Great Herald Hunt yesterday. For once, the weather cooperated. No, it didn’t “cooperate” — it actively collaborated, and colluded. It was an unindicted co-conspirator. The kind of mid-70s low humidity day that makes people still want to live in South Florida despite the quality of driving there. And here’s a fabulous Hunt quote in the paper today that perfectly captures the Hunt spirit:
“This might be it,” said Jeff’s brother, Rob, speaking of yellow dots on the pavement leading to the Venetian Causeway. “Absolutely not,” Jeff said. “I think that just might be for people working with the sewers . . . But we can’t rule anything out.”
The full story, as usual, struggled to explain the Hunt, but it also included the puzzle-by-puzzle explanation.
After the last Herald Hunt, which took people an hour and a series of hints to solve, we intentionally made this one easier, and we succeeded. Huge percentages of the 5,000 participants seemed to have genuinely solved most of the puzzles, and the winner solved the endgame — the Final Solution (which requires solving all the preliminary puzzles first) two minutes after we issued the final clue.
Most people seemed to enjoy being able to get so deep into the Hunt and still be competitive, but a few complained it didn’t require “enough brain power” as one woman down from DC for the Hunt put it. I said, “So you won, then?” And she said, “Um, no.”
“Well,: I said. “Maybe if we had made it easier still, you might have.”
She had a point. And ever since E.T. the extraterrestrial followed a trail of Reese’s Pieces more than a quarter century go, thereby driving a 65 percent surge in sales of the chocolate-peanut butter treat, paid product placement has become a given in almost every movie and television show.
