adrian is rad

I don’t know how to do this at all in one post. I spent the last 12 days in Boston, NYC and DC.

The best part was seeing people I don’t get to see very much. Everything else places after that.

Tourism and whatnot:

• New York Transportation Museum is awesome. It’s in a 1930s subway station. On the tracks are 20 or so vintage subway cars from across the history of the New York subway. It’s pretty great.
• Brooklyn Museum is pretty good. A decent collection but definitely a second tier museum
• Coney Island is a lot of fun. The Cyclone’s first drop is heart-stopping and the sliding cars on the Wonder Wheel are pretty amazing.
• Baltimore Orioles vs. Texas Rangers. We had good tickets (3rd row of the bleachers). It was a good game and Camden Yards is a pretty great ballpark.

Music and Film:

• My friend played backup as part of My Brother the Welder’s first show ever. It was a good time. Good tunes and impressively precise for a first show ever.
• Lars and the Real Girl is an amazing movie. Touching and hilarious and awkward all at once. I really liked it.
• American Teen is a documentary following 5 people (and a handful of their friends) over a year at a midwestern high school. I found this very compelling and I was totally engrossed in each person’s stories. It also serves as a lesson in parenting–many of the parents in the movie just say horrible things.
• Shaun of the Dead. I managed to see this as part of an afternoon of TV. It was good, but I think I liked Hot Fuzz better.
• At my friend’s mostly-traditional Indian wedding, there was a really good dhol drummer providing a beat for dancing and the procession. It makes me want to learn yet another Indian double barrel drum.
• Other Music is a good small record store. I liked their selection and the people working there seemed pretty knowledgeable.

Food:
I ate so much food. Where to start:

• Hallo Berlin is still really good for sausage and fine beer.
• Patsy’s Pizza might have drugs in the slices they’re so good.
• Horace and Dickie’s is a fish and chips/ chicken shack that serves ridiculous portions for next to nothing around the corner from the Red and the Black (see below). I liked my crab cake sandwich ($4.80!) and their sweet potato pie was delicious.
• Three brunches in two days: because vacation is for overeating.

Pure ridiculousness:

• At a sports bar in DC on Sunday night, two guys were watching the PGA Chamionship. They were more into the sport than anyone I’ve ever seen. Our dinner was oft-interrupted by cheers or jeers. One of my favorite moments was near the end of the event: “FUCK! FUCK YOU, SERGIO!”
• On the 6 line in NYC, a 30-something black woman got on at one stop and proceeded to preach Jesus (in a pretty compelling and rousing style) for one stop. Then she sat down and read a book.
• While my friend and his girlfriend were disagreeing about something, I asked them if they were fighting. They responded that if they were fighting they would be yelling into each other’s mouths. They then proceeded to demonstrate: they opened their mouths wide, locked them together and proceeded to scream. I fell off my chair laughing.

Okay. That was the trip. Or some of it, at least.

This NY Times article reminded me how much I love Walter Lewin. I loved his classes and I remember a lot of the examples and demonstrations they talk about in the article.

My good friend gumbeaux did his PhD with Lewin so I’ve been getting odd and hilarious Lewin stories on the side for a few years as well.

FOCAL tep:

Snow cancelled plenty of days when I was young (though 2 hour delays were the best because you didn’t have to make those yo) but natural conditions haven’t canceled much more feel in the last 8 years. MIT just wouldn’t cancel classes…except for that one record-breaking snow fall. Otherwise, you’re already in hell, what’s walking a mile in 8 inches of freezing slush?

Well that’s all changing for me because tomorrow’s TYPHOON DAY. No school, no work across the region.

I was just thinking about some things I said in situations where I was looking for a job. I’m pretty amused (and proud) of a couple of the things I said.

1. To an Autodesk (makers of AutoCad) representative at the MIT job fair:

So why doesn’t MIT use or teach AutoCad?

2. To an engineer at NASA - Ames interviewing me about a environment-surveying robot that used a parachute with a grappling hook to land on and drag itself up a hillside.

I can’t understand why you would want to solve the problem that way.

