End-of-Year Review 2002 The Year of Living Entropically reflected the state of the nation You can hash but you can't hide from the economic implosion seen in hashes over the Lawrenceville Dot Bomb Field of Broken Dreams, Lucent's empty Hopewell estate, American Cyanamid's abandoned plantation, and Sarnoff's unguarded acreage. Everything's going to hell and only the stalwart double duty of some veteran hares and an infusion of enthusiastic idiots and pitiful wankers from the local diploma mill kept the PHHH continuous-set streak alive and participation level with that five years before. Worth Noting: Hash #900.4, September 22, 2002, Hey Yo! Paully sets a straight liner through streams from Fackler Road. A nice forest of F's kept us lost. *** 2002: We just barely kept up our five-year record of running more than once a week. 2002 53 2001 54 2000 55 1999 56 1998 54 1997 52 There were 17 new people who ran more than one hash, and the average pack size was 9.9, down from 12.1 last year. The sum of all hashes run (no one-timers counted) is now 9214 (8657 at the end of 2001, 8045 at the end of '00, and 7104 at the end of '99). By comparison, in 2000, 28 newcomers participated. *** The Get A Life Award goes, yet again, to Hey Yo! Paully! who ran 44 hashes. Weepee finished second, wasting 36 Sundays and Wednesday evenings. Wacko and Solo did 29, the Geezer "ran" 22, and Juicy 21. You only make the Idiot list with more than 20; in 2000 16 morons did just that. Hand Solo set the most, inflicting 7 upon us. WeePee and Pyroman set 6 apiece, Hey YO! Paully 5, and The Geezer and Wacko did 4 each. *** First Hash: January 6, 2002, #862.4. "The Battle of Wounded Knee, Part 2" Solo sets through a vast despoiled landscape, prompting a poem from the Atomic Duck. Last Hash: December 29, 2002, #914.4, "Who really set this Marathon?" Discomfort returns--or was it Solo again?--probably Solo because it was long and everyone got lost. *** Worst Venue: Nothing will ever replace the Louisiana Reptile Fancier's #327.4, "The Warehouses at the End of Time." T. J. and friends never got out of Princeton's urban blight on #898.4. But Weepee capped the worst in a long tradition of shitty hashes with an on-in at the end of #906.4 by a slimewater-filled loading dock bay. Impressionable novices confused flaking dried synthetic algae on the asphalt with the equally synthetic potato chips. *** Best Venue: Honorable mentions: The newly opened terrain of the Watershed that Hand Solo marked for the second half of #899.4 was truly glorious; too bad the confused and soggy pack revolted at the regroup and never traversed it. Llloda's #874.4 lived up to its billing until she met the dogs while laying trail-beautiful spring woods terrain. Nonsensei offered some fine overgrown 19th century industrial works on #890.4. Second place goes to the Louisiana Reptile Fancier for his winter wonderland #911.4 through the Herrontown Woods and River Road environs, which set the stage for a snowball fight and sledding the cooler back to the LRF's car. The winner is Pyroman and Speedbumps's Hard Corpse X (#870.4) in the Deliverance Country of High Bridge, which featured exactly that, along with hills higher than Sauerlands, lacerating shiggy, and many river views that Weepee saw up close and personal when crossing the West Raritan floodwaters without a paddle or a boat. *** Name of the Year: Honorable mentions to people who never came back: Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Safe Sets and Ticked Off. Runner-up is Valerie Lied, who also never came back. The winner was our Mongolian rookie, Deviant Honked, who was named Anagram on her first and only hash, leading to many variants thoughtfully provided by write-in for Ms. (name redacted at Deviant Honked's insistence). *** Protests/Whines/Remarks of the Year: Honorable mention: Solo's "My woman was on her knees." did not, he assured us, refer to Mrs. Solo. The winner is one-trick pony Glenn Ballard's curious case of internet diarrhea regarding the shiggy on Marcia Marcia Marcia's virgin #895.4 set. This sparked the liveliest discussion on the PHHH list since Geezer had it out with Obersturmführer Reichard Pashtun in '00. That this extended whine came from someone who boasted of breaking two ribs by bicycling down a stairwell made it all the more inexplicable. Best remarks to Weepee for his thoughtful attempts to explain the PHHH Weltanschauung to "Safe Sets" Ballard: see PHHH Yahoo Groups messages 3034 and 3063. *** Weirdest Objects of the Year: Nonsensei's Rising Sun flag marks on the trees in #878.4. *** Worst Event: Honorable mention: The lost hash cash on #886.4. Runner-up: Juicy's refusal to let the freezing hashers on her doorstep taint her new abode on #913.4. The Winner: It was the worst of times, for the wedding reception on-in at #883.4 had NO BEER. *** Best Events: Honorable mentions: Running through the Frist Center on #903.4; Llloda's wet sweatshirt contest at #877.4's on-in; and Ex Utero leading the pack's serenade of heat- prostrated Geezer at the River Road on-in of Pyroman's #889.4. Record of note: Most hashers in a car without using the trunk: 8, after Solo's #877.4. Second place: Hey YO! Paully emerges shirtless from the shiggy by the West Hopewell Teenage Prison Farm on 901.4, gets cuffed and cavity searched, and triggers a lockdown and prisoner count. And the Winner: It was the best of times, for Christine Brown and Neil (Fight Club) Shenvi tie the knot and go swinging at their reception at the first on-in of #883.4. *** Worst Write-up: Longest write-up goes to Hand Solo who copied most of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance's 350 pages to describe #892.4. Nonsensei wins with her shameless effort to defend her Best Hash title in #890.4. *** Best Write-up: Also ran: Hwipwi's #878.4, "Yet Another Tale from the Belle Mead Inn." Honorable mentions to Geezer's avian-inspired #867.4 and #894.4, "West Denial Virus," whose digressions about the hash itself detract from the J. M. W. Turner-meets-Ray Bradbury-like imagery of Geezer's West Trenton landscapes. Weatherman inspired two of Weepee's best efforts: #902.4, "A Beautiful Half-Mind" and #868.4, "A la Recherche du Hash Perdu - Weatherman Returns," which wins for its imaginative use of sentence structure. *** Worst Food: Traditional mention: Weepee continues to foist the foulest in processed agri- business foods: see #866.4. Honorable mention: Ouipee's 99% pure Lindt chocolate that Excremental Earning insisted on chewing, much to her regret, on #876.4. The winner however comes from Hand Solo, whose execrable Vienna Fingers don't improve with a brand name, and his endless supply of soda water on the one of the hottest hashes of the year (#888.4) was a worthy loathsome and generically labeled complement. *** Best Food: Honorable mention to Weipei's malted Easter eggs on #875.4. Runner-up: Pyroman and Speedbumps's two varieties of homemade salsa on #879.4. Winners are Llloda's going away gazpacho on #891.4, accompanied by Pyroman's on-trail on on-in margarita Jell-O shots on #879.4, and capped by Marcia Marcia Marcia's vanilla ice cream and beer aperitif on #895.4. *** Rookie of the Year: Runner-up on four legs at #879.4 is the spirited wonder dachshund Stickshift, whose masters, alas, will likely never return to the PHHH after their stimulating discussion about alternate lifestyles with another one-time visitor, Grab Bag, at the On-in. Runner-up on two legs, Brain Injury Volunteer (9/14). And the winner is Justin Spencer (Captain Lame-O), who ran 11 and set 2 of his possible 14 appearances. *** Worst Hash of the Year: Honorable mention to Wouipee's Binky for a hash (#871.4) so bad it was eight months before anyone could be persuaded to even write it up. Runner-up is #906.4, "We're Not in Kansas, Are We" revealed a hole in Weapea's map as big as the gap between his ears. Idyllic terrain at American Cyanamid ruined not by guards with high-powered rifles but Weapea's miserable marks. The winner confirms the ineffable incompetence of the best and brightest at Old Nassau, as T. J. Pray, (Björn Dork), teams with Captain Lame-O and others best consigned to anonymity on two hardly marked stinkers, #898.4 "Checkmark Sally" and #908.4, "Flood for Thought." Best Hash of the Year: Rivers ran through all of them. Nonsensei's runner-ups #890.4 and #878.4 took advantage of several stream and brook crossings, some more impromptu than others. Geezer lost his shirt on the latter's flashflood. Weepee set some stinkers this year but his fetidly hot hash #894.4 through the virus-laced parks of West Trenton culminating in an on-in in the middle of the Delaware River made up for them. Having the bewitchingly cute Ex Utero ford the toxic flow on her father's back didn't hurt in the balloting. *** And Now, The Ultimate Award..............Hasher of the Year for 2002: 1992: The Hash Ghost - full frontal nude photo was included in this now-a-collector's-item write-up. 1993: No Award; apparently there was no 1993. 1994: In Utero (now happily ex utero). 1995: Wacko - first to 365. 1996: Who has run more hashes than any other non-human? Glory, that's who. She raised the average IQ of the pack by 50 points each time she ran. 1997: Delay LLLama. Eternally lost - miserable sets. 1998: The Louisiana Reptile Fancier, as he echoed the defining person of our time, Richard M. Nixon: "That's it; I'm outta here and I'm not coming back! You won't have the LRF to kick around any more." P. T. Barnum is vindicated again. 1999: This year we honoured our Grande Dominatrix, Road Jaundice, Architectrix of the Hard Corpse that year, runner of nearly 300 hashes, supplier of sky-blue Oreos, and Mother Protector Of Us All. 2000: We anointed Richard Pashtun as Anti-Hasher of the Year, Century, and Millennium. 2001: Discomfort, now sadly departed from these colonial shores, but seemingly unable to stay away. For all the discomfort and uncertainty she brought to us and herself, (see #819.4, #822.4, and #842.4), she was the Hasher of the Year for 2001. And the winner for 2002 is . . . the envelope please . . . Oh this one is an utter no brainer, for sure. Arrested? Handcuffed in the back of a squad car for running with an open can o' beer through a jailyard? Hey Yo! Paully, is our Hasher of the Year for 2002. *** On On to '03 - YBSs