2009 Washington Post Hunt
Jen and I did the Washington Post Hunt today with Sheffi and Clint. It's a short (a few hours), fairly easy annual puzzle hunt written by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten, and Tom Shroder. We had lots of fun and came very close to winning, but did not.
This year's hunt started at noon at Freedom Plaza, a block-sized empty concrete plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue a block or two from the White House. Coincidentally this is across the street from my office, so we met up with Clint and Sheffi at 11 am and headed over (after running by Au Bon Pain for breakfast/lunch). The forecast threatened rain, so we drove and parked at my office and got to the plaza 15 minutes or so before kickoff. It was crowded and they were out of copies of the magazine; luckily Sheffi had brought one with him. It didn't feel like there were more people than last year, but still a good crowd showed up.
Post Hunt works like this: in the Washington Post Magazine are five questions, a DC map, and a whole bunch of clues paired with numbers. The questions are all really easy and obvious (sample: "What can the letters in 'Adrian M. Fenty' [the mayor of Washington] be rearranged to spell? A. 'Darn Yam Feint'; C. 'Damn Fiery Ant'; F. 'Fanny Am Tired'; K. All of the above, as well as 'May End In Fart'), and each gives a letter. At noon, the sponsors announce five numbers, which go with the five letters to give five coordinates on the map in the magazine. You run (really, walk, since there's tons of time) to those five locations (a copy of the map is here) and solve the puzzle at each location. Each answer is a number, and each number matches a clue in the magazine. Then at 3 pm they announce the final clue, which launches into endgame. If no one's won after a half hour, they give more clues.
In the order we solved them in, the puzzles were:
1. We went to O8, the plaza outside Aria restaurant across the street from my office. There was a guy standing under a tent and passing out cards to each team ("one per team, please," said the staffers doing crowd control). He had a tie on with a bunch of clocks on it, and white cotton gloves on, one with a fingertip cut out of it. He was very conspicuously not saying anything, though the cards said something like (paraphrasing, since I don't have the card anymore) "What letters are missing from what I say?" Except, of course, he didn't say anything. So we wandered around for a bit, and flipped through the magazine, before deciding to move onto the second puzzle. Then while walking to the next puzzle, Sheffi happened across this article in the magazine: a "First Person Singular" column by a guy who owns a clock shop. We quickly worked out that all the letters are used in the column except S, I, and X. So the answer was 6, with the clue "At 3 p.m. we will give you the end."
2. We then walked the rest of the block to E14, out in front of the Old Post Office Tower across from my office, where there were two people dressed as classical Greek statues, with white togas and body paint. Both were posing, frozen still except for occasional shifts to a new pose. Staffers were handing out cards with the following text:
According to ancient Native American legend, the Earth was originally pooped out of an eagle.
PLUS
It is believed to be the world's largest freestanding polyp.
MINUS
Little Alice loved hanging out with Uncle Henry, but she kept a sledge hammer ready in case he got frisky.
So clearly we needed to get three numbers &mdash but there were only two statues, and in any event it wasn't remotely obvious how to get a number from either. So we flipped through the magazine and got nowhere, and decided to move on. (We knew there were statues on the map, but didn't put two and two together yet.)
3. We moved onto K6, the stage where Dave and co. kicked off the hunt, where there were two guys dressed as Uncle Sam calling out "Post Hunt stimulus plan!" and tossing out fake $100 bills. The bills were smaller than usual and had a few edits from real bills, including replacing "IN GOD WE TRUST" with "IN GOLD WE TRUST." They also had a red stamp on the back from a bank that advertised in the magazine. The stage also had some commodity prices: oil for $50 a barrel; gold for $893 an ounce; corn for $5 a bushel; steel for $1000 a ton; kobe beef for $102 a pound; and caviar for $90 an ounce. We figured the answer might just be 893, but we also weren't certain the bank was real (the ad looked kind of photoshopped), so we called the phone number on the ad and pressed for extension 893 just to be sure. That didn't give us anything, and we realized that all six numbers were possible answers, so we figured it was just 893. That gave us this clue: "'Do not foreclose on this home, Snidely!' 'Indeed, I shall not - for two thousand dollars, your daughter's virginity and 24 toy poodles!'"