Needless to say, I didn’t get either job.

(I’m not actually that irreverent in general but sometimes I just get in a mood, I guess.)

(I should also note that I think both things are fair statements, even in retrospect.)

I lived in Germany during the summer of 2002 and I traveled nearly every weekend. I arrived in Germany May 28 and left August 23. Sometimes I use this blog to put things down that are at the edge of my reach memory-wise, so I can make a record of them. I actually have all of this written down in a notebook, but I can’t find it.

• May 31- June2: Bremen, to visit Colin[1]
• June 7-9: Düsseldorf to visit my Oma[2], Frankfurt to visit Sam Breuning[3]
• June 14-16: nothing
• June 21-23: Solingen, Köln to visit the cousins Füser[4]
• June 28-30: München[5, 7], Bayrischer Alpen[6] for MIT-Germany/ MIT Club of Germany meet up
• July 5-7: Vienne, Strasbourg France for the Vienne Jazz Festival[8]
• July 12-14: Berlin, for LoveParade 2002 and visit with Justus[9]
• July 20-22: Hamburg[10], Lübeck[11] w/ Christian
• July 26-28: Karlsruhe for the “Savage Seven” ultimate frisbee tournament as a part of die Sieben Schwaben[12]
• August 2-4: Romantic/ Clock Road, Rottweil; Stein am Rhein, Switzerland; Rottenburg ob der Tauber w/ Meredith Gerber[13]
• August 9-12: Pittsburgh, USA for Colin and Heather’s wedding. Surprise![14]
• August 16-18: Köln (to see Bugge Wesseltof) and Frankfurt, w/ Sam Breuning[15]

Footnotes:

1. Bremen smells like hops when the wind is the right direction because of Becks. The Schnoor area was neat, with its small and odd houses.
2. My Oma didn’t realize I was related to her for the first hour of my visit; the Alzheimers had started to take its toll. This ended up being the last time I saw her. I regret not having stayed with her for the whole weekend, but at that point I thought I was going to visit again that summer.
3. Sam was a cool British kid also with a German father; he’d been on the Cambridge-MIT exchange. We ended up hanging out a number of weekends that summer. I’ve since lost touch with him.
4. My dad’s cousin (my “Tante”/ “aunt”), her husband and kids (my “cousins”) were all gathered at their palatial family estate in Solingen for a sculpture showing of a local artist set up in their gardens. At one point we all, including the artist, were sitting under some trees eating a snack and they asked me if I liked one of the statues near us. I said, in stilted German, that I did (it was actually one of the few I did). It came out wrong and they made fun. I said “echt!” in vain. At another point this weekend, another cousin-by-marriage of my dad’s who was also visiting announced, after having talked to me for five minutes that I spoke “perfekt Deutsch.” Right…
5. We all met at a Biergarten, all the current students and the MIT Club of Germany members. I was stuck at the Club table for most of the night, which was extremely awkward. At some point I excused myself and snuck over the student table. Seeings as it was social interaction with people I didn’t know well, it was still awkward, but not nearly as much.
6. We went hiking in the Alps and stayed in a rustic ski cabin that one MIT Club member had access to. Sam and I got a ride down with a guy who spoke with a typical German accent except, because he’d spent multiple years as a ski bum in the US, mixed it with ski bum slang and inflection all the time. At the cabin, I learned I was ace at splitting logs with an ax, usually splitting decent sized logs in one swing. During one of our day hikes we stopped at an inn, where a 10 year old kid was drinking a 1 litre “maß” glass of beer.
7. It was the day of the final when we got back to Munich and I had the surreal experience of watching Germany play (and lose) in a World Cup final with 10,000 Germans in a public square where they’d set up screens. Turkey won the consolation match so there was some celebrating. (Note: Turkish is the largest minority in Germany by a factor of 4, at least at the time.)
8. Vienne has a Roman amphitheatre with gorgeous acoustics. Sam knew the mayor of Vienne so we got VIP passes into the events, including into a VIP area the first night where we passed the London Times jazz critic. Vienne was about 450 miles from Stuttgart, a good 7 hours, which we drove non-stop on Friday afternoon, on half a tank of diesel in a pretty amazing VW Passat TDI. We still missed most of the first act. Also, French radio sucks. I bought a CD-tape adapter after this road trip.
9. The LoveParade is a parade along a mile-long route on which 40 heavy duty trucks with world-class DJs and sound systems drive for an entire afternoon. Estimates for my year were 500,000 in attendance. Oh and there were a lot of topless girls there.
10. My (second) cousin Christian lived in Hamburg at the time. He’d stayed with us in America in the early 90s and he was out to repay the favor by showing me a good time. We went out with some friends. On the way there, he’d talked to them and said he was bringing his cousin (”eine Cousine from mir”) with him. We got there and the friend said “this is your hair dresser (Friseur)??” See, they might sound alike on the phone; yes that doesn’t work in English and I don’t care. This was the first night that I drank more than one beer in a night, in fact, probably quadrupling my total beer consumption ever in just that night. The goal was to stay up all night and go to the Fischmarkt when it opened at 6am, but it ended with me falling asleep in a bar at 4:30am, having had multiple beers (mostly Heinikens while watching a crappy, but, let’s be honest, fun American cover band) and a good quantity of vodka. Incidentally, trying to explain complicated concepts in German wasn’t easy, let alone to a group of strangers in a loud bar while intoxicated. And, Malta, I can’t say your name correctly sober either; but you can’t say “squirrel” to save your life, so there.
11. The bells of the main church had fallen and melted from the bombings in WWII. They’d be left as a beautiful and poignant reminder. Lübeck in general is a wonderful small town.
12. “Savage seven” means no subs (the seven you have to start is all you have). Having gotten roped into this at the last minute, I played seven games of no-subs ultimate frisbee in two days. I can still remember the intense pain, mostly in my calves that I felt for the rest of the week. Walking on flat ground and up stairs, my right calf hurt intensely; my left calf hurt similarly walking down stairs. I couldn’t, and didn’t, win. Of course there were 6 flights of stairs between my office and the cafeteria/ train level at work.
13. This was a fun little road trip with another MIT-Germany person; Meredith was in Munich for the summer. We went to some classic historic German places. I also made my only trip to a Switzerland, to the town of Stein am Rhein, which was noted by the “strict” border crossing. “Passports? No, we don’t need to see those. In fact, you don’t even have to come to a full stop. Just roll on through!”
14. After the rehearsal dinner, I had some friends over, got tipsy on Mike’s Hard Lemonades and had to search for the right words to use in English. That I was thinking partly in German was a big step for me and I noted my progress.
15. Bugge Wesseltof had impressed Sam and I with his electro jazz stylings in Vienne. Plus we liked his awesome name, so we drove like maniacs (once again) to get to Köln by show time, only to be disappointed by his collaborative work with a female jazz singer.

I’ve been tired before. Back when I was at that place, I had weeks on end that were a complete haze, working on problem sets, projects, soldering until 4am then waking up at 7am so I could be at the machine shop at 7:45am when it opened so I could beat the rush.

There were times I was tired enough that I didn’t notice I was moving the tool into a piece of brass on the lathe axially instead of radially and I cut the piece in two and had to beg for replacement stock.

There were times when I was sitting in class and—dozing off in class was quite normal for me, even the over-caffeinated me—that I just woke up and the class was over. There was no head drooping and then waking with a nod repeatedly or really any idea or memory that I was dozing off. I was sitting there, taking notes and then, suddenly, I was waking up and the class was over.

I used to consider the amount of sleep I got last night a good night’s sleep. You got it pretty easy, boy.

Twice yesterday this happened at two different social functions:

Dev/ Kyle: Hi, I’m Dev/ Kyle.

Me: Yeah, we’ve met. I’m Adrian.

Both of these people I’ve interacted with a few dozen times. Do I look different? Why are people not recognizing me?

Which reminds me of a pretty great story. At some point Natalie Portman, who went to the little brick schoolhouse up the road was at an MIT party. She was milling around outside. My friend Will was waiting outside for people so that they could all leave. He’s there; she’s there. Both milling. So he walks up to her and says “Hi, I’m Will.” She apparently grunts and doesn’t shake his outstretched hand.

