Bubblesort's choice of task threw me off - I was mentally prepared to be assigned a task, and to work to do it as creatively and thoroughly as possible. But "Multi-tasking"? I, for one, am not much of a fan of such "meta-tasks" (the half-dozen or so player-submitted "Do some other group's task" (et al.) tasks suggest I may be alone in this, though). That said, a task is a task, and I don't think anyone wants a "duel" to consist of too much back-and-forth over the rules.

Going by ID's, at least, there are - or at least, have been - nearly 1200 tasks. There are a few near-duplicates in there, a few in-jokes, and more than a few that may never see the light of day, but it was still daunting to plot out a Multi-task.

I browsed through the active and deactivated "big lists", taking notes that I was trying to loosely group in potential collections of tasks. I had a couple of good threads going.

First, I considered a lengthy collection of grocery-store tasks. A properly-done I Was A Teenage Spokesmodel could involve The Player Commodity, Corporate Makeover, and Reverse Shoplifting. With the right product, altering the label could even take care of Everything That Exists Is On The Internet. Thank You The MGMT, Public Sign Makeover, Product Co-branding Photo Essay and Renew A Lost Art could've been worked in as well, without too too much trouble. Perhaps even some Tapes And Tapes, or Out With The Old could happen in the supermarket.

It felt a little unsatisfying, though; a bit un-duel-ish. Even if part of Multi-tasking is completing a ton of tasks at once, I felt more like I was trying to come up with tax exemptions than dueling someone. So I considered another option. Most San Franciscans know that, when the chips are down, you're alone, and you're facing an uphill epic battle, a good man to turn to is Frank Chu (yes, he has a wikipedia article). I've talked with Mr. Chu before about advertising, and with an event coming up, it would be a good time to Spread SF0. I could Compile Some Footage, perhaps Renew A Lost Art for the ad, or maybe even conduct the transaction with greeting cards. I'm sure there were other possibilities as well, but again, while a Frank Chu ad would've been great, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to carry the full task(s) out over the weekend, and that Mr. Chu's significance would be easily missed anywhere his celebrity status has yet to reach.

I'm prone to analysis paralysis, and I prefer to deal with problems one at a time. I also wanted a big, impressive centerpiece task. So I turned to a character with a history of winning SFZero battles with a combination of cunning and pyrotechnics. No, I didn't ask Oliver for help. I just decided that a task he created, Erection, would be the perfect weapon with which to win this duel.

With that I could toss aside my trees of tasks and get down to business. Having recently succeeded in attaching a chair to my ceiling with little assistance, I assumed a tower would be within reach. This also seemed like a good time to fire up the ol' VMware and try to do something useful with SketchUp - persumably, using a tool dedicated to architectual design would make Tower-building almost foolproof! Check out the little person providing an idea of the scale.

SketchUp didn't really help much, since my real problem didn't seem to be in imagining a 30+ foot structure, but in contructing it quickly and cheaply by myself. I checked prices on wooded dowels, but decided they were too expensive (and a bit heavy all together). I considered copper (or some other metal) plumbing, but that failed on the same counts (but much worse). I wasn't sure there'd be much wiggle room for any assistance pulling the tower together. Furthermore, I was planning to Trespass installing the tower (the plan was to put it in either the wooded area or the parking lot between Oak St. and Fell St. just off Octavia Blvd. - where the Central Freeway ramp used to be). Based on price, the length available, and my own perception of its strength, I decided on PVC plumbing. It's light, it's very cheap, and the various links and joints make piecing the structure together relatively easy.

So I was off to a big box in Daly City to buy my tubes. I browsed the plumbing bits, looking for useful joints - among the best seemed to be a corner joint that would connect three pipes. Assuming I bought 12 lengths of 10' tubing, it could have 40' legs, meeting at right angles to each other...

I asked a Depot dork for some math help, or at least internet access, or at the very least, a calculator. No luck with any of them. I managed to blow enough of the cobwebs out of the trigonometry corner of my brain to determine the tower would end up being less than 30' tall, so I skipped the corner joint, bought the biggest keyring they had (to loop the tops of three legs together), and stuffed 120' of PVC into my hourly-rental Toyota Corolla.

Back at home, I started drilling holes in the tubes so that I could connect them to the keyring. I found an piece of cloth I'd bought some time ago, which would become an SFZero flag - the better to Spread SF0 with, natch. I figured I could even make a joke out of naming my construction The Sutro Tower.

