Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture: I Swear We Were This Close

This photo is not from Battery Spencer. Hey, it was really dark there. Instead, this is yet another photo from the start of the day.

It was very dark at Battery Spencer. Our team wandered out to pick up our clue packet. As you might guess, many teams reached this spot at the same time, since the Man had shut down the previous puzzle.

This clue was a big crossword. The clues of the crossword were tough trivia questions. The answers to those trivia questions were also the teams' secret code words. So if you didn't know the name of "U2's iTunes exclusive song" but had spotted team Wild Bats' code word, you could fill in that answer. We had few code words, and not much trivia knowledge. But we had phones. Soon Tom was talking with Lisa and Peter was talking with Ray Choi. The answers started to come in.

So we had a grid of words forming. But how did that lead to a message? Our WOLF provided a hint: "I O I O, so off to work I go". Oh, obviously for each row of the puzzle, we wanted to look at the "O"s and the "I"s. No doubt the "O"s were dots and the "I"s were dashes and the whole thing was Morse code... No, that wasn't it. But each row had five [IO] characters. Wait, was this binary code? Yes, it was. That got us a name: "Andrew L Stone". We gave that name to Lisa. She said he was a movie director. She started reading us the names of some of his movies.

Our WOLF beeped. We were out of time, the game was over, it was time to head to the ending party. The WOLF told us that the last password was "courage".

When Lisa was able to make herself heard over our screams of dismay she told us that one of the movies was named "The Password is Courage". So we didn't quite solve that puzzle, but we felt pretty good about our performance nonetheless.

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