This was in post-Phantom Menace, pre-Attack of the Clones period; there had been a young Anakin but no grow Anakin yet. He had this intricate plan in which he’d bust his butt and get the Anakin part for Attack of the Clones. On the first day of shooting, she’d introduce herself to him, her male co-star. “Hi, I’m Natalie.” He’d then yell “Oh, we’ve met!” and storm out.

Needless to say, this plan did not come to fruition.

I don’t really get into webcomics much, but I’ve been really enjoying xkcd “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

It’s pretty geeky stuff, generally. Some of it reminds me of jokes friends would make in college (like thing jwerberg said about the Apollo 11 space shuttle and it having the same computing power as a TI-85 “and that thing can’t even do tan 90!”)

There are some of my favorites.

I may relate a little too much to some.

Some are at the heights of geek humor while others are just sort of random.

And then there are the ones about love.

Sometimes I have to remind myself to remember. It was a bit over a year ago—November 13 last year. FB was a good guy.

• Took a train across the country (Boston to Emeryville)
• Cycled around Lake Tahoe
• MIT
• Lived in Germany

Screw cars, we’ll put a fire truck on the Dome. Pretty impressive hack and an interesting memorial for September 11.

One thing that I was sad I never did while at MIT was help organize/ participate in a serious hack.

[note 1: I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a memoir of my time at MIT. I’m going to start posting some stories here as sort of a test bed. I don’t have a writing voice, much like I don’t have a singing voice, but I hope to find one.]

[note 2: What follows is, admittedly, a bit creepy, but it is not stalking nor was it ill-received by the parties involved.]

It was the Fall of 2001 and I was freshly a junior. A number of my friends had left MIT to live in and go to the other Cambridge across the pond. September 11 obviously hung heavily over that semester. I was taking a class in world music with the incredible George Ruckert along with the normal engineering classes and an incredibly hard German class (”Read this scene and memorize this speach from Faust by Thursday…”) with a woman named Dagmar which I eventually dropped after a month of struggle. I was living in 52 with Jesse which has a whole host of separate stories associated with it, but for now I’ll recount the story of the Lia Incident.
(more…)

This week I read Goat by Brad Land. (Here’s a review/ plot summary.)

It’s a memoir about Brad as a college student that gets abducted, beat up and has his car stolen. He’s pretty traumatized by the event.

A year later he joins his brother at Clemson, where the brother’s joined a fraternity. Brad decides to join the same fraternity. The hazing that follows gets to him and gets mixed up in his head with his previously trauma and he starts having nightmares every night and shaking constantly.

It’s a fast read and well-written. I was (technically) in a fraternity but even by MIT standards it was a bit of an outlier. By the time I was a senior I still hadn’t ever seen a keg in real life and we were more likely to have a discussion about LEDs or carbon nano tubes than getting drunk or getting lucky. And people didn’t even memorize our frat’s poems or history, let alone go through any more serious hazing. I knew this sort of thing went on and probably still goes on, but the details, the specifics were shocking.

All in all, it was pretty unsettling.

It also made me want to write a memoir of my college years. I’ve been thinking about this since about my sophomore year. I think it could be a good story.

I finished Moneyball on Thursday night. It’s about inefficiencies in the baseball player market and how they came to be exploited by the Oakland Athletics and their manager Billy Beane. I found it really interesting for a non-fiction book. I tend to like fiction books and read very few non-fiction books because I tend to get bored with them, but this one kept my attention throughout. I’d recommend it if you like baseball at all, especially now, with the baseball season fast approaching.

A few things that struck me while reading the book is the statistical significance of baseball. A hundred sixty two games a year. A few at bats a game. A few pitches per at ball. Overall, this leads to a statistically significant number of pitches and at bats. You can really run some numbers on this stuff and figure out what is significant in winning games, which is, as it turns out, something that people have done and is explained in this book. Football, with sixteen games a year, maybe a couple more, doesn’t have much statistical significance.

