[Image] [News] May 11, 1999 [Viewpoints] ---------------------------------------------- [Voices] [Sports] Burton-Judson team wins University Scavenger [Hyde Guide] Hunt [Search] [About] [Image] ----------------- Christine Back News Editor ----------------- Rummaging through boxes spilling over with Scavenger Hunt items retrieved during the past four days, the 12 teams participating in the University's campus-wide event held last weekend presented their inventory of hard-sought after objects, which ranged from a pack of Salem cigarettes signed by professor of Philosophy Ted Cohen to 100 burned-out light bulbs. After the 12 student judges inspected and scored the teams on Judgment Day this past Sunday, the winners were announced, with the Ruff Ryders team representing Burton Judson (BJ) Courts taking first place, the Mathews House team, Piratechnics, placing second, the Shoreland team placing third, Pierce P.H.U.Z.Z. placing fourth, and the Snell-Hitchcock team placing fifth. Following the ScavOlympics held on the Midway Plaisance, hundreds of University students crowded into Ida Noyes Hall for Judgment Day, carting in as many of the 339 items posted on the 17-page packet as possible. Scored on the basis of ingenuity and creative interpretation, items and activities on the roster were examined by the judges, each of whom helped generate the list. "All the teams demonstrated a tremendous amount of spirit. I was very impressed by that -- the fair play and quality of work," said Tom Howe, Scav Hunt head judge and third-year student in the College. The first place team Ruff Ryders, who earned over 14,000 points, were able to capitalize on the major point items and those which required a considerable amount of networking, including taking Dean of the Admissions Ted O'Neill shopping for mens' clothing, and getting a tenured professor to wear a tee-shirt with the words, Hugo 3:16 -- in this case, professor in English and world-renowned Shakespeare scholar David Bevington. "On Wednesday night, when the list came out, I emailed Ted O'Neill asking him if he could do it... On Saturday afternoon, he came and picked me up at BJ, and we went to Barney's [department store]. We went upstairs, and he tried on a couple of sports coats and 'bought' one that cost about $1400... I charged it to my credit card, and then returned the coat afterwards... He was a great sport about it," said Brian Richardson, a member of the BJ team, who videotaped the shopping excursion and showed it to judges on Sunday. In addition, Ruff Ryders co-captain Chris Wheat, a third-year student in the College, said that students were able to convince Bevington to wear the Hugo 3:16 tee-shirt and come to the judging at Ida Noyes. "We were able to get David Bevington to come on Sunday and wear the tee-shirt, and even stay around for a while to watch the Scav Hunt," Wheat said. "O'Neill would have come on Sunday, too, but it was Mother's Day, and he wanted to spend that time with his mother." However, Wheat said that one of the most impressive accomplishments of the team was exerting tactical control of Hyde Park, where team members manned street corners and directed traffic on Saturday evening. "One of the items was to get take complete tactical control over a desk, a classroom, a University building, Hyde Park, and Madeline Albright. Well, Madeline Albright was kind of out of the question. But we took over the Reynolds Club on Friday night, and on Saturday night, we set up between Ellis Avenue and Kenwood Avenue and between 55th and 59th Streets. We had two people at every intersection and diverted traffic in Hyde Park," Wheat said. "That was my ingenious plan. It was a lot of fun. I might just do that for the hell of it sometime." The tactical control feature of the Scavenger list resulted in a wide range of attempts to complete the assignment, many of which were successful. Overtaking the Ryerson Macintosh Lab filled with students writing their BA papers, the Pierce team was also able to gain control over Pierce Towers dormitory, where team members took all of the Resident Heads and Resident Assistants hostage and tied up the phone lines and power box under the guise of the PLO, the Pierce Liberation Organization. "Someone wrote a computer program that looked like we were monitoring the emails that were coming in and out of Pierce... We got the Cohens, the RH's of Pierce, to show us the fuse box and had control over the power box... We tied the Resident Heads up and had them upstairs. There was a viva la revolucion party going on with signs and banners all over the place saying things like 'It is good to die for liberty'... We had a dead body strewn outside... It was great. Every exit was sealed," said Colleen Peterson, second-year student in the College. Other teams made attempts at the high energy Physics buildings, including the Snell-Hitchcock team and the Mathews House team. Dressed in black and equipped with water guns, members of the Mathews team, which placed approximately 400 points behind the BJ team, took over the LASR physics building on campus, stationing team members at each of the stairwells and climbing