April 2008 Archives

Fermat’s Room, the Spanish math-mystery film making its American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, begins with a warning: “If you don’t know what prime numbers are, you should just leave now.”

This was a bold joke, and also an odd bit of bravado, as the ensuing film didn’t require any math knowledge at all. The story ostensibly revolves around a proof of the strong Goldbach Conjecture, which posits that every even number greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. (Fermat's Last Theorem, despite what you might suspect, doesn't come up at all.) But Goldbach fades from prominence within the first half hour, as four mathematicians—an aging genius, a young wunderkind, a hottie, and a grizzled pragmatist—convene, at Fermat’s behest, at a drawing room within a remote abandoned warehouse.

At this point, your nerd quotient, rather than enhancing your enjoyment of the movie, detracts from it a touch. The gimmick of the titular room is that it literally shrinks unless its occupants can solve riddles and logic puzzles within a given time limit. (The directors explained in a post-screening Q&A that they built a shrinking set, and indeed the claustrophobia is convincing.) It’s a fun premise, but it’s hard to suspend disbelief when revered mathematicians and supposed puzzle freaks struggle with old chestnuts that would barely garner 30 points in Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Like the first riddle:

A candy-store owner receives three opaque boxes of mislabeled candy. One contains sweet candies, one contains mints, and the third contains a mix of sweets and mints. The three boxes are, correspondingly, labeled “Sweets,” “Mints,” and “Mix,” but none of the labels is on its correct box. How many pieces of candy must the shopkeeper remove to determine the actual contents of the three boxes and relabel them properly?

(If you’ve never heard this one before, the solution is in the footnotes.¹)

A classic riddle, but that’s the thing: It’s a classic. Geeks have already heard the puzzles in Fermat’s Room. It’s a forgivable sin, though, for two reasons. First, there are only so many clever logic problems that can be conveyed to a general audience in 30 seconds of dialogue, and even though the directors made some of the simplest possible choices, a couple audience members still complained in the Q&A session that they couldn’t follow along.²

Second, I can overlook the use of old riddle-book fare because director-screenwriters Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña did create one original enigma, and it’s the biggest one: the room itself. The origin of the room is the central thread of the film, which wends through a bottomless spiral of twists. The surprises arrive with a refreshingly light touch. Piedrahita and Sopeña are clever but also careful not to seem too proud of themselves.

The film’s resolution isn’t perfect—in particular, the explanation of Fermat and Pascal’s roles in the grand scheme was a little too breezy—but Fermat’s Room is still a polished exercise in artful misdirection. From that opening joke about prime numbers, in fact from the moment the film’s title appears on screen, you’re being charmed into false assumptions, which is the mark of any good mystery flick or, for that matter, any good riddle.

These Duracell batteries with the Chinese writing on them seem to be the AA variety of choice at bodegas and markets around the city. When I need batteries in a jiffy, I’m usually forced to choose between these gray-market imports or the off-brand “Super Hi-Fi Triple Power!” cells that, for all I know, could be sawdust with a copper top. It’s a tough call, but I usually cross my fingers and go with the Chinese Duracells.

I’ve always felt a little guilty about it, though, because of this little guy peeking out from above the Duracell logo:

The chintzy tanktop, along with the suspicion engendered by the package’s Chinese script, led me to assume that this Duracell bunny was a knockoff of the famed Energizer Bunny. As it turns out, my knowledge of battery mascots was embarrassingly provincial.

It seems that the Duracell Bunny is a longstanding advertising icon, beloved almost everywhere except the United States. Here’s a recent commercial featuring the bunny that’s airing in the U.K. Watch with delight as the Duracell Bunny lures his zinc carbon rivals into a grueling, no-turning-back climbing trip.

This mascot is a more cutthroat sort than his showy Energizer counterpart. When the Brand X bunnies give in to dehydration and heat exhaustion, the Duracell Bunny shows no concern—rather, he quickens his murderous pace. My favorite moment comes at the top when, after noticing signs of life from the topmost bunny on his death hoist, the Duracell Bunny gives the rope a quick jerk to snap the spines of his victims once and for all. Duracell: Use it, or quite literally die.

The Duracell Bunny has been around since the early ’80s, so what gives with the Energizer Bunny, which didn’t appear until 1989? How did Energizer rise to prominence with the same basic gimmick?