Another thing that stuck me is that all these people going into baseball now are from Harvard and Yale and crap. (Theo Epstein went to Yale). Where are all the MIT people in baseball?

In somewhat related news, I’m trying to read more. In the last month, I’ve finished How We are Hungry, Karoo Boy and now Moneyball. I’m starting Mysteries of Pittsburgh now. Hopefully I can keep this up. I like reading.

While getting my song recorded for this week’s cover’s contest, I ran across some old recordings I made. Some were total total crap of course. None were really polished and done, but some I liked anyway.

So I decided to share with you a few of these “lost songs.” These could also be called “unfinished songs.” Note that all of these are completely embarrassing in their own ways.

Freak in Me formerly known simply as piano1. I recorded this partly in the practice rooms at MIT so it had to have been July 2003. I haven’t touched it since. This may well have been the first thing I recorded with my own protools set up and microphone. The piano part sounds like a lot of the piano parts I wrote in those years but it’s good. The end is a bit freaky. I think I wanted that juxtaposition between the prettier piano part and the ending.
Freak in Me

Freak in Me (first.class.airline remix) While we were on our roadtrip, zooming across Colorado probably, our very own Andy was remixing piano1. All of the sounds in this song are from my version of the song, just heavily processed. This amazed me then and it amazes me now.
Freak in Me (first.class.airline remix)

Not now I guess I recorded this last January. It’s about a girl, of course. Some multi-parted song action, with my first recording of a wurlitzer.
not now

Highland Cathedral and Wings and Murdo’s Wedding My friend Indy was getting married and I was going to play the pipes at his wedding. He wanted to hear some of the options before the wedding so a few weeks before, I put these down very quickly using my fireside pipes. I hear tons of mistakes throughout (and my pipes aren’t 100% in tune), but that’s because I hadn’t actually learned the songs yet, I was just running through them from a book. I haven’t played much of the pipes lately, but maybe I’ll start playing again.
Highland Cathedral
Wings and Murdo’s Wedding

I think I’m going to do the Mystery Hunt for the seventh time this year, which is pretty funny considering that I’m not particuarly good at it nor do I take it particularly seriously.

It made me pretty happy when I was poking around the wikipedia article on the Mystery Hunt today that I remember a lot of the “notable events” and, in fact, know the named people in them.

After not knowing where it was for about a month and a half and having written it off as lost, I found my brass rat today. It was in the washing machine after I washed some clothes. I do my darks more than once every one and a half months so I can only guess it must have been in some pocket for two cycles.

I was thinking about some CDs that I used to listen to lots at the MIT music library. I’d listen to a whole lot of fiddle music. One was called My Love is in America and was the recording of the Boston College Fiddle Festival which had some of the greats like Kevin Burke and Liz Carrol on it. I couldn’t find it online, but then I checked the label, Green Linnet, and not only did they have it, but it was $4. You can listen to it streaming on their site too. It’s lower-fi than I remembered, but it’s got a ton of energy and some great songs.

Another great CD was Green Fields of America Live in Concert (with a lot of great Irish American musicians). It’s also on Green Linnet, but I couldn’t find it on their site. I called them up and it turns out that they have about 5 copies left. I got that for $10.

And currently they have free shipping (for standard shipping at least) so two CDs for $14 is pretty good.

I’m sitting in the W20 (the student center) at MIT, burning about an hour before I leave for the airport. I got in Saturday morning early and I’ve been going just about non-stop since then. I hope I sleep some on the airplane because I need to get some rest before I go back to work tomorrow morning. My goodness.