onto the roof to wave its Piratechnics banner. The "nth Scav Hunt Pride Parade", which took place on Chicago's North Side on Saturday, along Halsted Avenue between Fullerton and Addison Avenues, also drew creative entries among the participating teams who made floats for the event. The Snell-Hitchcock team was able to get the public involved in the parade, according to co-captain Alexia Koelling. "For the parade, we actually had a car that joined us. We were throwing candy out into the crowd. People on the streets were coming out and seemed to get really involved," Koelling said. As a requisite for constructing the float, teams had to furnish their creation with symbols of "amor venationis." In their interpretation of the term, the Pierce team constructed a large ass which they hoisted unto a team member and used as their float. Amor venationis, according to a judge, translates to "love of the hunt." "We originally had this flat bed that we were going to use, but we couldn't get the casters to support it. So we constructed this ass and had a team member wear it and had people dressed up as semen running around handing out condoms... Everyone else had floats, but then we came along... and the crowd got really involved... We got this one guy to join the parade, and he told the judges that he loved Pierce Tower," Peterson said. While most of the Scavenger Hunt activities were held in the Chicagoland area, the road trip component of the event required students to venture around the Great Lakes states and into Canada, where teams had to complete a variety of tasks, including swimming in each of the five Great Lakes and bringing back a package of Tim Horton donuts, the Canadian equivalent of the Dunkin' Donuts chain. Erin Archer, a member of the Snell-Hitchcock team, said that during the road trip, she and fellow teammate Helene Felman made a stop in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where they completed item number 160: a picture of a team member performing at the Northpoint Exotic Dance Club. "We turned a corner on a dark highway to Mackinaw Island, saw the fluorescent lights of Northpoint Exotic Dance Club on the highway from Green Bay, WI, pulled off, and went inside. There was one room, and a bar full of drunk salesmen and yokels. We asked if more U of C people had been there -- yes, one other group. Helene Felman and I danced fully clothed to the cries of 'Naked, naked.' A paraplegic in a wheelchair was right in front, asking us to bring him on stage to dance with us. We left in a hurry," Archer said. The road trip proved more difficult than some teams expected, with various team members encountering unanticipated circumstances which even made mobility a hard task. "Our car broke down in Escanaba, Michigan, so we got a U-Haul to tow it. But the U-Haul broke down on the border of Wisconsin, so we hitched a ride with a trucker on the way home. But he couldn't take us all the way, so we had to take a cab back... The car's still in Wisconsin, so we're going to have to go back and get it," said Jennifer Sellers, a first-year student in the College and a member of Mathews' road trip team. In past years, road trip locations necessitated long periods of driving to cities such as New Orleans and New York. However, this year's loop around the Lakes was specifically intended to make the road trip less dangerous, allowing for frequent stops to rest and relax, according to Howe. "We tried to design the list so that the items wouldn't be undertaken illegally... As for the road trip, we made it so that they couldn't leave at night and that the trip didn't require one long stretch of driving," Howe said. Indeed, a major concern among administrators and Student Government was the safety of the Scavenger Hunt, and of the road trip component in particular. With no arrests and no accidents reported, the judges said that this year's event has been a marked success. "I think it was the most successful Hunt ever. We have to recognize the fact that there were no injuries, all the road trips went well, there were no arrests to our knowledge, no malicious acts between the teams -- all of this is great, and we're very proud of that," said judge Geoff Fischer, a third-year student in the College. "We were watched very closely this year, and there were concerns raised by the Finance Committee and the administration. I think we proved that the event doesn't have to be dangerous or illegal, and can appeal to the creativity and intelligence of students and be a successful event at our school." Howe agreed, saying that the ingenuity of some of the entries were in keeping with the intellectual character of the University. One of the items required that students build a breeder reactor, a nuclear energy source which recycles radiation from its reaction to create more fuel. Two physics students from the Mathews team successfully built the device and completed the item, inspired by the efforts of a Michigan high school student reported in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine. "I give Mathews House a tremendous amount of credit for the breeder reactor. This fell into