Franklin Tomason Traditional Cache
Hoosier_Reviewer: Since there has been no response to my previous note, I am archiving the cache.
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You're looking for a magnetic nanocache hidden on campus. It's not terribly well hidden, but it's small and it's in an area where your GPSr is likely to act funny. That's the only reason for the 1.5 difficulty. It's on campus, so you might want to be a little stealthy, but the tomason (read the long description) should provide you with a good cover story.
Gary Thomasson played baseball for the San Francisco Giants for five years (1972-1977) before being bounced around other Major League teams, and eventually getting lured away to Japan to play for the Yomiuri Giants by the biggest contract ever given to a player in the Nippon Pro Baseball league.
While he was in Japan, he came very close to breaking the record for most strikeouts. Unfortunately, that was as a *batter*, not as a pitcher. Nevertheless, the Giants kept him on for two whole years, paying his salary, and for some reason continuing to send him out to the plate, despite his performance.
His name became synonymous with things that no longer served a purpose but that were being maintained for some non-obvious reason, in the eyes of some people. One of those people was Genpei Akasegawa, an avant-garde/neo-dadaist artist perhaps most famous for sending out invitations (to a gallery opening) that looked like 1,000-yen bills. (Well, they only looked like that on one side, and even then, only if you were color-blind, but he was convicted of counterfeiting anyway.)
Genpei started a column in a magazine called "Shashin Jidai" ("Photography Age") featuring photographs of what he called "tomasons" or "hyperart": strange remnants of once-useful objects that have been maintained despite no longer serving any purpose. Classic examples include stairwells that lead nowhere, doors leading out of the third floor of a building without any balcony, telephone poles that have no wires attached to them, and gates with no fences.
Genpei seems to have the attention span of a gnat, so he grew tired of the idea long ago, the column dissolving into a series of tangents and side-notes, but many of us are still on the lookout for tomasons in the wild.
Special thanks to DJHobby for making room for this cache.
DJHobby and MonsterCatAmbush have qualified for the elusive "zeroth-to-find" title by finding the cache before it was even published. This means that the first-to-find title is still up for grabs, as of 9am, March 8th, 2011. Hurry up!
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Pna'g trg n tbbq svk ba lbhe TCFe? Ybbx sbe gur gbznfba; vg jvyy yrnq lbh evtug gb gur pnpur.
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
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