Alex Krogh-Grabbe

Tonight I played Clue. I’ve always liked it a lot, though I’ve never played it very frequently. I was really proud of the notation method I used today, and I think that with a few tweaks it would be really superior. I’ll outline what I did, a few observations, and what I plan to do next time.

What I did

I put X’s in the boxes for the cards I had. When anyone made a “suggestion”, I marked in a second column their first initial and how many guesses they had now made. In a third column, I wrote down the initial of everyone who said they could not help the guesser (in the rows guessed). When someone did show a card, I marked the first column (with the X’s for my cards) a small initial of the person who showed, in each row guessed. When I was shown a card (or when I definitively deduced what card was shown) I put a big initial of that card’s holder in that same first column. When I was pretty sure someone had a card, I circled the small initial in the box.

That’s it. It was a little clumsy and inefficient in some ways, but I won. Here are some observations:

Observations

• The most important thing you can know (apart from knowing that someone has a card) is who doesn’t have that card. Therefore the most important thing to keep track of is who says they can’t help the guesser. You can ultimately figure out who has a card when this list gets up to one less than the number of people playing.
• Ideally, you’d keep in mind each person’s progression of guesses, so you could see the patterns and thus figure out what they’d been shown last time they guessed. But I think that’s too much for the little piece of paper. If you’re not doing that, keeping track of which number guess a person is on is labor-intensive and inefficient.
• Obviously, when you know someone is guessing two things that they hold, and someone shows them something, you know what card was shown. But even if you can’t do that, it’s still good to keep track of when someone shows. If someone shows frequently when one card is guessed, you can have a pretty good idea that they have that card. This is of course a rough guess unless you also make sure that that card is not being guessed in conjunction with another on those occasions, and even then it’s less than 100%. But most of the assumptions I made based on this panned out.

What I’m going to do next time

The same thing, except without the numbers (which wasted time), and with a special focus on who doesn’t have certain cards. I won this time partly because two people before me accused incorrectly, but I think having a good system like this can’t hurt your chances. Anyone have a better system, or comments on this one?

This weekend I supplemented the completion of my first major assignment for school with attendance at the Honk! Festival in Somerville. Honk! is a festival of activist street bands from around the country, held annually in Davis Square in Somerville. On Friday, bands played in bars and other venues around the city (I didn’t see any that day). Saturday is the main day, with bands playing from noon until 9pm in hour-long blocks at six venues in and around Davis. Sunday there was a parade down from Davis Square to Harvard Square (which I missed because I was writing a paper), followed by a concert in the evening at the Somerville Theater back in Davis. The whole thing was spectacular, with wonderful weather. I knew I had a friend in the Rude Mechanical Orchestra from Brooklyn, but turns out one of my classmates is also in Factory Seconds from Somerville. I saw numerous friends from all areas of life wandering through Saturday’s crowds, enjoying the raw energy and cacophonous brass & drums throughout the day. Some of my favorite experiences were with What Cheer? from Providence and Minor Mishap of Austin, TX, watching from a tree as the Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band performed at the opening ceremonies, and dancing with my classmates in a packed crowd to the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. I also enjoyed Extraordinary Rendition, also of Providence. I want to learn trumpet or trombone now!

I greatly enjoyed the festival, and am interested in getting more involved next year. One of the friends I saw meandering through the crowd was not only volunteering, but was hosting one of the bands at her house. Sounds like fun!

I’ve had a whirlwind of homework and commitments the past few weeks, and I’m leaving Boston for the fourth weekend in a row tonight. On top of that, one of the core readings of the semester is due on Monday for my Foundations class, and it’s 88 pages of dense text. So, you’d think this morning when I don’t have class, I should be reading. Well, you’d be correct. Instead, though, I worked a little on my job as UEP website manager, and spent more than an hour on a fun project:

Being new to this whole cooking-for-myself thing, I realized that I didn’t know off the top of my head the ingredients for pancakes. So I browsed the internet, writing down simple pancake recipes from the top three or four pages of the Google search result. I put the results into an Excel spreadsheet (as I love to do) and crunched numbers to come up with a educated average. Here’s what I came up with:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1.5 tablespoons melted butter
• 1 tablespoon sugar (or honey, in my case)

How’d they turn out? Fluffy! I will probably cut the baking powder in half next time, or drop it entirely. Historically, I’ve also lathered maple syrup onto my pancakes, but now that I’m buying it for myself, and seeing how expensive it is, I’m much more judicious. That will take some getting used to as well. Perhaps more honey, or an experiment with fresh fruit, will be necessary.

Do you have perfect pancake recipes? How well do they sync up with this one? Is there anything that you find especially important in the cooking process that I might be ignoring?