The simple truth is that the Energizer Bunny was intended as a parody of the Duracell Bunny, a fact that has been forgotten over time, at least in the American market.¹ And what an utterly lame parody it was—they slapped a pair of sunglasses on Duracell’s enduring icon and called it their own. In essence, Duracell made a claim that “Our batteries last for, like, infinity,” and Energizer responded with, “Oh yeah? Well our batteries last for infinity plus one!”

Of course, the entire world rejected this stupid tactic, except here in America, where we absolutely could not get enough of that too-cool-for-school rabbit. Now that I have educated myself on the brazen unoriginality of the Energizer Bunny, I will never again buy a pack of Energizer batteries, unless I do.

“He’s got a bucket of crotch-flavored popcorn.”¹

Geek Out

Let’s all go to the movies. And get ourselves some snacks! The Tribeca Film Festival is underway, and the festival’s database programmers have taken the novel approach of organizing films on their website by “mood.” Two offerings on the “Brainy” mood page jump out as appealing options.

There’s a timely screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey on Sunday at 3:00. The movie will be followed by a panel moderated by NPR Science Friday host Ira Flatow, and will include:

• Buzz Aldrin
• Contact screenwriter Ann Druyan
• MIT artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minksy
• Matthew Modine, for some reason

So if you’ve ever wondered what Matthew Modine thinks of this science-fiction classic, here’s your chance, I guess.

Moving on, the most exciting new film on the schedule for me is Fermat’s Room:

The walls are closing in — literally — on four brainiac mathematicians with shadowy pasts in this übertense debut. … Each has been invited by the mysterious Fermat to a sort of salon for riddle freaks, where they will try to solve an assuredly grand enigma.

I was sold halfway through the first sentence, as I’m a sucker for any movie about mathematicians. Hopefully the film will be heavy on the math and riddles, although the mention in the synopsis of Oliva, “a brilliant but hardheaded hottie,” gives me some pause. (I still hold a grudge against the makers of Enigma for turning the exciting tale of the Bletchley Park codebreakers into a lifeless love story.) Fermat’s Room shows tonight, Saturday, and throughout next week.

Get bent. Speaking of festivals, the NYC Bent Festival 2008 is also in full swing, with a concert tonight starting at 7:00 and workshops throughout the day tomorrow. If you’re not familiar, circuit bending is the art of using electronic hacks to create novel new sounds—along the lines of a theremin, but a couple orders of magnitude more complex. Circuit benders use/abuse synthesizers, toys, pretty much anything electronic that makes noise. Even TVs—Ed Bear’s Intro to Video Bending at 3:00 tomorrow will show you how:

The disappearing vocabulary of analog video is at once the signature of the 20th century and a powerful tool for recording, performance, and learning. A basic understanding of the video signal turns any television into an oscilloscope and all electronics into potential audio-visual instruments.

All the fun happens at DCTV on 80 Lafayette St.

Geek In

Get in the hole. This week’s game recommendation is inspired by some fan email I received while away:

DEAR SIRS I WOULD LIKE TO ORDER SOME WII GOLF DISKS FOR MY WIFE AND I TO PLAY ON NINTENDO WII.  I ONLY HAVE ONE THAT CAME WITH MY CONSOLE.  WE LOVE PLAYING GOLF AND WOULD LIKE MORE COURSES.  PLEASE ADVISE SO I MAY ORDER   THANK YOU ROBERT

Great question, Robert, and thanks for your loyal readership. I only sell Wii golf disks to exiled Nigerian princes, but I can tell you about another golf game you might enjoy. I whiled away long flights on my recent trip by revisiting my favorite PSP disc, Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee. I find the mechanics tighter than the also-enjoyable PlayStation games in the series (although I haven’t played HSG: Out of Bounds yet). If you can get ahold of the Japanese Open Tee sequel, a task that should pose no challenge to a man of your Internet shopping acumen, snap it up.

Which is all you really wanted, anyway.

Shortly after I regaled readers with a tale of of the narcoleptic breakfast treat created by the supergeniuses running McDonald’s Japan and hinted at more reports to come, my excursion in the Orient was derailed by a minor crisis that forced one of my traveling companions to head home early. Suffice it to say that reservations were canceled, hands were wrung, zigs were taken in lieu of zags, and so on.

