A Commonplace Book

Every team brings a different ethos to New York’s annual Running of the Idiots, AKA the Idiotarod. Some teams, like Colonel Angus, are there to race. Some teams, like the Golden Shower Girls, are there to cause havoc. And some teams, like Kostume Kult, are there to preen.

After a marathon cow-building and costume-designing session the night before, Kostume Kult’s SaKred Kow cart set off at a leisurely pace this past Saturday and took its time enjoying the ride from Chinatown to Red Hook. Clad in a range of oranges that could be described as an assault on the eyes at best, we forsook the race for first in favor of some more wholesome and less goop-covered activities.

Between protesting the local fast-food restaurants, recruiting a Hare Krishna devotee, and stopping at some bars, we managed to escape the worst of the food throwing and cart sabotaging. We also came in so far to the back of the pack, with a time of 3 hours and 36 minutes, that I’m not sure if we actually beat any other teams.

Although it would have been nice to win a prize beyond “Best Recruitment of New Members Along the Course,” I can’t fault the judges for giving “Best in Show” to Team Danger Zone. My instinct is to lump 80s nostalgia right in there with pirates and ninjas as lame and unoriginal (at least there was no Team Bayside High) but Team Danger Zone took it to another level with their costumes, cart, music, and sketches.

Fakework also deserves every bit of applause they get for the effort that obviously went into their Marie Antoinette cart, although they might simply have exploited my weakness for cake and thigh-highs.

And finally I think some credit should go to the Golden Shower Girls despite their having walked away the overwhelming favorite for this year’s “Most Despised” award. No matter how annoying and dangerous they might have been at the front of the pack, I didn’t have to deal with them in the back and they have my gratitude for spending the morning harassing Team We-Have-Neon-Wigs-And-Drank-Too-Much-This-Morning-And-Could-Not-Be-Any-More-Obnoxious-If-We-Tried.

The full set of photos I took is here and some selected favorites are below.

I like puzzles. Anyone who has had to sit next to me on the V train can probably confirm this. Games Magazine was always one of my favorite magazines when I was younger, and it is now my standby entertainment source on the ride from Alphabet City to Midtown and back. Usually I stick with the standard puzzles like cryptic crosswords and battleships, but based on a one-paragraph recommendation in the annual Games 100 feature, I recently picked up a slightly more unusual sort of puzzle, Da Vinci’s Secret: The Clue.

The first in a series of 7 wooden puzzles, The Clue is a stack of 7 wooden blocks which when properly unlocked will yield a scroll of unknown contents. The scroll and one of the 7 wooden blocks are both necessary in solving the second puzzle The Equation. And so I have unwittingly been sucked into one $40 purchase which will inevitably lead to 6 more. (Best quote so far regarding the mystery of The Clue: “Well it’s not like this is the sort of thing you buy yourself. It’s like something your aunt would buy you for Christmas. [pause] Wait, you actually bought this yourself?”)

Years ago I read a definition of what makes a puzzle different from a game or some other such form of entertainment. To heavily paraphrase, a game is an ongoing series of tests which must be surmounted to reach the final resolution. The solution can, in effect, be measured as a continuum, with a number of states existing between the game’s start and its completion. In this sense a crossword puzzle is more of a game than a puzzle.

A puzzle, however, can only exist in two states, untouched or solved. These two states are divided by a moment of insight, the flash of inspiration which is required to overcome the hurdle and unlock a puzzle’s secret. The frustration inherent in this is that it might take just as long to solve a puzzle as to finish a game, but the hours put into a game reveal slow and steady progress while the puzzle remains steadfastly unsolvable until the second it is finished.

This is all a long way of saying I’ve spent several hours staring at my stack of wooden blocks and I haven’t made any progress. Some of my initial insights (there are engraved lines on the middle block!) I have since discarded as probably only useful for the second puzzle in the series. The circle and square inscribed in the top haven’t led to any breakthroughs, and even the clue packaged with the puzzle has been a touch less than helpful.

Thats not to say I’m not happy with The Clue. Its extremely well made, its given me quite a few hours of relentless brain-wracking, and it looks fairly cool sitting on my shelf. I’ll just be a lot happier once I can set it on my shelf with the scroll sitting by its side.

The Queens Museum of Art looked a little different than usual this weekend as various New York Burning Man camps moved in, set up, and rocked out from Saturday afternoon until early Sunday morning. The general consensus I heard was that the location was an amazing choice made even more so by how agreeable the museum’s curators were.

It’s one thing to have the number of people they did (I heard the 2,500 figure tossed about, although I’m not sure how accurate that is.) But for the museum to allow the number of installations and participatory setups they did, especially alongside so much from their own collection, made for a really wonderful atmosphere.

I didn’t feel like rocking the paparazzi vibe the whole night and I left Queens for another party by 1:00 AM anyway, so my pictures are few and far between. A few of my favorite photos are below, and the rest on my flickr page.

Rest of the set can be found here.

And a quick search of flickr turned up some amazing pictures by lovegreg. They aren’t organized into a set yet, but you can still just browse his photostream in reverse chron for great shots from throughout the night.