With the flag's first coat drying, and the top three sections of tubing linked together to form a reasonably stable tower, I lugged some pipes downstairs to attempt the 20' version. And that's about where things started to go wrong.

First off, there's really no easy way - that I could figure out - to build a tower by yourself and without the aid of a crane, scaffolding, etc. I just leaned the collapsed tripod of the top section against something, popped an additional section of pipe onto each leg, and tried to convince it to stand up. At that height, the trees were a serious obstruction, and I was just using improvised anchors to keep the legs in place. I managed to hold it aloft for a bit, but "freestanding" was out of the question. As it turns out, once you have more than about 10' of PVC linked together, it starts acting much more like a twizzler than a steel girder.

So back to the laundry room / deck / workshop. This time I tried attaching a couple bits of metal and wood I had lying around as braces. Even the 10' tripod certainly felt more rigid. So back down again to add some length and try again. This time it was somewhat more stable, though still very difficult to manage alone. It's worth noting that, particularly in one's back yard, 20' suddenly looks very tall indeed, and 30'-40' seems almost impossibly tall.

I decided to take a break from tower wrangling to work on the flag a bit more. I considered my options. The lack of anchors, weights, etc was clearly a hindrance. I drilled a couple holes in a few "bottom" poles - I figured I could screw them into trees, bolt them onto some kind of anchor, or tie them to something. I had some heavy wire from the original version of the Take-Something-Leave-Something-Box. I drilled a couple more holes and tried using that wire as bracing for the tower - it helped, a little.

I'd hoped to finish the tower Saturday night, but by this point it was dark and my friends and roomies were all out Saturday night-ing (not that they could help - but a tower needs a witnesses). I decided to turn in and give it a go the next day.

I awoke with dread - the tower was built of half-cooked spaghetti, and while the bracing helped, I suspected that some aspect of my implementation was flawed - some combination of putting them at the wrong height (for their length) and not drilling bolt holes through the piping in quite the right direction.

I finished up the flag, and took another look at things. What I really needed was better bracing. Wood or metal loops? Maybe some of the old bicycle tires we had lying around? The extra bits of fence and deck wood the landlord stored in the yard? Maybe double loops of wire? Maybe try to straighten it instead of looping it in a (more aesthetically pleasing) circle?

The wire was, at this point, the only practically available option, but the problem with the tower thus far hadn't been the legs splaying wildly apart; it had been the soft, arced buckling the legs tended to do, which the wire would do little to prevent.

I'd considered tying a rope to the top to hoist the tower from our fire escape enough to make adding length easier. Faced with what was smelling increasingly of failure, I abandoned the trespassing / Octavia plan and walked up to Alamo Square Park to see if any of the trees seemed like they'd work to loop a rope over to pull up the tower. "Freestanding" it's not, but I figured I could anchor the legs carefully and then hope that letting go of the rope wouldn't send it tumbling down. I was encouraged enough to go buy some rope at Walgreen's (who knew?)

Given the instability of three 20' legs, though, I realized that I couldn't be optimistic about three 40' legs supporting the tower. More drilling, and I decided to add a fourth leg - with four 30' legs, I reasoned it'd be more stable, and I could add some kind of spire to make up for however much height it lacked - it worked for the Petronas Towers.

With Sam as my spotter / documenter and the neighbors watching confusedly on, I attached my rope tried to raise the four-legged, thirty-feet-at-best tower, now topped with an eye-catching flag. I tied the top to the fire escape, added the third pipe sections and went back up.

If 20' of PVC was like a Twizzler, then 30' - four legs or no - was like a guitar string. I hoisted, tied, tried spreading the legs around, and tried anchoring them to various pieces of the back yard, but all to no avail. Distaster.

In desperation, I screwed the rope to a baseball and ran back to Alamo to see if I could loop it over a sufficiently tall tree branch - and again failed.

So there you have it. First and foremost:

A Failure - not only that, a failure to get up an Erection! Is there any greater, any more tragic failure?

There's also the obligatory additions, since I don't think I really Spread SF0 with this attempt:

I took many a note - notes, incidentally, that will be of little use to you should you decide to build a tower.

Finally, there's:
Quite a bit of footage - much of it from early on, when I was brash, confident, and unaware of my impending downfall.

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So, as it's already five after 9pm, I'd better finish up. I personally think this was a rather spectacular completion of The Failure, but that's hardly a duel-ish task. I haven't seen what Bubblesort posted yet, but I hope you'll be judicious in your voting, and vote for completions rather than people. I'm not sure what loosing this dare means - do I admit I'm a moron? - but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.