4. From there we crossed 14th Street from Freedom Plaza to this hidden enclosed fountain/pool thing I'd never seen before. There the hunt organizers had set up two podiums for a congressional-style debate, with two people in suits debating House Resolution 98999. They kept saying that the key thing this bill was missing was "accountability," how there was no "accountability" in the text, that that was the key word. Occasionally they referred to the House and to its 435 members. And they mentioned young, tech-savvy people. We recognized 98999 as an SMS short-code, since the rules to the hunt had said that we would need a text message-capable cell phone, and we texted "accountability" to 98999. Kind of unmotivated, but Post Hunt puzzles aren't generally that elegant. Immediately we got a response telling us the answer was a simple majority - i.e., 218. That answer clued "It starts five-three."
5. From there we crossed through the back of the pool-like thing to 15th Street and started walking down toward the final puzzle. On the way we saw, in the same block as the pool, a guy with a sandwich board with a number and an arrow pointing (we thought) toward the puzzle we had just come from. We had seen a similar sandwich board across Liberty Plaza from the stage, and we decided that each arrow pointed toward one of the puzzles - this one pointing to the debate, and the first one pointing south, toward the clock guy. So we noted it and moved on, figuring we would find five numbers pairing with the five puzzles.
When we got to the last puzzle, a little north of Constitution Avenue on the grassy lawn between the White House and the Washington Monument (apparently this is called President's Park; who knew?), we came across a series of large statues. (Which I keep typing as "statutes.") There were a statue of a ghost with a voice bubble next to a cannon, and then a statue of a vacuum cleaner, and then a statute of four eyeballs followed by an hourglass. Sheffi and Clint immediately got Buchanan from the first set (boo+cannon), and I quickly thought "Buchanan sucks something" (because a vacuum cleaner sucks, of course) before they said Hoover and Eisenhower (eyes and hour). I used my iPhone to look up what numbers those presidents were and we got the answer 153,134 (15th, 31st, 34th). There was also a pencil with all the presidents on it in our goodie bag, which was otherwise sponsor swag, so it was solvable even if you didn't know all the presidents or have web access. (It says something about the ethos of the Post Hunt that asking the participants to figure out, on their own, what numbers the presidents were is considered fiendishly evil.) 153,134 gave us the clue "Let it
."
We looked around a little for a guy with a number and, failing, headed back toward Freedom Plaza. When we got up to 15th Street and E Street we saw a crowd around this elevated statue to our left. We couldn't tell if they were just tourists or what, and it wasn't a site with a puzzle on our map, but it was on the map and there was a statue there on the map, so we went to check it out. It turned out to be a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, and there was a guy there with a sandwich board number. It looked like the arrow could be pointing due south to the presidents puzzle a couple of blocks away, but the guy was also standing by a statue, so I think we decided at this point that the numbers had to do with the statue puzzle. We had three numbers at this point, but none of them obviously went with the three clues, so we decided to check out the others on the map.
On our way back we revisited the one at Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Street, which, we now realized, was very clearly an eagle pooping out the planet Earth, which was quite nicely confirming. So we checked down 14th Street on the side of the Reagan Building and saw two statues, each with a sandwich-board number and each containing a man and a small girl, one of which had a sledge hammer. Jackpot. So we re-checked the one we had seen originally, which wasn't obviously a giant freestanding polyp, and then we checked the Reagan Building plaza. Where there were two statues of flowers, and one giant polyp. Each with number guys. So we had our final answer, 424 + 313 - 157 = 580, and our final clue, "For cinematic realism, madam, you will be tied to a four-poster bed and compelled to squeal as we tickle your feet with an emu feather."