The trip became something of a mess, but before flying back yesterday, I did manage to make a quick, obligatory pilgrimage to Akihabara, Tokyo’s exalted gadget mecca. Below, a photo essay as GONY eases its way back to regular programming (read: as I sleep off the return-leg bout of jet lag).

There are three parts to Akihabara, roughly speaking: a flea-market building near the station, the squeaky clean main street Chuo-dori, and the spotty patches of pachinko parlors and specialty used shops in the alleys off Chuo-dori. None of this is in the actual neighborhood named Akihabara—“Akihabara” the shopping district is actually in Kanda, but nobody seems to care about the distinction, just like nobody complains that present-day Madison Square Garden is nowhere near Madison Square.

Exit the Akihabara “Electric Town” station—located on the JR Yamanote line, a rail loop that connects most of Tokyo’s major neighborhoods—and you see this complex whose neon name translates as “The World’s Radio Hall.” So right away, you know you’re dealing with some cutting-edge tech. I mean, radios!

Inside The World’s Radio Hall are cramped corridors of stalls selling electronic devices and parts, striking not just in the sheer quantity of wares on offer but in the meticulous organization of every square inch. It wasn’t enough for this storekeep to create a hand-lettered sign for every part on display; he felt compelled to color-code.

It’s often said that in Akihabara, you can find parts that you couldn’t get anywhere else, which is true to a limited extent, but the greater appeal to me is the presentation. Inspiration emanates from the tidy parade of diodes, capacitors, etc., inviting you to pick up a dish and build something. You probably can get 99.9% of this stuff elsewhere, but not the experience.

The Akihabara stalls are quite agile—thanks to their small size, they can transform themselves en masse in response to market trends more quickly than the monolithic electronics chains. Every time I visit, it seems a different class of product dominates the “Radio Hall.” Five years ago, it was pocket translators. Two years ago, it was in-car GPS displays.

This year, it’s a spy-camera boom. Mini cameras of this sort aren’t new, but the advent of tiny high-res LCDs appears to have provided a tipping point. I easily saw five to ten times as many of these cameras for sale as I did last April. Perhaps you could draw some misguided sociological assumptions from the trend, but I’m not going there…OK, fine, all Japanese people are creepy paranoid upskirt voyeurs. Happy now?

Also under the Radio Hall awning is the Kotobukiya character shop, one of Tokyo’s best sources for cute anime toys (more My Neighbor Totoro than Dragonball Z) and “blind boxes.” In the foreground you can see a machine that produces customized Hello Kitty name stickers. These are used in lieu of government I.D. in Japan.

Also visible outside Kotobukiya, and all around Akihabara, are the “Capsule Stations,” better known as the gacha gacha for the sound their cranks make when you turn them to get a toy. These coin-op stations, whose prizes are worlds better than the junk you might see in similar American machines, are a local fixture but are slowly disappearing from Japan in general. Gacha gacha used to be almost ubiquitous, but it’s rare that you see a large cluster of them outside a nerd-focused neighborhood like Akihabara anymore. This wall of gacha gacha offered a wide variety of toys, ranging from giant robot figurines to slightly more expensive giant robot figurines.

The skyline on Chuo-dori, the neighborhood’s focal avenue, is predictably dominated by electronics chain stores. Laox and Sofmap each have more than half a dozen locations in Akihabara alone. Ishimaru Denki, seen to the left of Laox above, is unusual for the area in that it doesn’t cater to tourists with English-language signs or duty-free outlets. Don’t feel threatened, though: Like all store staff in Japan, the Ishimaru salesmen will still attempt to converse with you in panicked, broken English, even if you speak to them in fluent Japanese. It’s a charming idiosyncrasy of Japanese culture that never gets annoying at all!!!!!!!

Across the street from Ishimaru Denki is this Sega arcade, one of many towering game centers in the area. Like the gacha gacha, arcades are fading from the Japanese landscape outside of Akihabara, unable to hold on any longer against the appeal of home console and online gaming. In Akihabara, every arcade’s floor plan hews to a de facto standard that places community games at the top, general video games in the middle, and eye-grabbing “UFO catchers” (i.e., crane games) on the ground floor.

