ScavHunt is over!! We came in fifth, which was not particularly good but not particularly surprising, either. I'm glad it's over so I can return to the land of the living and actually get some work done. ScavHunt can probably best be summarised by a joke that one of the judges told on Thursday night:
Q: How many ScavHunters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: 100. 1 to screw it in and 99 to get naked for no apparent reason.

Admittedly, though, there usually was a reason. Our boys gone Wilde were really supposed to be wearing plaster of Paris and fishing twine and it's hard to get a lot of coverage from that. There was an item about a torch relay in your skivvies and apparently one of the judges really wanted to see a Dick Army, if you get my drift. We figured the point of ScavHunt was to make it impossible for as many people as possible to ever run for public office.

Isaac wanted to know what my favorite item was. I'm not really sure. I had fun working on the Echo Courts sign, but it was supposed to be 15-feet tall and made of sheet metal and only one team could really afford to build it right, so I don't really think it was a good item. The MarioKart go-cart race was cool, too, but again, most of the go-carts went on human power since people didn't have the time and money to do it right. I liked some of the little items more. I proved the existence of Max Mason dorm using the Axiom of Choice (well, the well-ordering principle) and transfinite induction since we weren't allowed to use Zorn's Lemma. The U of C porn website was cool, as was the Comma Sutra and the Foam Chomsky. I didn't think the party was very good, it ended up just being 8 separate parties rather than one big one.

Highlights:

• Our team captain, Keren, saying of one of the items: "Yes, I know it's only 8 points, but it's [judge's name's] item and he has a self-esteem problem, so we have to work on it."
  
• One list item was an unaltered orange with exactly seven seeds. We decided to just take a chance, so we just randomly picked an orange. The judge opened it, bitching about how he hated judging the item, mushed around in the inside for a little before telling us there weren't any seeds. Apparently the orange was from the dining hall and therefore a naval orange.
  
• Memorising one of Shakespeare's sonnets in 20 minutes.
  
• Seeing Laundry Boy give a ten minute version of the monologue from here. I think you had to be there.
  
• Seeing one of my former TAs in what appeared to be rabbit ears at the party on the Quads on Friday. Well, they might not have been rabbit ears, but they consisted of a pipe cleaner headband with two things that didn't appear to be antlers attached. I don't know what else they could have been.
  

Lowlights

• Getting more sleep last night than in the last 4 days.
  
• Running into Sudeep at Mr. G's at 10:45 pm while buying 8 bottles of juice for mixers for the party. Apparently Mike also came out of Kimbark Liquors for the first time ever and ran into Sudeep.
  
• The SearsTris tower debacle. We were going to skin a version of Tetris with the Sears tower in the background, Chicago-appropriate theme music, and little U of C building blocks. We got the first two working about 4 Sunday morning, but while adding the third, the computer crashed and completely wouldn't work after that. I went to try to do it Sunday about 12, and my ethernet card wouldn't work so I couldn't download the program on my computer. So, no points. I bought a new Ethernet card, but the old one seems to have fixed itself so I'll probably take this one back.
  
• The ScavOlympics item about blowing smoke into two lungs that Mo somehow morphed into a race the smoke-filled balloons thing. I don't know either.
  
• Driving all around Chicago on Saturday only to discover that almost everywhere I went was closed or didn't have what I needed or had NO parking. Sucked.
  

I'm glad I did ScavHunt. It's a chance to pretend I'm not a U of C student (and don't have any work to do) for 4 days. I'm glad it's over and right now I don't think I'd do it again. But I'll bet that when it comes time next May, I'll be back in the Tufts lounge (or wherever we end up working next year) to do it all over again.