Hash Trash fans, this week we bring you not one writeup, but two! PRINCETON HHH HASH #747.4 Date: December 5, 1999 Weather: Far Far Too Nice (Record High of 65 degs) Venue: Princeton Junction Train Station to the Ditch Where the Dinosaurs Died - and Back. Time: 1:00 or so Set By: Throat Deep Hashers: The LRF, Booger, RoJo, Discomfort, Wacko, Geezer, Mike Whelpley, Ice Blue Balls, Tree, Darby, Exciteable Boy, Tropical Depression, OuiPee, Hey Yo Paully, Juicy, Solo, Squirrel Droppings, Rubber Alan, Llloda, Pyroman, Speed Bumps, Jennifer, Tomoko, Any Others I Have Forgotten I Apologize A THORNY SITUATION The hospitalization of Geezermom created a thorny situation, unplucked by the divine intervention of Throat Deep, who with little preparation and less sleep channeled his "Geezerness", setting this hash on the Geezer's favorite and most overused terrain since Kingston, crossing and recrossing the Ditch Where The Dinosaurs Died until all were amply slimed - the exciteable boy fretting about Hepatitis B. Further evidence of Geezer-channeling was Throat Deep's inexplicable decision to set the final marks of this A-A before we began, leading to the inevitable stumbling upon the On In trail by our beloved Hand Solo. At the first check Solo came bumbling up at the back of the pack remarking "Hey, I had 25 marks leading off in the other direction! Where were you assholes?!" Fortunately only the LRF and Wacko had waited around long enough to be given this information, spoiling the fun for both. The LRF ended up running back and forth along the road for an hour and then back to Princeton in disgust. Wacko, without the challenge of shortcutting, had to run the entire true trail. And, Solo, of course, still managed to get lost and run 10 miles on roads. Ignorance is bliss, and the rest of the hounds spent this far too splendid day on an excellent tour of that hash icon - The Ditch Where The Dinosaurs Died. Notable moments were the puncturing of Oui Pee's beach ball, Pyroman's crowning of a street sign with a deer skull, and Excemental Earning's revealing of the design for the 750th T-shirt (and then departing without running the hash). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NEXT HASH: #748.4, Sunday, Dec 12, 2 pm, 87 Prospect, Geezer sets #749.4, Sunday, Dec 19, 2 pm, 87 Prospect, HeyYo! Paully sets the Winter Solstice hash. #750.4, Sunday, Dec 26, Throatwarbler Mangrove sets the Canadian Boxing Day which is also THE FINAL HASH OF THE MILLENNIUM #751.4, Sunday, Jan 2, Pyroman sets into the new millennium. God help us. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to the Princeton Hashnet, email the message subscribe phhh to the address majordomo@cdiprinceton.com Post messages to the Princeton Hashnet by e-mailing to phhh@cdiprinceton.com and don't forget to check out our shiggy-filled Web Page http://www.princetonol.com/groups/phhh ----------------------------------------------------------------------- and now for something completely different... PRINCETON HHH HASH #747.4 Date: December 5, 1999 Weather: Khoroshchow Venue: North of the dinosaur ditch behind Carnegie Center Time: 65 minutes Set By: Throatdeep Hashers: Tropical Depression, Iced Blue Balls, Louisiana Reptile Fancier, Juicy, Hey YO! Paully, RoJo, Booger, Llloda, Rubber Alan, Excitable Boy, Hand Solo, Pyroman, Speedbumps, Ouipee, Squirrely, Tomoko, Geezer, Wacko, Discomfort, Jenny, George, John Paul Ringo, Tree, Darby. Hash Club I was a chem major, one of those guys you meet at a party and think, he wouldn't be so bad if he didn't keep talking about pulsed discharge photoionization detectors. After the third or fourth art history major excused herself to fix a barrette, I began to think about my future. Did I really want to master some obscure benzene compound while real men spoke smugly about loft factors and thread counts in Ikea comforters? Then I met Geezer. It was one of those department socials where everyone actually cares about everyone else's research. He wasn't like the other profs, all pasty and smelling faintly of one steroid or another. There was something edgy, something healthy about him. Maybe it was the scratches on his face, the kind you'd associate with cathandlers or 14-year-olds using their first Gillette. But even Beavis and Butthead wouldn't try to shave their foreheads. We walked out of the party together, the lights on Washington Street refracting pink through the small scabs on his earlobes. He looked up and down the street and sighed. "Four more traffic lights and barriers to keep Princeton's best and brightest from making eighteen-wheelers test their brakes. And the pavement. Where's the sense of the natural, the test of natural selection?" Then he looked at me, a twinkle in his eye, in a vaguely Brad Pittish, digital-effect sort of way. "You should hash with me. You'll see that Princeton doesn't always look like the North Dallas Tollway." "What's hashing?" "I can't tell you. You just have to do it. Show up in the parking lot behind 87 Prospect at 2 on Sunday." What the heck, it was that or the lab. So I went. Who'd believe that twenty people would show up. They all looked pretty ragged, old running clothes with tears and holes, bad haircuts, and weak attempts at insults. That was the men. The women, though, well, maybe Geezer was on to something. We piled into cars and ended up by the train station. This was natural? But then Geezer reviewed the rules and everyone straightened up, eyes bright, nostrils flaring, ears pointed. The two dogs wagged their tails. "This is the 747.4th set of the Princeton Hash. Rule no. 1: No whining. Rule no. 2: No Whining! Rule no. 3: if it's flour, follow it. Rule no. 4: If it's pavement, avoid it. Rule no. 5: If it has thorns, run through it. Rule no. 6: If it's dead, leave it alone. Rule no. 7: if it's wet, wade through it. Rule no. 8: If it's beer, drink it." And off we went, through the foulest landscape I'd ever seen: swamp, thorns, dead deer, live ticks, canals, toxic waste, and bad beer and cheap potato chips to finish. Hashers would follow dead ends and false trails just for fun, and come back with bits of fur, blood, and lichen all over what was left of their shirts. I was hooked. Every week, it got worse. Everyone tried to set a shittier hash than the week before, with bigger thorns, deeper streams, smaller ticks, smellier mud. I began to look like one giant scab, permanently infused with the faint odor of swamp gas and leaving little trails of river silt all over Frick. I'd see other hashers and we'd just nod, knowing we'd been through shiggy none of these brie-eating, metalloenzyme spectroscopists could even imagine. And at parties? Girls pay a lot more attention to guys who've shed blood and still have all of their limbs. But the hashes were getting out of hand. Rookies showed up and never returned. Students went to the emergency room and tried to explain away puncture wounds the size of dessert plates. And the hashes turned radical. Hey YO! Paully jumpstarted bulldozers and ran them down the Millstone Expressway. Wacko loosened bolts on powerline pylons for the next big storm. This was too much. I went to Geezer's office in Frick, where there were a lot a scarred chem students, posting maps with pins stuck in them and 8x10 glossies with red lines and arrows marking suburban developments. Others were networking with hashes all over the Northeast, the U.S., western Europe, the entire world. "Where's Geezer?" I asked. No one answered. He hadn't shown up for class for weeks, leaving us to his grad students while throwing out excuses about symposia and important meetings with the NIH. The receipts on his desk told a different story: flights to Charlottesville, Evanston, Eugene, Jo'Berg, Columbus Ohio, Cardiff, Goa. . . His email showed streams of messages with the Cuban Assassin and A. G. Zaire, rendezvous at the House of Shih and Bellemeade Inn. Their phones were out of service. Who were these people? What was Geezer up to?