UFO catcher prowess is a point of pride among Japanophiles, myself included. The key is to view the crane as a tool of manipulation rather than acquisition. If you try to use the pathetically weak claws to pick something up directly, you won’t have much success. Instead, you have to use the crane to nudge your desired item toward the prize chute.

The item placement in Akihabara UFO Catchers tends to be pretty unfair. The picture above was taken at a Sega arcade in Nagoya, where the machines were more forgiving. I realize that I’m beginning to sound like the chain-smoking grandmother who claims to know which casinos have the “loosest” slots, so it might be time to swear off my UFO Catcher addiction.

This parting shot nicely encapsulates Akihabara. On the right is the area’s main Sofmap (née Bic Camera) location, in the middle is the renovated Taito Game Station arcade, and to the left of Taito is Toranoana, the best manga shop in Tokyo aside from Mandarake. And on the Sofmap building, a manga ad featuring girls with comically large breasts. Viva Akihabara!

Earlier in the decade, Akihabara was unkempt and a touch seedy, mirroring the otaku clientele it served. As the area has become more of a prized tourist destination, it has cleaned up its act, but unlike, say, the post-Giuliani Times Square, Akihabara has managed to maintain some of its mythical character. The maid cafes and schoolgirl-panty vending machines may be less prevalent than before, but I still know of no better place to go when you want to feel like a big dork—and see some even bigger ones.

A “geek” writer feels a lot of pressure on a trip to Japan. There’s an implicit expectation that I’ll wow readers with tales of the futuristic Orient they have glimpsed in their comic books and their Adult Swim Inuyasha reruns. Having spent a great deal of time in the country, I know that I can’t live up to those outsized expectations (because neither can Japan, really), but still, the pressure is there.

Trouble is that the vast majority of technology you encounter here, both when visiting hives of gadget commerce and in daily life, don’t really stretch the imagination. You get familiar gizmos in mildly unfamiliar permutations. Smaller, more featured cellphones. A TV with a DVR and Blu-Ray built in. A Sailor Moon vibrator with improved lithium batteries. Same old, same old. Modern Japan has never been about innovation on the broad scale.

At least that’s what I thought, until I visited a McDonald’s the other day and witnessed true innovation. See, the other major pressure facing a writer in Japan is jet lag. People whine about jet lag on a cross-country trip in the United States, but flying to the other side of the world gives you a special sort of desynchronosis. Every traveler has his own melodramatic way to describe it, and my simile of choice is that it’s like walking around underwater. Until I recover, I can barely speak coherent sentences, let alone glurg incandescent morphing.

So where does McDonald’s come in? Well, the most frustrating thing about jet lag is that you can’t sleep it off. Even if you go to bed at the “right” time, you’ll wake up a few hours later, and you will not fall back asleep, due to hormone imbalances or some such. Mankind has long struggled to find a solution, and now we have it: the Megamuffin.

It’s a medical miracle. If you’re struggling to sleep, simply eat one of these, and your body’s non-digestive processes will shut right down, no questions asked. (If it’s after breakfast time, the Mega Teriyaki will do as well.) Sleep drugs have nasty side effects, but the only side effect of the Megamuffin is heart disease and hastened death. And skyrocketing health costs. The perfect cure.¹

In the 1980s, we feared Japan because they had studied our manufacturing strategies and improved upon them. In 2008, as McDonald’s in the United States struggles to reorient its menu with healthy, “organic” items, the restaurant’s Japanese minders have boosted their revenue by reinventing an old standby of the fast-food trade: increased meat. Look out, U.S.A., the student has once again become the master.

The celebrated lions outside the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library are named Patience and Fortitude, which I find appropriate, as I’ve visited NYPL branches a few times in recent months to research an upcoming GONY piece, and the task was a strong test of my own capacity for patience and fortitude.

So I welcome the news that the NYPL has enrolled in “iTunes U.,” a section of the iTunes Music Store where academic institutions can share material. The initial selection is pathetic—the “Performing Arts Archives” consists of a single 3-minute discussion of the NYPL’s Katharine Hepburn collection—but I assume that if only for the sake of dignity, the library will fill it out.

My optimism doesn’t come from any notion that the NYPL’s iTunes U. is a breakthrough in itself. Rather, it’s a heartening step in the right direction in that it makes more Library material available to the public, and more importantly, it does so through a familiar interface.

