The Hunt is just nine days away now. If you've been busy celebrating the 16th day of Christmas and haven't paid much attention to the January calendar yet, let me give you an update on what's coming up:

• Saturday, January 18th Noon - The Pioneer Press will be having their own version of a Pre-Dig Gig at the Bad Weather Brewery in St. Paul. The PP will be there selling their buttons which will be registered. You can get more info at http://www.badweatherbrewery.com/events/2020/1/18/pioneer-press-treasure-hunt-party 
• Saturday, January 18th 6pm - The actual Pre-Dig Gig which will be at Joseph's Grill in St. Paul, just across the river from downtown St. Paul.There will be a pasta bar there for $17 inclusive or you can order off of the menu. We will have a private room, though after a while we pretty much just take over the place. Buttons will not be for sale there as far as we know, but you can get in on the park pick pool the annual Cooler Crew picture.
• Sunday, January 20th - The official start of the Treasure Hunt even though Clue 1 will be out the day before in the early edition of the Sunday paper.
• Sunday, February 2nd 11:30am - The Rehash Bash will take place at Newell Park in St. Paul. This is a potluck event where we wrap up the hunt with food, door prizes, and initiation rituals.

Just 5 days now until the kickoff and the early release of Clue #1

I saw a confirmation from the PP on their Facebook group that the early edition of the papers will once again be going to Shamrocks. They try to get it there as soon as possible. Sometimes that means 11pm. Sometimes that means after the clue comes out online. But there usually are some people gathered there every night starting with Sunday night. I may not have much vacation time this year so I'm not sure how often I'll make it out this year, but I'll be there sometimes.

It looks like in addition to a couple of dustings this week, we'll get a more substantial snowfall this Friday. That will be followed by cold temperatures. So digging for the medallion this year will definitely be a challenge. Given that, perhaps we can look forward to something other than a large suburban park this year. It could be a Battle Creek kind of year. I wonder if all the St. Paul shootings this last year will play a role in where they put it?

It looks like the first clue is out!

Clue #1
There’s just enough snow and temperatures low
To rouse us from our snoozing
And hide the MacGuffin, no we ain’t bluffin,
In a park of our very own choosing.

The Vikings are done, the Twins yet begun
What excuse do you have to dawdle?
Gather your kin, prepare for the win
And be sure to bring a hot bottle

• The prize is $100 which will go to a single winner.
• The winner is the person who gets the most points.
• In the case of a tie, the winner will be whoever made the earliest post naming the correct park as one of their guesses.
• All guesses must be made by posting them to this board
• There is no cost to play (other than revealing your guesses perhaps).
• Between the release of each clue you have 10 guesses. You can spend all your guesses on one park ("Como for 10!") or give one guess to each of 10 different parks, or divide them any other way you wish ("Battle Creek for 5, Highland for 3, Como for 1 and Shamrock for 1")
• If you do not post a new guess, then your most recent guess will be presumed to carry forward with no action required on your part.
• You may make a new post and change your guess for that day, but it becomes locked in once the next clue comes out.
• Guesses made for the correct park (to be determined once the medallion has been declared to be found) are worth one victory point each. Guesses for the correct park made the day before are worth two victory points each. Guesses made the day before that are worth three points each and so on up to a potential value of 12 victory points for guesses made on the first day, if the hunt goes 12 clues (though guessing the right park on the first day of a 12 hunt clue would be a significant fail in other respects!)
• You are free to guess any park you like except for that you may not group parks by guessing a larger regional park that they are a part of. In cases where it is fuzzy, a ruling by the judge (me) will be made.
• I am eligible to participate as well because all posts are public and because there is no purchase required.
  
  

The term MacGuffin is something that I've heard before but I couldn't quite define it so I looked it up just now. Alfred Hitchcock seemed to have come up with the term. It is a plot device. It is something that seems very important to the characters in the story, but the audience doesn't actually care about it. For example, in Mission Impossible, the good guys and the bad guys are both after some code that unlocks a list of spies. It's very important to them, and why they are doing what they are doing, but we as the audience may not have even really understood what exactly it was even. So it is curious that refer to the medallion as a MacGuffin. It is an object that is at the center of our story, and what drives us to do what we are doing here. I suppose if you were then watching the documentary "No Time for Cold Feet" the medallion might be a MacGuffin. That audience wouldn't care about the medallion itself. They say they're not bluffing which could be a response to "Como? Again? Are you kidding me?"

A park of their very own choosing? Who else would be choosing it?

I don't think I'd worry about the reference to the Vikings and the Twins. They have often had references to the Vikings in Clue 1 and it usually didn't mean anything.

Otherwise I don't like to read too much into Clue 1. There's a million things that *might* be true, but no second point of reference to know if you are on the right track. So the only thing we can say for sure from this clue is that it is in a park.

On the other hand, they did release a "The Deed is Done" video yesterday. It starts with a view of the weather forecast. It shows Friday's forecast and says "Today", so we can assume it was hidden yesterday. Then it shows the trunk of a good sized tree with what look to be some ski tracks behind it. Then it shows the top of presumably the same tree. There is another similar tree to the left and a third one partially hidden behind it. So it's a park with some trees which actually does eliminate a few of the smaller ones. If those were cross country ski tracks behind it, then that also eliminates a lot of small parks that are too small to bother skiing through.