The itinerary, in somewhat chronilogical order:

• Brookline Lunch with Jesse. Cheap good diner food.
• hangin out at Jesse’s place. Watched The Breakfast Club
• Newbury Comics. Bought something for Logan Sandmeyer of duckmeup.com
• Pour House for half priced hamburger night with Elmo, Snellla, Sam, Jesse and Mim. I got the double Wisconsin, of course.
• Beers on the roof of tEp
• My Summer of Love at Kendall Square Cinema with mim and Jesse
• lunch at Thorton’s Fenway Grill with Abe and Amrys, followed by a game at Fenway with the same plus Colin.
• FroYo at Ankara with Abe and Colin
• Bukowski’s in Inman with Wally, Mim, Indy, Farhad, Wumph, Mim and Jesse.
• Get the new Night Rally and Clickers split 12″ from Farhad at April Fog.
• Breznev’s with Wally, Agi, Morton, Sarah, Blake, Paladin, Kraken, Mim, Andyl, Jesse, and Qwgbo. 2 Peking Ducks is a whole lot of fat!
• Newbury Comics (this time picking up the new Stars CD, a 2 CD Neil Diamond Set, and the old Time Are a Changin’ CD by Dylan) and a Frappe at JP Licks with mim.
• the 4th of July Part at tEp. The fireworks, despite other reports, were fantastic and very well done. The music selection in parts could be overlooked.
• Lunch with Amrys, stop by to see Georgeji (Prof. Ruckert), errands at my Boston bank, buying an MIT ringer T at the Coop, drink a dr. pepper while blogging this.
• get a sandwhich for the plane, hop on the T

I always sort of like the Engineer’s drinking song that we sung at ye ol MIT. The chorus of it goes like this:

We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers
We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers
Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum all day and come along with us
For we don’t give a damn for any old man who don’t give a damn for us.

I decided to poke around the web a little bit and, what do you know, people sing it elsewhere. Here’s a bunch of verses from schools and engineers all around the world!

Who knew?

I went to see the Evens last night at the Terman Middle School auditorium. What kind of band plays in a middle school auditorium besides one that was put together for a talent show? I’ll tell you. It’s Ian McKaye from Fugazi playing baritone guitar and Amy Farina playing drums. They both sing.

It was a tiny show. Three rows of 15-20 folding metal chairs and a few people in the back. I sat down in an empty seat at the front (about 6 feet from where Ian sat while playing) and almost immediately the dad sitting next to me asked if I’d gone to MIT. He’d seen my WMBR shirt. We talked about WMBR for a little bit, then he went on to explain to his 10 year old daughter that MIT was a nerd school and that she could go there for grad school but not for undergrad because he couldn’t afford it unless she got a scholarship. They also talked about internships for a while and somehow got on the topic of a spinning-talking-sensing pumpkin. The girl, quite amazingly, described a pretty good way to make this thing that would be nice to kids and try to scare adults. She was 10 years old (give or take, I never asked)! At age 10, I was trying not to cry into the paste I was eating.

There were too many amusing things to tell you all of them, but here’s a short list:

• Ian repeatedly asking if the people in the back if they were comfortable and if everything was under control.
• they finished a song with a hard vocal part. Ian: “How was that?” Amy: “Alright.” Ian: “Let’s try it again.” They do it a second time. Ian: “No, still not right. One more time.” A third try. Ian: “That was better, right?” Amy: “Yeah, that was good.”
• Ian went to Terman Middle School for 9 months in 1974-75 (I think) and told some stories about a school dance (in that very auditorium) and making a heart in wood shop with a torqoise inlay. It was stolen on the last day of school before he could give it to his crush.
• The aforementioned dad next to me at some point volunteered his 7th grade yearbook and Ian asked where he went to school. Dad: “I went to Paul Revere Middle School in LA.” Guy 1 (behind us): “I went to Paul Revere.” Guy 2 (in the back): “I I went to Paul Revere.” Ian: “See? We’re bringing people together.
• Ian asked people to sing along to a song. Ian: “Are you ready to give it a try?” The first person to say yes was Ian’s dad, who turned out to be in the back row.

It was an enjoyable and cheap ($5!) evening.

Oh and there was a girl there that looked like Emily Warman with long redish brown hair. There was a striking resemblance in facial features.

Other quick things:
I just found out that I’m missing Cat Power saturday. Dave’s coming today. We’re going on my company’s trip to this place in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

I spent basically the whole weekend doing the MIT Mystery Hunt. It’s a puzzle competition that’s pretty famous at this point. People fly in from around the country and the world to MIT to take part. My team, Project Electric Mayhem (or just Mayhem), has a west coast branch that operates out of the Bay Area. I hunted my four years at the Institute and now this was my second year out here.

