latenight playtime

Last weekend was the first Friday Night Waltz DJ'd by Richard Powers in a while. It was soo crowded and so hot. But it was fun...and ended with us testing the kitchen's patience at the Cheesecake Factory till 1:30 AM...

Saturday night was The Game, sort of. It was on campus, and my first bike-powered Game. Which basically meant they could send us from Mirrielees to the modulars all the way on the west side back to the tennis stadium on the east side to the Mausoleum to the north to the Faculty Club to the south...it was exhausting. But we emerged victorious nevertheless.

Best clue ever: A CD labeled "Tunes 4 U", with 45 minutes of music on it. Each song has some random length of silence at the end, which you can find out by ripping the tracks and opening with an audio editor. Then you can take the seconds of silence and the seconds of each track...

...or you could listen to this suspicious quiet part in the middle of track 4, which contained a drumbeat that was spelling out GPS coordinates in binary.

...or you could listen to the song itself on track 4, which is "Bare Necessities" from The Jungle Book:

Don't pick the prickly pear by the paw
When you pick a pear
Try to use the claw
But you don't need to use the claw
When you pick a pear of the big pawpaw
Have I given you a clue?

And then the music fades out abruptly and mysteriously. Anyone know where on campus this was?

Worst clue ever: Ten bags of mini candy bars, meant to be arranged by the year they were first released, then interpreted as Morse code by their manufacturers (Mars or Nestle), yielding "370.21.O35". Now, being techies, we all thought this meant building 370's lecture hall, seat O35, and some useless 21. Maybe it's readily obvious to anyone who actually gets books out of the library that this is a call number. (Is it? My informal study of one fuzzie seems to say so.) But it turns out that if you go look this book up in Socrates you get:

The wilderness and the laurel tree; a guide for teachers and parents on the observation of children. O'Gorman, Ned. Holding in EDUCATION.

You might think that you're meant to go to the Education library, where the book resides, or perhaps Bing Nursery, where children are observed. Nope. Turns out there's a modular called Laurel that's waaay over here, nestled among other obscure, identical-looking modulars named Oak, Poplar, and Acacia in a "wilderness" of trailers.

No wonder that clue took us an hour and a half to get...