McGuffin Ho! It's Not What You Know

Soon we were on our way to the railroad museum in Point Richmond. Or rather, we were on our way most of the way to the railroad museum in Point Richmond. We arrived at the mouth of a blocked tunnel. It was closed for hypothetical construction--no construction was going on at the moment, but there were plenty of barricades. Someone spent a while trying to get the GPS to route us around this obstacle: no dice.

Finally, a few of us hopped out and trotted through the tunnel while Alexandra stayed in the van. On the other side of the tunnel, we discovered Keller Park. Jim Keller liked that plenty. But the rest of us were not so fond of Keller Park, because it didn't look much like a railroad museum. There was some juggling of laptops, of mapping software. There was some tense walkie-talkie conversation with Alexandra in the van. And we kept walking while Alexandra started meandering the streets of Point Richmond in search of an alternate route to this museum.

But we kept walking, and eventually that railroad museum did turn up. It was closed, but there was a plastic box nearby, and that plastic box contained puzzles.

We were looking at a music CD in a jewel case. The case label was decorated to look like a substitution cipher code wheel. The CD itself was decorated to look like a schematic for the inside of a single Enigma code wheel--and it was labeled "Copyright 2005 Enigma Records GmbH. Avoid skipping during playback disc must always rotate counterclockwise." Looking at the shiny side of the CD revealed some faint letters: "MMMM ZWJPRJF..." Ah, a coded message. Fortunately a few of us knew how Enigma worked. To solve it, we would either need a roomful of WWII-era electro-mechanical specialized computing devices, or else we would need to figure out which letters went on the outside of the code substitution wheel.

Hmm, maybe if we listened to the CD, it would tell us those letters. We put it into the laptop that we'd taken with us--and we couldn't really hear much. Fortunately, woon we got a call from Alexandra--she'd found her way to the museum, and the van was parked on the street out front. Us foot troops made our way back to the transport van. I paused to grin at Mark Pearson, usually of the Warrior Monks, who was parked by the side of the road. It looked like he was volunteering to help Game Control watch over the clue site. What a mensch.

The CD was soon in the van's CD player--it was audible! It contained TV show themes. Uh-oh. Who in this van knew TV show themes? Well, we knew some of them. And we knew that there were 26 songs on the CD. And for the shows we could identify--it seemed like each of them started with a different letter. Probably if we could identify all of them, then that would give us the ordering of the 26 letters on the code wheel. Unfortunately, we didn't know them.

But Cori Lucas did.

Greg deBeer usually played with a team called Desert Taxi. They weren't playing in this game. But he knew that his Taxi colleague Cori would recognize these songs and would be sympathetic to our plight. Soon Greg was holding his mobile phone up to the van speakers so that Cori could hear distorted playbacks of obscure TV show themes. She knocked them down, one by one.

Soon we had our next destination: Telegraph Avenue in the People's Republic of Berkeley.

Next: Dit Dah D'oh!

| comment? | | home |