Monday, May 09, 2005
The Hunt: The Rest
Well, that's over. Later, all.
I mean, yeah, how about that rest of Scav Hunt? I should probably talk about that, seeing as I said that there would be more to come. So, here it comes:
In general:
The weather was excellent. I can only assume that Weathorr was pleased with the icons created in his honor (I sure was.)
Friday Highlights:
Scav All-Stars at the zoo: Judge Stampy totally won the critter-flicking contest, judged by number of body-lengths traveled.
The party: Honestly, the best Scav Party I've ever been to, in six years of going to Scav Parties. This is both because of the inherent awesomeness of the parties and the length of time said awesomeness was maintained. Past parties have tended to start off strong then contract as you near midnight and the booze runs dry, eventually fusing into, in MK parlance, "the singularity." This singularity becomes the site of the major Scav debauchery, as witness last year. This year, however, the parties kept rocking well after midnight, but with a good kind of rock, devoid of the nude grindery of the aforementioned year. Party shutdown was relatively orderly and ran into few problems (the only major one being some wasted frat dude who refused to give up his lit tiki torch, which he kept dropping onto the grass). The presence of one sober judge and several semi-sober judges brought balance to the Force. Incidentally, I drank more alcohol in a shorter period of time at this year's party than I have in my entire life. Despite this fact, I was still one of the soberest judges. (Any evidence to the contrary was assuredly fanciful jest.)
I was originally doubtful of the "party-party" idea, but in the end each team really made something special out of something fairly ordinary. My favorite things:
F.I.S.T. (Tupperware party): Tupperware fountain, marching band (complete with older gentleman), and dead-on sell of the product.
Max Palevsky (Kiddie birthday party): Goodie bags, duck-duck-goose, and WATER BALLOON FIGHT!
BJ (Pool party): Fire-tossing. I don't know what it has to do with pool parties, but it was cool while it lasted.
Snell-Hitchcock (Superbowl party): Sheer size (easily an entire Snell's worth of people there), Harold's Chicken-eating contest, Blue, limbo (required by law), and a great musical selection.
Broover (Irish wake): Paddy O'Furniture, rest his polyethylene soul.
Broadview (Slumber party): See photo above!
Shoreland (Tea party): Proper embracement of both of the possible interpretations, Alice in Wonderland and the Boston Tea Party.
Pierce (Post-prom party): Clinton in the bed...why?
Vegans (Communist party): The vegans randomly chose this party. Cosmic!
In general: Four live bands. Wow!
Absolute highlight of the Hunt:
Valley as Palevsky's Guitar Wolf at the party. I literally wept with joy. LOCK'N'LOLL!!!!
Saturday highlights:
ScavOlympics: gruelingly long but still very enjoyable. My Olympic items went off even better than I had expected, despite a hospitalization incurred during one of them. Mao went perfectly--everybody was utterly flummoxed by the rule set, and penalties were handed out fast and furious. Most folks caught on eventually, however. The Office Sprace, despite the complexity of setting it up, was validated by its glorious conclusion: the utter destruction of many pieces of office equipment on the street outside of Haskell. Unfortunately, one dude got a little too hands-on with the destruction and got badly cut up (there's that hospitalization). Happily, similar injuries did not occur throughout the clean up process, despite the huge amount of glass shards and twisted metal strewn about.
Judgment:
Sadly, judges generally only tend to see the items from their page, so there's a limited pool of things to which I was exposed. Of those, the best were:
"Every Rose Has Its Chthon": teams nailed this one. I don't think I stopped laughing at any point during Snell-Hitchcock, BJ, or Shoreland's renditions. Single best lyric goes to Shoreland, for "Just like Remy LeBeau has his prawn."
Portraits of Weathorr: As I said before, even the malevolent one himself was pleased! Best overall was the F.I.S.T.'s, a charcoal depiction of a grim, Nordic deity straddling the Chicago skyline.
Plastinate a tilapia: Only one team actually did it, and that was BJ. An amazing job.
Pustulio: Causing Dan to implode.
IL State Fossil: Yet another reason to have grad students on the team--because they actually have access to hard-to-find items! Big ups to the F.I.S.T. for being the only team to actually bring in a specimen of Tullimonstrum gregarium as desired.
Disappointments: No one even attempted the Kraft Kitchen Kabaret. No one understood the "scariest baby." (The necessary clue for this item was in Judge Sara's bio on the Scav website. Check those bios, people!) There were no satisfactory jugbands (BJ and Palevsky's were the best, but the former didn't play any of the requested songs, and the latter did not play "Brothers" or "Barbeque"). Only a few teams did big, annotated pictorial layouts for Jon Stewart's Anthology of Public Domain Victorian Erotica as desired. Oh, well, you can't win them all.
The End: Had I been in charge, I just would have called the higher-pointed team the winner. That is exactly why I am not in charge. The correct decision was made in calling it a tie. Congratulations to Palevsky and Snell-Hitchcock on a hard-won Scav Hunt. In a year of solid efforts from all the teams, these two really put out stellar performances. The tie, a far cry from the Snell-Hitchcock blowout of last year, was not the result of a drop in quality of the S-H team (they were, if anything, better than ever), but rather, I would argue, of a renewed push for individual item quality on the Max team. By sheer force of numbers, Palevsky could complete the majority of the items on the list in years past, although sometimes quality got lost in search of quantity. Lots of items done, but lots of Photoshopped nonsense worked into the mix. Not so this year, where even minor items maintained a high standard of quality. I'm already excited to see what goes down next year (and the years to follow...will the new dorm finally be able to topple these current Titans of Scav from their lock on the top two spots?)
Post-Scav: It's got me down. Anyone, uh, want to hang out and talk about Scav Hunt some time? I've got a wicked case of the withdrawal, and I need some hair of the Hodag that bit me.
