December 9, 2007.

Most visitors to the Mall of America were only aware of one of the two events that was happening there this afternoon: the "World's Largest Christmas Carol," in which the voice of Theodore from the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie was to lead them all in singing The Chipmunk Song. This was to set a new Guinness world record for largest Christmas sing-a-long or something like that. The ubiquitous (and free!) santa hats with black A's on them, plus the commonness of red sweatshirts with yellow A's, the hordes of fans screaming "We love you Jesse" at their former-boy-band-member idol, and of course the wandering anthropomorphic chipmunks, all added up to provide a delightfully surreal backdrop for our utterly unrelated tasking.

We mostly gathered at or before one o'clock. Shortly before the hour of destiny, Shea Wolfe was sent out as a location scout and found us two nearly perfect locations on the fourth floor of the mall. We then proceeded to the more visible one and got our blood moving with a rousing game of Pong.

We turned Pong into a contact sport. The rules were those of the video game, but with a human ball and four-person chains of linked arms as paddles. The space was disproportionately small for the size and speed of our paddles, so when security broke the game up one team (consisting of Peter Harmon, Rao, Shea Wolfe, and Mean Jeannine) was in the lead one point to zero.

Security did not ask us to stop doing stuff at all, however - they just said we could no longer "participate in that activity" for safety reasons; apparently they were afraid we'd fall over when the ball crashed into us, hurt ourselves, and sue the mall or something. So we went to our other location, away from people who might not want to be hit by flying projectiles, and played Galaga, for which we were joined by the Unit family and by Kariudo Chasseur.

We used paper airplanes, made while waiting for everybody to arrive, as ammunition. Each alien began equipped with two planes, while the rest - approximately half, though no exact count was ever made - being in the hands of the intrepid player. Both player and aliens threw planes; aliens also got to swoop at the player in a beeline and return, trying to tag the player along the way. (Just as in the real game, one of the most effective alien tactics proved to be firing at point blank range while swooping.)

Three people played. Our transcription being fairly brutal (due in part to inaccurate ammo), only the the last, Kariudo Chasseur, was able to beat level one. We were about to do level two when security showed up, clearly amused by the bird's-eye view their surveillance cameras afforded them, and broke up the festivities.

help im a bug
My personal favorite moment was being the pong ball. It was dizzying and I fell over. There are probably pictures of this.

Darkaardvark

As we stood around folding paper airplanes, a MallCop asked us to scoot over a foot or two. We did; she asked us to do it again. About a minute later, a wave of several dozen cops, security guards, K-9 units and presumably Jesse McCartney came stomping by. It was a bit surreal.

It was a bit disappointing to have our game of Galaga broken up right as we were about to try out some new ideas, but I think we made two security guards' days a bit better.

The highlight? Probably being hit directly in the face by a very well-aimed airplane.



Burn Unit:
The "new ideas" Dark Aardvark refers to were partly mine. The plan was for level 2 Galaga to have me and probably Eleanor hold up as the top aliens, then swoop down and extend Henry's stroller (while making sound effects) to "tractor beam" up the ship. Then Shea Wolfe was going to be the backup ship and we'd try the "shoot down the tractor ship get a second barrel tactic. We were interrupted by security before putting this idea to the test.