 25. That, for the unitiated, is Rock, Paper, Scissors - 25, i.e., a Rock-Paper-Scissors-like game with 25 different hand signs. As it says in the item description, "you'd better have the rules (and the moves) down." Because I know all of you are going to be curious, that information is provided here. What really surprised me is that all of the players and most observers really DID learn all the rules. For example, the axe reflects the light of the moon, so axe beats moon. (Yeah... some of the outcomes don't really make any sense, but that's ok.)



The first two players step up to the line. As you can see, they are all business. The guy on the right is thinking 'I'm going to Rock-Paper-Scissors your ass all the way back home to your momma'. You can see it on his face if you look closely.



I think this is Sponge vs. Monkey. If it is, the guy on the left wins, because "monkey tears up sponge." See the rules above if you don't believe me. These two players also threw the same sign three times in their round, which was impressive.



A captain in a fetching ball gown takes on someone who is not in a fetching ball gown. Too bad for him.



Oh the excitement! This was a higher-tension game than you might expect, as you can see on the captain's face. What sign is he making? I can't really tell.



I thought this was alien vs. alien, but the sign of the person on the right is not so clear. Maybe it's nuke? If it's not a tie, then she wins (because "alien defuses nuke"). You should all learn the rules of this game and introduce it to your high schools. We need a new and more complicated way of settling trivial disputes than RPS-3.



Item 6: "Needed: One Geometrician, one straight edge and one compass. Only the straight edge and compass... are people?!" None of the other teams had a chance to beat Max P's team. The guy in the green jacket is a high school geometry teacher (and recent alum). The girl in the pink (Agnes) is our secret weapon, as you will see in a second.



Ha! That's a straight edge. The task was to find the perpendicular bisector of a line marked with a string on the ground. Of course we just traced two arcs from the ends of the line (I picked Agnes up and turned her towards the center while someone held her foot to make an arc) to find their intersection, which marks the bisection point, and then found a perpendicular line through that point. Easy.



The point of intersection of the two arcs.



Now we have the midpoint...



Here we double-check our results. Just so you know, we were one inch off on one side and right on on the other. Go us.



While this was going on the watermelon foot race got underway. You will notice that some runners are facing backwards. They were ordered to do this because the judges judged that their feet were not actually watermelons. The guys on the ends, for example, had cut entirely through so their feet were sticking out the bottom.



Cool Herc leads the way to the finish line!



And the aftermath.



Three-legged limbo gets underway (item 3). This is much harder than you might imagine, though not at this height.



Round 2: Still pretty easy.



Snell-Hitchcock gets disqualified (for bending at the waist and touching a knee to the ground).



Oops. They did not make it.



Oral Jenga (item 8)... The judges are sick and devious. Fortunately, the competitors were amazing and the game lasted for a while.



Max P's man was an Oral Jenga machine into the 20th round.



The tower starts to fall... Can he hold it?



No! Damn!



This girl lasted for 23 rounds. I don't think I can play 23 rounds of regular jenga with my hands.



Alas, victory was not hers.



After TWENTY FOUR rounds, this girl won. Amazing. (And behind them is Eckhart Hall, where you will take your math placement tests in September. Yippee!)



The final ScavOlympics item: "Teams of two should bring their sledge and shifgrethor to compete in this year's ScavOlympics." Here the contestants take the starting line. Snell-Hitchcock's 'sledge' was a shopping cart. Other teams objected that wheels were a bit unfair. When the judges allowed them to proceed, one team tied a skateboard to the bottom of its sledge. Max P (at the right) stayed with our sled-sledge because that was the spirit of the item. Snell's shopping car did have a fire-extinguisher propulsion mechanism on the back which actually worked. Unfortunately I did not get to take any pictures. Mad props for that, Snell-Hitchcock.



These men could pull an elephant up a mountain... Fortunately here they were only pulling Agnes, who weighs much, much less than an elephant. Louis runs along beside them and offers words of encouragement.



The passenger is half-smiling/half-crying because the back of the sled is beginning to melt a bit from the heat so it's no longer very comfortable. At this point Max P's heroic champions are well ahead of anyone else who is actually pulling a sledge, though they are behind Snell's shopping cart.



The END. We win! Hoorah! This concludes the ScavOlympics. Now, on to Judgment Day!



Later today and tomorrow:

1. Midnight at Max P.
2. Judgment Day.