For my research at the Library, I wanted to comb through New York papers from the 1930s and ’40s. NYPL staff would inevitably direct me toward their online New York Times database. When I told them I didn’t want to restrict my search to the Times, I got different reactions. All of the staff agreed that the library has such materials, a few claimed to know how to find them, and none actually did. There was always another room, another database, a binder somewhere…but not here. The material was on microfiche, a fact the librarians underscored with dread, as if they spoke of runic tomes guarded by a ferocious dragon.

But in fairness, I can forgive the fact that a public enterprise on the vast scale of the NYPL doesn’t have experts at every station. The most aggravating thing for me about research at the NYPL is not that the staff was unable to retrieve some information, but that the information they do make available is so difficult to navigate. Each new resource requires you to learn yet another atrocious interface with its own cocktail of Boolean modifiers and its own idiosyncratic ranking algorithm. (And good lord, people, any information retrieval system that, in 2008, still forces you to view only ten results at a time should be taken out back and shot.)

Libraries spent the past decade frantically digitizing their wares while interface design has taken a back seat. They threw books up on “virtual” stacks and figured they’d make the card catalog when they get around to it. In that time, libraries have ceded their authority as information centers to outfits that concentrated on how users navigate information—most notably Google.

The iTunes interface isn’t ideal, but at least it is familiar, one less thing to learn. If the NYPL’s directors still take pride in their status as an information hub (and I think they do), it would behoove them to pursue more projects like iTunes U., which presents information in a context that a general audience understands. As I saw firsthand, it doesn’t matter how many newspapers you have in the back room if nobody knows how to read them.

amNewYork’s Urbanite blog recently mentioned an interactive Space Invaders-type video game called TV-PIXX that aired on New York’s WPIX in the early 1980s. Each day, one kid got to play the game by calling in from home. The controls were simple: Instead of pushing a joystick button, kids would yell “PIX!” to fire a shot at enemy spaceships as they appeared on the screen.

TV-PIXX was WPIX’s canny self-promotional retitling of TV POWWW!, a system that apparently saw use on many American and Canadian local TV affiliates for a stretch in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I’d never seen or heard of TV POWWW! before the Urbanite article piqued my interest, and video is hard to come by. There’s this clip from Sacramento, Calif., affiliate KTXL, which offers no gameplay but features the world’s least gruff sea captain plugging TV POWWW! with the underwhelming pitch that, like it or not, it’s “the only game in town”:

The only clip I could find with footage of the game comes from a site dedicated to Barney’s Army, a kids’ show that aired in the afternoons in North Carolina. (Afternoon kiddie shows were the main venue for TV POWWW!) Maddeningly enough, there are only three seconds of clear gameplay before the picture devolves into low-budget video-effect chaos—apparently, the show was cutting “the pow game” from its lineup and wanted to give the segment an exciting sendoff:

(A quick side note—the character in that clip, animated in real time, is done by a process called “Aniforms,” which made its national TV debut on Steve Allen’s I’ve Got a Secret. On-the-fly animation, like interactive programming, has long been a holy grail of TV, and the technique so enamored Mark Goodson Productions that they produced a notorious game show pilot, Malcolm, built around a wisecracking Aniform. It was a moment of television history that Alex Trebek would probably prefer to forget.)

The original Urbanite post that prompted me to look into TV POWWW! notes in an aside that present-day TV exists in “the age of interactivity.” That’s true in a sense, but then again, it has always been true in a sense. What amuses me about interactive TV is that it has been attempted with little success since the dawn of the medium, yet it’s in a state of perpetual comeback. Whether it’s call-in quiz shows or hybrid video games, most formats have been tried and have fizzled. Before DirecTV’s “Game Lounge” there was 1977’s How Do You Like Your Eggs?, hosted by Bill Cullen for Warner’s ill-fated QUBE system:

And before GSN’s new Bingo America (née ABC’s National Bingo Night) there were countless variations of “bingo at home,” including this one featuring a young Monty Hall:

Interactive TV is always making a comeback because it has never truly arrived.¹ It’s a romantic thought, programming created by you, the audience, as it happens! I imagine TV producers keep trying it because it seems like such an obvious idea.

