Item #174: I’m sick and tired of giving directions to prospies. By Thursday morning at 9:00 a.m., erect a signpost somewhere on campus with arrows pointing in the direction of and giving the distance to: your Headquarters, three Hyde Park landmarks, and a city located on another continent. [21 points]

Photo by C. Smith

Item #43: Correct the greatest tonsorial tragedy of our time by donating your mustaches to the Institute of Politics. (4 points per mustache transferred to an index card and delivered to the I.O.P., up to 20 points)

Scav List

Item #3: Those sexy Halloween costumes never seem to pander to University of Chicago interests. Create two of the following: Sexy gargoyle, Sexy Ratner, sexy cMore, sexy Simone de Beauvoir, sexy Arley D. Cathey. (5 points each)

Item #12: Sorry Windows 95 users, no Stellar Souvenirs for you! The Space Jam website’s downloads only work for Macintoshes running Netscape. Replace the “N” in your Netscape browser logo with a hypercool spinning basketball, using the download from the original website.  (12.95 points)

Item #102: Thomas the Tank Engine and Theodore the Tugboat both adequately prepared me for the world of terrestrial and aquatic vehicles but times are changing. Create at 30-second video for today’s preschoolers that literally and figuratively puts a human face on Predator drones. (12 points)

Item #127: In his famous essay “Consider the Lobster:, David Foster Wallace investigates lobsters’ capacity to feel pain, but surely the pain of being boiled alive is only secondary to the many indignities of modern life. To that end, prove that lobsters really do feel pan by subjecting a live lobster to: heartbreak, work-related stress, existential dread, civil rights inequality, and sexual objectification. (11 points)

Item #150: We know that, as much as we hope they don’t, some Scavvies wear out during the Hunt and start to get a little sad. What if no one is in Headquarters when that happens!?! The solution? A hug machine! Must be platonic, but not cold, firm, but not uncomfortable. (<33 points. 10 more points if your team’s machine hugs another team’s machine before Judgment.)

Item #199: They say you eat with your eyes first. have your team’s best food stylists arrange and photograph a meal from a U of C dining hall that makes it look good enough to eat. Fake steam, acrylic ice, food coloring… all the usual tricks of the trade are fair game, but please provide a before photo of what the dish usually looks like for comparison. (12 points)

Item #252: Why isn’t there a comprehensive Wild Wild West wiki? Ideally called, “Wiki Wild Wild West”. Wiki wiki wild. Wiki wild. Wiki wild wild west. Like all good wikis, collaboration is encouraged. (3 points)

Hilarious Scav item selection from The Maroon, photos by Tom Tian. 

Scav list release 2013. It begins. #uchicago

By Jennedy24

Scav Hunt Items of Yore

Item 230, 2010: Man, the course catalog makes some classes sound so boring, but after seeing the theatrical trailer for one, I totally want to take it! Pick a seemingly boring class and make a video trailer of no more than three minutes. [16 points] 

In a world where Archaeological Datasets is offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1pm in Autumn Quarter, Snell-Hitchcock reigns supreme. 

Name that Scav Item!

A tiger bought by the Snell-Hitchcock scavenger hunt team is displayed on the Midway Plaissance. Photo by Jamie Manley, ‘14. 

From the exhibit On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life.

The Hunter Games

For four wild days, University of Chicago students turn scavengers.

“This year’s list, the longest in the twenty-six-year history of the Hunt, consisted of three hundred and fifty-one items. It filled nineteen pages and contained such challenges as: Build a ten-foot bridge across Botany Pond using nothing but balsa wood and glue (60 points). Revamp a Xerox machine for office warfare (12 points). Secure a meeting with the mayor of Chicago (25 points). Produce a scale model of the Great Lakes out of fire (15 points).”

Patricia Marx, Annals of Entertainment, “The Hunter Games,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2012, p. 26

Keep calm, and Scav on. 

uchicagomag:

What do the Senior Class Gift and Scav Hunt have in common?

Christopher Straus, U-High’84, AB’88, MD’92, tells all.

Imaginary Scav Team Names

Scav Hunt teams like MacPierce (Maclean + Pierce), Blintstone (Broadview+Flint House+Stony Island) and ye olde deceased teams like Broover (Breckinridge + Hoover House) rule the ScavLand with great combo names. Consider the comedic potential in the following imagined names:

Brony Island (Broadview + Stony Island)

The International House of Rock (I-House + Blackstone. Get it? Rock! Ha!)

Fat Max (Broadview and Max Palevsky. Broad Max? Yes?)

Max Snellevsky (Snell-Hitchcock and Max Palevsky) 

The New Graduate President’s Hall (Midway House + President Robert Zimmer… we can dream, can’t we?)

Scav Olympics

Perhaps no context is the best context. Enjoy the wonderful, quirky, brilliant world of the greatest Scavenger Hunt competition of all time: the Olympics. 

(Photos by Jason Smith)

The Scav List

Retrieving the list for the annual UChicago Scavenger Hunt (biggest in the world, wut) was more difficult than it seemed….just look at these photos by Jamie Manley. 

Also, note the excited panda in the first one :)

scav2012:

@varchambeau: #160 Using string an the architectural nooks & crannies in the quad, weave an inspirational slogan #scav2012 http://t.co/JyN50Nw1

Scav 2012

This year’s list is finally out! As UChicago descends into beautiful chaos, we present you with some of our favorite items:

• At the statue of Pocahontas, Buddy Holly sings with all the voices of the mountains. [5 points]
• You have one (1) minute to get a team member from their underwear to fully dressed. The team member cannot move, and all you have are as many helpers as you can use and some buckets of paint. GO! [12 points]
• Hershey’s French Kisses. [1 point]
• Release a pack of zombies at Cobb during the break between classes on Friday at 11:50 a.m. [Up to 4 points per convincing zombie, maximum 5 zombies.]
• At every public event, one of your team captains must have increasingly ornate headwear. Headwear must be built upon the same base item throughout the hunt. [24 points]
• Side mullet. Business on the left, party on the right. [7 points]
• As tweens in the Oughts, our first experience with the Greek Chorus was animated Lizzie McGuire. But that show never reenacted the Greek tragedies appropriate for its format! Film up to two minutes of The Very Special Episode: Lizzie McGuire does Medea. [8 points]
• Up at the Law School they work all day. Out in the sun they slave away. Couldn’t they use the distraction of mermaids in their fountain? [8 points]
• A professor, in academic gowns, over a steam vent, `a la Marilyn. Bonus points if the panties match Marilyn’s. [12 points]
• Write an original polyglot emordnilap. [6 points]
• The appropriate music video for “I’m Bringing Skeksi Back”. [6 points]
• Your appendix, in a jar, at Judgment. [34 points]

(Photo: MacPierce’s Buddy Holly, The Sturgeon Mary, Corn, and John Deer taking off to see the many wonders Iowa!! #scav2012 http://t.co/SD7LHFg9)