At this point we had an hour and a half to kill before the final clue, so since my office was less than a block away, we grabbed food from CVS and the convenient mobile pizza vendor and went and borrowed a conference room overlooking Freedom Plaza. We ate; talked through our five solutions to make certain they were right; wrote our clues out nice and neatly so we could move quickly during endgame; and played volleyball with the swag-bag inflatable beach ball. In the end, our clues were:
218. It starts five-three.
6. At 3 p.m. we will give you the end.
580. For cinematic realism, madam, you will be tied to a four-poster bed and compelled to squeal as we tickle your feet with an emu feather.
893. 'Do not foreclose on this home, Snidely!' 'Indeed, I shall not - for two thousand dollars, your daughter's virginity and 24 toy poodles!'
153,134. Let it
.
A few minutes before 3 p.m. the organizers took the stage, with Dave Barry strumming a guitar gently in the background, and Tom Shroder announced that they would only announce the final clue once. At 3, he started playing and sang "Old McDonald had a farm," and gestured to the audience, which sang "E I E I O" loudly. Dave stopped playing, and Dave said something like "turn that over in your head." So we immediately got 01313 and, per clues 218 and 6, added the beginning 53 to the end we had been given, giving us the phone number 530-1313. We called that number (area code 202) and got a recording telling us something like "the essential words will be revealed after four." So we took the other three clues and took the things immediately after four (or fore, or for, or 4) and got POSTER CLOSE TWO TOY LET, or POSTER CLOSE TO TOILET. And there was a toilet on the map, at 14th Street and F Street, at the downtown Filene's Basement. (Which just happened to be a Hunt sponsor.)
So we started running, first through the crowd and then up 14th Street. Where we found three posters - the Eiffel Tower at night; R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars; and a guy kicking a soccer ball. Three posters is, of course, not "POSTER," so we were confused for a minute until we realized we had missed a word and the actual clue was CINEMATIC POSTER CLOSE TO TOILET. We were actually there very quickly - I think the first team, but it couldn't have been later than second or third. And within a few minutes a bunch of other teams ran up, including Trip Payne's team, which made us happy.
We went very quickly from R2D2 and C3PO to those four coordinates (R2, D2, C3, and P0) on the map, which was clearly the right step: each coordinate showed a very clear, distinct item, and they seemed to be saying something. We just couldn't figure out quite what that was. They were, in order, a hand gesturing "stop" or something to a kid riding a donkey; a jail cell; a "#2"; and a boxer punching out Dave Berry. We knew we needed some sort of instruction out of this, and based on "cell number 2" we expected it to give us a phone number to call. So we spent a while trying to turn the hand into a verb - "punch" or "push" or something else indicating "call" - and the boxer into a six-letter string we could combine with 2 to get a phone number. We'd have something like "punch cell number 2-BOXXER." But that's pretty weak.
After flailing a little we decided to go check out the intersection with the hand, which was two blocks away, to see if there was anything there. There wasn't, of course. We also went through the magazine carefully to see if there were any ads with explicit references to cell phone numbers - and found one, a page with ads for four realtors, each listing a cell and an office number. And one of them had something in her bio about being a marketer on steroids or something. We figured maybe she was a boxer, and we needed to call her cell phone number. She was very confused.
Eventually we wandered back to the plaza for the 3:30 clue, in case the hunt hadn't been won; of course it had. So we heard how all the puzzles worked and listened to the boos over the statue puzzle, which apparently something like 5% of teams solved. And then we felt like idiots: the hand was just "hand," giving the clue "hand cell number to boxer." I.e., go to where the boxer is on the map and hand the boxer (in this case, a boxer dog) your cell phone number. And then you win. So one silly insight away from victory. I don't think that was an unusual feeling this year; it seemed like a lot of teams were very close to winning. But still, it felt dumb.
Still, we had a wonderful time this year. On the whole, this year's hunt was better constructed and worked better than last year's. In particular, endgame seemed much, much better constructed, and the puzzles seemed more self-confirming. (Though the Chinatown puzzle last year is still my favorite Post Hunt puzzle.) I'll definitely do it again next year.