Mystery Hunt 2008 Post Mortem

I spent this past weekend at MIT for Mystery Hunt, and like last year, I was planning on doing an "obligatory hunt post." But this year's hunt, to be blunt, was simply not fun. The puzzles were too hard, required too many leaps in logic to solve, relied too much on flavor text, and often came with a basketfull of extraneous information and red herrings. Hunt started at noon on Friday and by 7pm I was ready to stop ... and it just kept going until 9pm on Sunday (by the time the coin was found, our team was almost completely cleaned out of headquarters, in the middle of a team debriefing, and setting up a dinner mob). I could say more, but since the winning team is known to write a good Hunt (they wrote last year's, for example), and I'm actually not in the mood for a full-fledge rant, I'll share with you this Sesame Street gem that came up in the middle of an "oh my god I'm so sick of trying to solve impossible-to-solve puzzles" conversation Saturday night: