24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part Three)

(Part 1 and Part 2)

Clue Ten - A Quiet Revelation

Our search for why someone tried to blow up Twitter and why somebody was trying to buy up California's debt had brought us to San Jose's Martin Luther King Library to find out who checked out a certain history book. Our clue was located several floors up. Rob once again took the elevator, while the rest of us hiked up four flights of stairs. But it was better than the parking garage: One of the most important aspects of this clue was that it was air conditioned.

We collected our puzzle, saw that Blood and Bones still solving (a good sign), and found a nice, quiet nook to solve in. The clue had an update of the story: Medium — the man behind the Twitter plot — had been caught, but before he could be interrogated, had taken a poison pill. A piece of paper with a letter grid and crossword phrases had been found on him. That was our puzzle, a word search. The strange thing about the word search was that each letter was in its own square. I kept that in mind as we started solving the crossword clues.

Solving seemed to go fast. My mind was half on trying to figure out why there was a letter per square, half on helping solve the crossword clues. I'm not sure at what point we figured out that each clue's solution was a four-letter word, but we came to that conclusion pretty quickly. While we worked, a member of CRANEA peered over the divider and let us know that at some point we may need some... additional... information that they'd be happy to provide should we ask. Somehow I connected that bit of information to the square formation.

The four-letter crossword clue solution words turned up in the word search grid, only with an extra letter per word (i.e. a clue would solve to CATS and then we'd find CASTS in the grid). As the rest of the team circled those words, I started counting the squares. Fifteen by fifteen. That rang a bell for some reason.

With all the words circled, Jonathan read off the string of extra letters: "SCRABBLE PREMIUMS". So that's why CRANEA said we might need something extra from them, I thought. "It's a Scrabble board!" I whispered urgently to my team. Light gleamed in Jonathan's eyes; he'd either come to the same conclusion or saw the veracity of mine. "Should we go get a board from GC?" I asked.

"Nope!" said Rob, bringing up a Scrabble board on his iPhone. We started taking letters that were on triple word scores, double letter scores, etc., in order from left to right. This proved fruitless after two or three letters. Just as we were about to mention that maybe we should take the premiums in groups (triple word, then double, then triple letter, then double), Jonathan was already doing it. The hidden message told us to take the highest scoring four-letter word as our answer. "Zoos," said Jonathan, and went to confirm it.

We were out quickly. Teams that were there when we'd arrived were still there, a huge boost to moral. Blood and Bones had solved just a few minutes before. We had definitely hit our groove and damn it felt good.

Story-wise, we found out what we'd come for: The only person to have checked out the history book we'd come across earlier was none other than... Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Clue Eleven: Roundtable Solving

I kept thinking throughout the day while seeing all sorts of artistic touches added to San Jose, how relatively boring Santa Rosa was as a city. Our next location was another strange building, this time City Hall. A domed building was at the center of it all. GC was off to its right. We got our clue and saw that all the shaded spots were taken by other teams. However, the fact that other teams were still there gave me some hope that we could catch up or possibly pass them. This was deceptive, though, since unbeknownst to us, two clues were being given out at this location.

We went around to the left side of the round building and found some tables in the shade (I half-seriously suggested we just sit in the middle of the fountain and solve), and the Golden Golems solving away. The other teams may have been out of sight, but we could at least use the Golems as a metric. We sat and began to solve. (Image credit: Goldem Golems/poovey)

This clue consisted of five mini-clues, each of which made use of two solving procedures from the previous ten puzzles. The most obvious one combined the orthogonal encryption with license plate math. Others weren't so obvious and sometimes required data from previous puzzles. There was no in-story reason given for these mini-puzzles. They were labeled as various parts of Jack's personality that helped make him a hero. I don't think we even noticed.

We passed the puzzles around the table, finding and losing traction, until we eventually filled in all five solutions on our answer sheet. The middle letter of each mini's answer formed the final solution (I think it was POWER).

Jonathan and I took the answer to GC to check it. I was thinking that we must have solved pretty fast — though it didn't feel like it — in order to have finished ahead of the Golden Golems. Once we confirmed our answer, though, we were handed... another clue.

As we walked back to our table, Alexandra (guest member of the Golems) was heading to GC to turn in their answer to the final puzzle. "You guys finished too?" she asked us. "Just the first one," I admitted to her. So much for that metric.

Clue 12: A Transparent Mistake

Jonathan sat down and pulled out a transparency from the envelope. It was divided in half, with the top part, labeled "Part 2", having staggered numbers on it; and the bottom half, labeled "Part 1" having a whole bunch of shapes. It was fairly clear that the transparency overlaid our answer sheet, as all the shapes lined up with letters from the previous puzzle and all the numbers lined up with letters from the first ten puzzles.

Annnnnnnnd that was about as much progress as we made for the next half-hour or so.

Sure, many ideas were given. Things were examined by Rob, Andrea, and Given, while Jonathan and I tried to figure out how the transparency worked. Given was the only one who came close to a workable idea when he pointed out that there weren't any "O"s on the first story card. "That's interesting," I told him, "but how can we make it into an answer? Does it happen on any of the other cards?" He didn't know and couldn't find a missing letter on any of the other cards.

"Scott," Jonathan said after some significant time had passed, "I literally have no idea what to do. I mean, nothing is coming to mind." I nodded in commiseration; I was pretty much at that point too. The rest of the team kept coming up with ideas, until we were all at a loss of what to do. "We've got over an hour to work on this," Jonathan commented. "I say we keep plugging away at it until then." He preferred forgoing a hint and maybe a few rankings in order to come in clean. The rest of us grudgingly went along with it for all of five minutes, after which it was obvious that we had tapped the depths of our idea well and didn't feel like spending the next hour looking blankly at a transparency. We convinced Jonathan to get a hint.

The answer sheet had been passed around and had kind of gotten hidden in the mess on the table. We needed to take it to GC in order to get a hint. As Jonathan was looking for it, he pulled out a piece of paper we'd never seen before. "What the hell's this?" he said with a complete look of incredulity.

It was the flavortext for the puzzle.

I still don't know how he could have taken out both the transparency and the flavortext and not have noticed the flavor text. Heck, I was watching him and all I saw was the transparency removed from the envelope. But since our first event, we've semi-jokingly said that we're allowed one major mistake per game. This was Jonathan's.

The flavortext completed the story: Arnold Schwarzenegger was pissed that he couldn't be president of the U.S., so was working on a plan to make California its own nation. With the help of Mexico, he could be president of "Mexi-Cal". Mexico wanted lots of money, but Arnold had found the missing gold from 1848 hidden in a bank earning interest. First, though, he had tried to take out Twitter to prevent coordinated protests. Our job now was to find the password to the bank account where Arnold had put the money and empty it into state treasury in order to solve California's massive budget shortfall.

More importantly, the flavortext was the key to solving. It nudged us to compare the letter outlined by a shape to the card with the matching shape. With this, we discovered that the outlined letter would only occur once on the card. Given actually had been a step away from solving the puzzle without flavor text! If only he'd spotted the one word with the "o" in it...

Regardless, we zoomed through the rest of the puzzle: The words each single letter on each card was in were strung together to tell us how to do Part 2, which was basically add the letter and the overlapping number, then subtracting the clue number. And done: The password was ACTION HERO.

We'd saved California. Not many days you can say that.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part Two)

(Part One is here.)

Clue Four: Who Put Math in my Crossword?

The story card had directed us to an air-conditioned deli, which was a relief in the near-100F San Jose temps that day. A few teammates went to grab sandwiches while Jonathan and I started work on the puzzle. It was a fairly straightforward crossword, except that none of the clue were numbered. Instead, they were prefixed by a math equation, like "A*B+G: Fish eggs". This meant we didn't know how long the answer to each clue was, nor where it went in the grid.

The rest of our team got back with food and we concentrated on solving the clues, pushing the equations to the back of our minds for now. Our methodology seemed chaotic for some reason and it seemed to be challenging to narrow down answers. "Fish eggs" was probably ROE, but could be CAVIAR. There were spaces for both. Finally out of frustration, Jonathan asked "What do we do with these equations?" I said, "I'm guessing their value equates to the clue's number? And then the letters in the equation spell out the solution?" It seemed like he hadn't considered the possibility, which meant that, once again, we had spent too much effort on the data and not enough on the extraction.

We made better progress after that, as we were able to figure out a few numbers which helped us place specific clues and narrow down where the rest went. Much smoother solving after that, but we should have done it faster. (Looking at the results, it seems as though there was a steep breakoff point for solvers: About 12 minutes average solve time for the top four teams, and 27 minutes average solve time for the next four.)

The solution was also the disarming code for the bomb at Twitter, which was good, but we'd killed Agent X, which meant he was no good to us. Luckily, we'd planted a tracking device on the guy whose clothes and identity we'd stolen, so we went to see what nefarious scheme he was up to now.

Clue 5 - The Gene (and Adrian and Briana and Molly and ...) Pool

There's often a danger of skipping over instructions when getting a new clue and trying to get right to the heart of the puzzle. I mean, it's exciting, you're in a hurry, and who wants to read incidental text when there's a mental challenge just begging to be solved? At best maybe you gloss over, say, "Find the nationalities of these names before working on the gene pool".

We kind of ignored that advice and started working on finding the names inscribed on rocks in the pool to match up with the names we'd been given and where on the circle they were. That seemed to take enough time for a simple task, but it seemed to take to long and eventually one half of the team decided to try gathering data about the countries.

Which may have been a bad idea. I looked up the indicated countries in my almanac, Andrea scouted them out, and Given wrote down, not the name of the indicated country, but its pair on the sidewalk square. Jonathan and Rob joined us after finishing the fountain, but that didn't seem to help, as they set about recollecting information. Time continued to pass and our messy methodology had us no closer to the goal than before. Data was wrong, it was hot, and frustration was beginning to set in.

Eventually, Jonathan stopped the chaos and one by one we went from one country to another, marking down both the country of origin for a name and its counterpart. Andrea scouted ahead and stood on the appropriate sidewalk section. This finally got us all the data we needed and we sat down to consider it. The first letters of the counterpart countries indicated we needed to use a rotational semaphore. But rotated to what?

Maybe we could use the sidewalk square associated with each name as north? Well, it kind of worked, but it turned out rotational semaphore can be kind of difficult using something as flexible as paper as your straight edge. But Jonathan eventually marked everything correctly and we got a message "NATIONALITY OTHERS J". Other's J what? Redoing the semaphore for those letters did nothing to change them. I don't know how long we were stumped before Jonathan finally realized it was "OTHER SJ" and that SJ meant San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica.

An impressively designed puzzle using environmental data, yet it left us feeling grumpy with our results. With a little organization, we could have easily cut twenty minutes off our time.

The story card indicated that the man we'd been trying to find had been shot, the higher ups in his organization having figured out that the failed Twitter bombing meant the operation had been compromised. In his pocket, though, we found a newspaper that dealt with Costa Rican protesters using Twitter to organize a revolution... something that this mysterious organization didn't want to happen for whatever they had planned.

Clue 6 - I Am Jack's Complete Playground Workout

Up until this point, Jonathan, Given, Rob, Andrea, and myself were working as an analog for Jack Bauer. We arrived a park for our next clue and were told that we needed to split up: One person would become Jack's body and scale a building (represented by playground equipment) while avoiding security cams (represented by the ground — except the green part); the rest of the team would become Jack's mind and try to figure out who killed the guy we stole the clothes from based on mug shots.

"Who's going to become Jack's body?" asked the captain of CRANEA. We all looked at each other. Based on Jonathan's previous statement that he always wants to do an activity, I expected him to speak up. He didn't. I thought maybe someone else might. They didn't. And darn it, I really wanted to do the playground traversal, so after a brief beat, I volunteered. Nobody complained or contradicted me; maybe I'm the only one who thought it would be fun.

I asked Rob to take a picture or two while I accomplished my task...


At the top of the final tower was a bunch of sheets of paper. The first one had some multicolored letters, "NY YY NY NN" on it. I looked at the others, the odd thought being that I might have to solve while up there. All the other sheets where the same, though, so I tore the top one off and climbed down.

"Took you long enough," quipped Jonathan, as Rob and I rejoined the team at a shady table. I thought I had actually made good time. But he, Given, and Andrea were looking a little frustrated because they hadn't made much progress: There were several sheets of paper filled with South Park-like characters, each in its own yellow rectangle. Basically, it was a variation of the game I used to play as a kid, Guess Who? At the top of each sheet of paper were a few anagrams, unscrambling to descriptions such as "black haired", and our team had solved all but one of them (which Rob and I set to work on). With my return, the little "Yes/No" next to each anagram finally made sense, as they matched via color to one of the Y/N letters on the sheet I'd retrieved.

A braille pattern emerged as we marked the people who met the criteria. The braille gave us four new criteria to meet, narrowing it down to one person by the name of MEDIUM. Finally, we had our killer and our answer.

The story card detailed how we called this information into HQ and found out that security footage showed that Mr. Medium was at the top level of a nearby parking garage.

Clue 7 - Licensed to Chill

Rob took the elevator; the rest of us walked up. In near-100F heat, Rob was the smart one. Regardless, we retrieved our clue and headed to a place that had two amazing factors going for it: First, it was air-conditioned; and second, it was Starbucks.

We ordered a bunch of frappuccinos (I got a Vanilla Bean, which was exactly what I needed and suddenly my new favorite drink) and sat down to solve. The clue consisted of many seven character strings with one question mark in each — passed off in-story as incomplete license plate numbers we needed to identify. Somebody pointed out that "PEMDAS" was in the flavor text, referring to operation of order. That, along with hints to concerning bringing about equalization, had us working on the theory that each seven character string was a math equation that when we filled in the one missing character, would be valid. The only thing was, we didn't know which letters stood for which operation.

Jonathan and Given attacked the puzzle head on. The rest of us seemed to be content to watch, throw in a helpful comment when we could, but mostly to enjoy a little rest with a cool drink. Soon, the puzzle was solved and Jonathan volunteered to run back up the parking garage to turn in our answer. Nobody objected.

Story-wise, it turns out we had found a briefcase in the abandoned car in the garage with the Constitution of California in it. Since it's too dense to read, let alone figure out what its connection to Twitter is, we get in contact with the only constitutional scholar we know: Barack Obama. While we wait for him to get back to us, we get information on where the driver of the car currently is.

Clue 8 - A Password-Protected Puzzle

We arrived at some sort of plaza to pick up our next puzzle. There was a covered stage nearby, offering some good shade and steps to solve on. From the story's point of view, a laptop had been found that password protected. The papers found near the laptop, in the form of a clue, might provide some way of figuring out the password. The instructions for the clue also detailed finding a book about something called "orthogonal" decryption: The grid of letters on the password screen had to be decrypted by row, then read by column.

The papers basically consisted of ordered crossword clues on the left, and unordered clues on the right. We figured there was some pattern connecting them, but it wasn't immediately apparent. Some initial words gave us the impression that there was some anagram-plus-one-extra-letter going on, but we couldn't see how that would apply to the grid of letters. We made some changes and worked on firming up the answers.

(At some point, Andrea noticed that Jonathan got a little bit of whipped cream on his nose from his Starbuck's drink. She borrowed my camera and delighted in taking a picture of it before he could get it off.)

Finally, we figured out that solution words on the left could always be anagrammed into one of the right side words (SPRITE -> PRIEST). Assuming that the pattern of anagramming could be applied to the password window's grid of letters, we came up with something about the sixth gift in the twelve days of Christmas. So GOOSE was the password and our solution. I liked that there was a plausible real-life reason, even if it was a form of the Only the Smart May Pass trope, to have the puzzle.

With that solve, our story continued: On the laptop is a PDF that is also password protected. The techs at CRANEA would attempt to break it, while we continued with our investigation. Just then, Obama called us back about the highlighted portions of the California constitution. He said that if California ever defaults on its loans, the state becomes the property of whichever entity owns 51% of the states debt. Obama had just check and found that Mexico had recently acquired just the right amount of California's debt...

Clue 9 - I Go All In

Near some oddly shaped building (which I see now is the San Jose Repertory Theatre), we were given a pack of cards, the box of which was custom labeled for the BANG with the ranking of poker hands. Something was odd about the printed rankings, though: There were no spaces between words.

Opening the pack revealed the card deck, but going through them revealed that there were several different card backings. We worked hurriedly to sort them and found that there were six cards per backing. It was pretty easy to notice that there was a poker hand in each group, so we arranged the hands into poker hands and ordered them on the ground in front of us by rank.

Some idea came up and Jonathan, Rob, Andrea, and Given discussed discussed it, almost completely ignoring the cards. After thirty seconds or so, I stopped paying attention and instead concentrated on the cards. An idea quickly came to me and I tested it against the first few hands.

"Hey guys, I've got TOOL," I told my team.

They fell silent.

"Taking the unused sixth card in each hand to index into the name of the poker hand," I explained.

"Well," replied Jonathan, "keep going with it."

This surprised me. Usually, if I hook onto an idea, I share it with the others so that the extraction can go quicker. But not this time: I was being asked to finish it on my own.

They all looked at me. I tried to quickly process the remaining hands. S then H then something then D. I paused a second, then said, "TOOLSHED".

Jonathan took the answer to GC while I verified that the seventh letter was indeed E. It was, and Jonathan came back with our story card:

The PDF had been cracked by some experts. It had information taken from a San Jose State library book about a payment of gold bullion to Mexico for the state of California back in the 1800s. However, the gold's escorts had died mysteriously and the implication is that Mexico never received it. The connection to the Twitter bomb and the succession plot wasn't immediately obvious, but maybe the person who had checked out the book would know? So said library we went.

Continued in Part Three.

24: The BANG - Or how I got my puzzling groove back (Part One)

For a few puzzle hunts before BANG 24, I hadn't left feeling satisfied. I think it is because of not being able to match some pretty big (for me anyway) ahas I got while playing in CiSRA 2009. Of course, in BANG 21 the ahas were purposefully minimilzed and in the Shinteki playtest it seemed the free hints beat us to the ahas more often than not. Regardless, I was kind of in a funk about puzzle hunts.

That all changed with 24: The BANG.

The Prize

A rough transcription of a conversation that took place the night before the hunt:

"So what if we put our prize in a silver suitcase for delivery?"

"Cool! And you know how in season four of 24, they had the nuclear football in a silver suitcase? Why don't we get a real football as a prize and deliver it like that?"

"I like it. How about I get a glow-in-the-dark football, so that it really can be a 'nuclear' football?"

"Good idea! And be sure to get handcuffs."

"I'm on it."

(I don't think anybody got the joke and we ended up taking the football home as our own prize, so maybe it wasn't such a great idea.)

Clue One: Failing to Embody the Spirit of Jack Bauer

After dropping of our prize and working through the issues of where an open bathroom was, we got to reading the rules while waiting for the official start.  One line caught our attention:  The third criteria for team scoring was " How best your team embodies the spirit of Jack Bauer".  "Jack breaks all the rules in order to get the results needed, right?" expressed Jonathan.  "Maybe we should open the first puzzle and start solving."

An interesting idea.  I thought back to No More Secrets when we chickened out on shutting off electricity to the bank in order to gain entrance, figuring that would be a little too, well, real. Finding out later from Jan that such a move would have been acceptable, I think there was the subconscious desire on our part to make it "real" whenever we could. It was tempting to go through with Jonathan's suggestion, but this wasn't The Game and we wanted to be on equal footing when being ranked against other teams.

CRANEA's team captain got up and gave us the usual spiel. He was asked if torturing GC was allowed, but apparently GC members had been trained to resist all forms of torture. No luck on bringing realism to the BANG there.

We opened the first puzzle and sat down by the river to solve. There were several descriptions of games, appropriate since we were a few steps away from Monopoly in the Park (familiar to us from playing in Shinteki Decathlon 4). It became clear that the descriptions were slightly off, giving funny versions of the names, such as Moose Trap for a game that traps elk instead of rodents. For once, having two copies of the puzzle worked well and we solved with speed to get a final clue of COW SUBS GET HIT. "Cattleship!" I whispered urgently, and oh man that felt good. I knew then that this was going to be a good hunt and that any thoughts I'd had that maybe I was over puzzle hunts were dispelled.

So we headed off.

Kind of. We were the first team to solve the puzzle — at least that's what we thought at the time; actual results show that coed astronomy finished a few minutes earlier — so there was no general stream of teams to let us know we were navigating correctly to the next location. Our navigator unfortunately read one of the street names wrong and we set off in the wrong direction. It was only about after a good stream of teams were heading the other way that we added a level of oversight to Rob's navigation. (On a side note: Rob's still the best navigator our team has had.)

As we walked, we read the short blurb that we received upon confirming our answer. I thought it was pretty cool, presenting the story and raison d'être for the puzzles. I liked that it was presented separately from the puzzles so that there was no confusion as to what was flavortext and what was story, a design flaw that was present in our BANG 22.

Clue 2: The Colored Cube

We arrived at the next site, kind of towards the middle flow of teams. I had put Andrea in charge of finding a sitting spot, so as Jonathan collected the clue, the rest of us followed her to a shady sidewalk spot. Jonathan came back holding a Rubix cube and the clue, a color-based nonogram. The main snag in solving it was that there was no specific length indicated for each color.

The two copies didn't help much in this case. I didn't help much at all, despite having written many a nonogram-based puzzle; I just couldn't get my mind into the non-length specific portion. Ironically, Andrea, to whom I kind of introduced the nonogram style when I had her solve some of mine, was contributing quite a lot.

So I sat back and tried to work out our endgame. The center of the grid was outlined like a 2D representation of a cube, so it was pretty probable that once those colors were filled in, they would represent a way to arrange the Rubix cube. That seemed pretty challenging to me... too challenging for a BANG. I was hoping Jonathan had practice arranging the cube properly, cuz I was pretty sure the rest of us hadn't. I was trying to think of a way around this difficulty, when enough colors were filled in that I was able to contribute more. In the back of my mind, I was wondering if we could create some sort of mapping like we had done for the No More Secrets sudoku cube puzzle.

With the grid finished, Jonathan didn't even look at the cube but asked us to tell him the letters on sections that matched patters. Well, obviously... why hadn't I thought of that. The center squares were obvious, but then they got more challenging with "I need a corner piece that's blue-yellow-red" which required imaginary folding in the head. Pretty soon, though, we had the answer and moved on. Maybe we'd passed a few teams that had passed us due to our navigation error.

Our story card let us know that we'd confronted a suspicious character who had plans to blow up some data center, but instead of getting a confession from him THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME so we knocked him out and stole his clothes.

Clue 3 - Bathroom Breakdown

Our next location was a bathroom at a park. The tiles on the bathroom were either red or yellow, an exercise in data gathering. Blood and Bones, coed astronomy, and Judean People's Front were there, a hopeful sign that we weren't doing too terribly.

Andrea snagged us a shady spot while we went to collect the data. I guess we're not particularly good at meticulous collection, since we ended up going back several times to the tiles and redoing our grid. As our theories regarding what to do with the data changed, we also had to redo the data.

I noticed that some teams had been paying particular attention to some letters and numbers inscribed on a cement divider. I hated noticing it, but at the same time I wasn't ashamed to used that information and snapped a few photos. How the puzzle was going to relate to those, I had no idea and as we still hadn't completed the data collection portion of the puzzle, no one was all that interested.

As we continued working, many teams that were there began leave. It felt like we were taking too long to mark this information down. We tried working with what we had, but couldn't get anything out of it. So we abandoned our shady spot and attempted to get a definitive marking of the tiles. Eventually we did and found that with the tiles XORed with markings on the grid we'd been given, we got a strange message: [N754M2IN], followed by A = [A] and V = [10].

What the heck? We tried to make sense of that and got nothing. I let everyone know again that many people were staring at that weird assortment of letters and numbers and it seemed to make sense that it was somehow connected. But nothing was coming to mind. Eventually, building off each other's theories ("Maybe X?" "Nah, but how about X+1?"), we finally realized that the information in brackets referred to what was written on the cement divider and the A and V mentioned were the letters in the same position on the other cement divider, which was just a straight alphabet with the number 1-10 under it. We now had our decoding mechanism and, quickly, our answer.

With the answer came the next part of the story. In the clothes we'd stolen was information about a pre-arranged meeting with Agent X. We had gone in disguise and met with him. During the conversation, he started a countdown timer that would blow up Twitter's data center in sixty minutes. So we'd shot him.

Continued in Part 2.

Belated Photos from BANG 24

The summer seems to have limited my blogging abilities, both with my daughter being out of school and a large project I undertook finishing only a week ago. In other words, the fact that I'm putting up the photos that we took at BANG 24, when BANG 25 just happened yesterday is entirely a coincidence.

Our team had a total blast at BANG 24 and much thanks to CRANEA for all the effort they put into it. I'd been having a string of bad experiences at recent hunts and this snapped me out of my funk. I think it may have even been my favorite BANG. Of course, I only have a sample size of seven...