The sort of puzzles that are in the Mystery Hunt are pretty intense. Usually it’s just a set of clues with little or no instructions or hints on what to do with them. One puzzle I got was something like this:

Hypoblast
Ohio College
US President
Witch Location
expressed differently
… [35 total clues]

01942
19025
19230
… [36 total]

the list of numbers was obviously zip codes. You look them up and you have 37 cities and states. Then you had to anagram (mix up the letters to get a new word) the city and state pairs and the anagram forms the answer to a clue. For example, look up 19025 and you’ll get Dresher, PA. That anagrams to rephrased which is the answer to the clue expressed differently. Now do this 35 times. Order the produced words in order of the original clues (which was arbitrary, the zip codes were in numerical order) and read down the first letters and you get HERBTARLEKDARRINSTEPHENSORKIPWILSON. And you have one zip code left, 56510, which is Ada, MN. You anagram that and look at the clue and, what do you know, Herb Tarlek, Darrin Stephens and Kip Wilson were each an AD MAN. And that’s your answer for one puzzle.

And there were probably about 120 puzzles this year.

And you take the answer to the puzzles for each round and then use those as the clue to solve meta-puzzle. There was an additional layer of meta-meta puzzles (not strictly true; we ended up calling these “super puzzles”) for each round this year as well.

Here’s a great write up of the sort of stuff that goes on during Mystery Hunt. I remember one year people made Rhett call up Noam Chomsky at home to ask him about a linguistics puzzle.

Mayhem did well. We had all the super puzzles except one solved. We suspect if we’d solved that we would have done a meta-super puzzle with all the answer from the super puzzles (and maybe the meta puzzles), the gone on the runaround in which you try to find the coin, which is hidden on campus somewhere.

Yes, hundreds, if not over a thousand people, do this every year and all for a simple prize; if you win, you get to write the Hunt for the following year. There is no second prize. When the coin is found, you pack up and go home.

Alright. Time to sleep.

[Update: Wally’s got a nice write up of the Mystery Hunt, including a nice piece of writing he did for the Technique.

I saw Million Dollar Baby last night. It’d been getting good reviews so I thought I’d check it out.

It’s good enough to warrant the praise. I remember after I saw Steamboat Bill, Jr. at LSC (with Marty Marks on the piano) with Wally, afterwards he wanted to leap and bound up the side of the student center, like something Buster Keaton would do. A good movie will make you do that. Today I want to jump rope and get some gloves and a bag.

Another sign of a good film is that it sticks with you. This one is so far. I’m still mulling it over.

The acting is top-notch. Hilllary Swank gives a fantastic performace. The sort of performance were she’d been living the life of the character all her life and someone asked her to do it in front of camera and she said “It’s all the same to me, boss.” Clint Eastwood. He acts almost by not acting. His performance is straight and without frills, yet that’s what it makes it so great; and that’s what keeps this movie real when it threatens to degrade into sentimental mush. Morgan Freeman’s performance as friend-cum-narrator is good, but not as nuanced as Eastwood or Swank.

The story could have stopped at other points or moved in different directions, but the success of the movie is in large part because it doesn’t take the easy ending. Not all the questions are answered. Much like Nowhere in Africa this movie benefits greatly from not telling the audience what is right or wrong, but to lay out a complicated story and leave it to the audience how to feel.

The screen play needs to be applauded as well. It’s told as one story line—no flashbacks, no starting the movie in 1958 and then jumping to present or whatever. Those sort of tricks would have hurt this movie.

Eastwood directs as well and he does a masterful job of minimalist film making. The movie, as well as his performance, are stripped down and presented without Hollywood tricks. It’s all there for you to see and that’s alright because it’s all good.

The film’s not perfect, but the reasons why are pretty nitpicky and I think many of you wouldn’t notice them unless I point them out, so I won’t.

I need to check out Eastwood’s other movies as a director.