It’s hard, though, to escape the fundamental conundrum of interactive TV: The more control you ostensibly hand over to the audience, the more the program stinks. TV POWWW! is a great example of this. It’s sounds like a good time, but in practice, 99.9% of people end up sitting there watching someone yell at an arcade game, which is pretty piss-poor TV. Only the kid yelling “Pow!” gets to have the real fun. Once the illusion of control wears off for the other 99%, once enough people realize they won’t get to say “Pow,” game over.

“秋茄子は嫁に食わすな。”¹

Geek Out

村上隆の作品を見に行く。If GONY seems preoccupied with Japan lately, it’s because I’m preparing to head over there next week. (Of course, I will be providing exclusive coverage during the 10-day visit.) As noted on these pages, before, though, you don’t have to sit through a mind-numbing, jet-lagging 13-hour flight to get a taste of Japan. This weekend sees the opening of the “© Murakami” show at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway), with more than 100 of the Japanese pop artist’s works. Highlights include “My Lonesome Cowboy,” featuring probably the most iconic spiral of cast-resin semen in all of modern art. The installation also features an operational Louis Vuitton shop, in keeping with Murakami’s groundbreaking use of branding in his creations.

Get your game show on. I grew up on game-show reruns, and while I feel blessed to have enjoyed the 1990s afternoon lineup on USA Network, my viewing was always tinged with disappointment, as I knew that I’d never get the chance to be a contestant on these great but long-canceled games. Fortunately, like-minded entertainers are working to salve these old wounds, like Sara Schaefer, who presides over a 9:15 p.m. playing of Name That Tune at Union Hall (702 Union Street) this Sunday.

Keep that Guy Smiley high going into the workweek with J. Keith van Stratten’s What’s My Line? Live on Stage, which runs Mondays at 8 p.m. through April 28 at the Barrow Street Theater (27 Barrow St.). I can’t vouch for the authenticity of Schaefer’s Park Slope NTT, but van Stratten’s WML is the officially licensed real deal, capturing the classy, art-deco vibe of the original. Whether your taste tends toward John Charles Daly or Larry Blyden, you should be pleased by this faithful, unironic adaptation.

Geek In

Weboggle your mind. OK,WordSplay changed its name from “Weboggle” a while ago, but all that means is none of the copyright threats plaguing Scrabulous. At heart, it’s still Weboggle, a full-featured implementation of Allan Turoff’s classic Boggle word game. Unlike the private, plodding pace of Scrabulous, you play WordSplay in three-minute bursts against dozens of opponents. Once you see your handle show up on the leaderboard, you’ll be sucked in, happily killing a few hours trying to top “wordsmyth” and “Donna from MASPETH” with your lexicographic virtuosity.

If you went by its shabby, forgotten web presence, you’d think New York’s “Nerd Nite” had trailed off into nothingness after Jan. 10. In fact, the educational, inebriational event remains in full swing, convening at 7:00 this Thursday night at Angels & Kings (500 E. 11th St.).

Nerd Nite invites experts in eclectic fields to deliver presentations to a 2-drink-minimum crowd in one of the city’s many fine saloons. The April 3 evening will include presentations on the history of drinking in New York and a debunking of the conventional wisdom on dinosaurs.

The most interesting lecture looks to be that of Manhattan Borough Historian Mike Miscione, who will explain how modern NYC came to be. From the Nerd Nite NYC mailing list:

In 1898 the patchwork of rival municipalities around New York harbor were joined together to create the five-borough New York City that exists today. But the city that never sleeps was almost the city that never was. Michael will describe the clash between the pro-consolidationists, led by civic visionary Andrew H. Green (“the 19th century Robert Moses”), and the Brooklyn loyalists who opposed them. He’ll also answer that age-old question, “Why on earth did we let Staten Island join the club?”

If you can’t make the talk, you can still peruse Miscione’s Andrew H. Green website, which seeks to raise awareness of the forgotten civic titan.

Interested parties can now sign up for the aforementioned all-day scavenger hunt Metropolitan Odyssey 2008: Sigma 182, brought to you by Metro Metro. In typical MM fashion, the game is already afoot: The title of the hunt is also a preliminary clue to its location. Last year’s hunt explored the West Village, and the exhausting 2006 hunt began near City Hall and sprawled across the Brooklyn Bridge into DUMBO.