the category of exceeding my expectations-- that was definitely one of the highlights for me," Howe said. Using the naturally radioactive element Thorium, fourth year students in the College Fred Neill and Justin Kasper contructed the device with scraps of discarded aluminum and carbon sheets. "We used Thorium... and turned it into weapons grade uranium and plutonium. We used the powder from vacuum tubes, and just scraped the Thorium powder off the insides. As for materials for the reactor, we used aluminum and carbon sheets which came out of the garbage. We did a little polishing and black magic, and turned it into a reactor," Neill said. While the actual construction of the reactor took four hours, Neill said that the most challenging aspect of the assignment was proving that the device operated correctly. "If someone looks at a pile of aluminum and carbon, they'll say you're full of it. You have to actually prove it... So we did some fairly intensive research on the nuclear disintegration that goes on inside the reaction -- it gives off a specific energy of photon that's released which proves that we've created weapons grade uranium. But they're very hard to detect, so we borrowed a proportional counter, which is like a Geiger counter, except much more sensitive, from the Physics department," Neill said. To verify the authenticity of the breeder reactor, Scavenger Hunt judges brought in a nuclear physicist to examine the device and determine whether the students had accurately constructed the reactor. "When the judges found out that there was a group that actually built one, they really flipped out... So we're sitting there making the reactor by my bed and a judge calls and says they're going to check this out and bring a nuclear physicist to verify it. I don't think he [the nuclear physicist] understood that we were serious until we started walking him through it and talking about decay change -- his eyes just bugged out. He was really speechless," Kasper said. "He endorsed it for the judges. It was funny because the judges were there taking notes just in case they needed to be able to judge another reactor." Although some judges and fellow Mathews teammates were concerned over the safety of the reactor, Kasper said that he and Neill took serious precautions during its construction. "It was all very well-controlled. We packed the materials..., built a shed, and assembled it there... We've stopped the reaction. We only detected about several thousand atoms of Uranium, so it's not like the source is radioactive by any means anymore. We might keep the reactor as a souvenir -- as long as the components are far apart, it should be okay," he said. Although the equipment that the pair borrowed to detect the Uranium was worth thousands of dollars, the materials used to make the reactor cost the team nothing, making the device an ideal Scavenger Hunt item because it relied on ingenuity rather than money, according to Kasper. "I think it was a really great item because it didn't cost anything, which is important. I mean, the Manhattan project cost one billion WWII dollars, and we were able to do this successfully without spending too much," Kasper said. Indeed, Howe said that the judging staff deliberately intended the Scav Hunt to be less costly, assuring that teams could participate without economic constraints. "I made it clear that this year would de-emphasize cost and emphasize resourcefulness... I didn't want any team to buy the Hunt, and I didn't think anyone did," Howe said. Resourcefulness, along with the rarity of the item, was one of the criteria by which the judges scored the teams, according to Howe. "There's a set point value, but the judge has discretion for partial credit if the item is not exactly what they were looking for. But a team could also be awarded bonus points for those who exceeded the judge's expectations, depending on the difficulty and resourcefulness of getting the item," Howe said. Although teams may have questioned the judge's decisions, Howe said that he is confident that the judges acted fairly and without bias. "I stand by the decisions of both myself and my judging staff. We tried really hard to make this fair, and we did the best that we could," Howe said. This sense of fairness was fostered among the competing teams as well, according to co-captain of the Mathews team Catherine Roberts, who said that this year's Scavenger Hunt was particularly reflective of students' sportsmanlike participation. "I thought it was wonderful. The Scav Hunt is so typical of the way this University has fun. It was really great to be a part of something crazy with people in your house and at this school. You end up doing things that you would never get a chance to," Roberts said. ---------------------------------------------- Top of the page | Front Page | News | Viewpoints | Voices | Sports | Hyde Guide | Search | About... ---------------------------------------------- www.chicagomaroon.com and contents © 2000, The Chicago Maroon email: maroon@chicagomaroon.com email the NEWS Calendar with information about events: calendar@chicagomaroon.com [Image] [Image]