[Hunt03] Re: 2004 MIT Mystery Hunt

[elaine <elainetyger yahoo com>]

Forgive me, but am I missing something here?

I haven't spoken to Eric in a few months, so I'm
basing this only on reading comprehension skills, not
from anything I heard him say.  Still, when I read
Eric's message to the team, it seemed to me to be a
hashing out of all the possible things he as team
leader could have suggested to the team to do in
response to the stuff discussed on "rumors" earlier
this year with large non-MIT teams being at a
disadvantage.  By the end of the message, it appears
he decided to leave the team as is and not call for a
split, while recognizing that individual members may
decide to split off without his say-so, as has
happened in the past.

Some of the things Mark quoted, he appears to
understand differently than I did in context.  (I
didn't save Eric's email, so I'm working from memory
here.)  First, Eric said he had considered doing a
separate hunt during IAP but *on a different weekend*.
 I don't know how long IAP is, but it seems clear that
Eric was not trying to create something else to do
during the hunt.  Second, re this team not being the
one to invoke a 2-pope schism, iirc this was something
Eric cited as a reason not to follow through on the
idea for a separate hunt.

When I read it, it struck me as, ok, he sees that our
team could be at a disadvantage and he thought a lot
about ways to get around it and decided to just keep
things as they were before and see where it goes. 
Everyone has the right to his own opinion, and to his
own reaction to other people's opinions, I guess, and
I would be livid if I thought someone tried to destroy
one of my traditions because it went in a direction he
didn't like.  I just didn't read all that into the
message that got Mark livid and Brian disappointed.

Elaine

--- Brian Tivol <tivol MIT EDU> wrote:
> 
> The list hunt-rumors was something I started by
> asking who on the
> Boston NPL mailing list would be interested in
> joining.  It was
> designed to discuss two sets of rumors: the ones
> that Mark referred to
> in his email about potential changes to the 2004
> Mystery Hunt, and the
> ones that float around on campus about the crazy
> brainiacs of the NPL
> who visit every year.
> 
> All those "there was a rumor circulating"s from
> Mark's mail were
> rumors that I was told to leak by some of the
> organizers.
> 
> I ran into some more of this year's organizers over
> Halloween and they
> concur with Mark's report: the rumors about changes
> to the Hunt's
> structure are things that had been suggested at one
> point but
> ultimately passed over.  They also engaged in some
> intra-team
> name-calling.
> 
> Sorry for not trying harder to get more recent leaks
> over the summer.
> 
> Mark also wrote:
> > I'm going to take the rest of this email to
> directly rebut Eric's
> > message from a couple of days ago, which made me
> absolutely livid.
> 
> What bothers me the most is that Eric was on
> hunt-rumors.  We debated
> a lot of topics, many of which were mighty close to
> what Eric wrote
> about himself.  I'm very disappointed to learn that
> Eric had planned
> what he'd planned without mentioning it to anyone
> else on that list.
> 
> --brian


=====
Dr. Andrew Weil described two types of paranoia: one sees a hostile 
pattern in random events; the other, faced with the same events, feels 
that "the universe is a conspiracy organized for their own benefit."  The 
second defines New York Yankee fans; the first fits all other baseball 
fans.
--Allen Barra, NY Times 10/19/03




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