[YOU, YES YOU. WAIT FOR PEOPLE TO FINISH LAUGHING _BEFORE_ SAYING YOUR LINE. Pauses, even in the middle of a heated conversation, are OK to let the audience laugh. Just stand still and wait. OK? Awesome!] ---------------- INTRO ---------------- INTRO: Welcome to Nothing At All, also known as the VMCSP: Very Many Campers Spontaneously Poof! Very Merry Christmas SPecial! [dramatic] Or, more commonly, the Vicious MathCamp Staff Parody!!! We're writing the last few scenes backstage right now. Assuming those get done in time, we will have broken the 0 mod 3 curse that has made it so that the only VMCSPs in Mathcamp history have occured in '98, '01, and '04! INTRO: [raises hand for silence if there are claps.] Anyways, I've stalled for time enough. Enjoy the show! [exits]. ---------------- DAN VS AC ---------------- [DAN, ALFONSO onstage.] DAN: I'm losing so much sleep having to deal with all these campers. There has to be a solution. ALFONSO: I know! All these campers are so difficult. I try to make relays as little fun as possible. Handicaps, wrong answers, impossible problems, nothing seems to get them down. DAN: Dude! I could give them 15 Theoretical CS problems and make them so exhausted they'll be too tired to complain about anything. ALFONSO: And when they're tired they'll get irritable and I'll finally be able to annoy them with my relay rules! I know exactly what needs to be done! DAN: Wait this was my idea! I get to implement it! ALFONSO: You're on! [DAN and ALFONSO do an RPS throw. DAN plays "long class ad," ALFONSO plays "transmogrifier".] DAN: A transmogrifier! Unfortunately for you, that only works on evil Dan. I am clearly good Dan. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. ALFONSO: No, not a long class ad! Stop, stop, please, stop! ALFONSO: Alright, you won that one. Two out of three! [They do another throw. DAN plays "phantom of the opera," ALFONSO plays "stealing shampoo".] ALFONSO: You foolish mentor! "Phantom of the Opera" is like this [does gesture]. You threw this [does same gesture]: "The Phantom of the Lecture Hall!" It has no effect! DAN: Aaaaaah, "stealing shampoo"! Nooooooo, give it back! DAN: Alright, this throw will determine the final winner. [They do a third throw. DAN plays "peanut butter," ALFONSO plays "clapping".] ALFONSO: [gasp] Peanut butter! [gags, but starts clapping audibly, and then louder]. [Everyone claps at DAN. Meanwhile ALFONSO begins recovering.] DAN: [raises arms, turns to audience] What's wrong with you people? [If clapping goes to long, ARI runs onstage and directs silencing. Then ALFONSO snickers at DAN.] DAN: [to Alfonso] You may have gotten past my minions, but you'll never get past me! Errr...well the other way around, you get the point. [DAN exits, ALFONSO follows.] ---------------- JCS ---------------- [RYAN, DAVID, ROB, CINDY, JAY, FMATT, SARAH onstage]. RYAN: OK so I have this great idea! Instead of doing work, I'll train the campers to replicate my brain, and then they'll do all my work for me. I'll have to make sure to make them think its fun. In the meanwhile, can somebody take over field trips for me? DAVID: Not me. I'm going on a hike this weekend. ROB: You're always going on hikes. DAVID: No I am not. Mira won't let me run hikes during the weekdays. ROB: You're a JC! Your supposed to do JC stuff during the weekdays, like count classes! CINDY: We don't need to count classes anymore. I've brainwashed the campers to become my personal slaves. I now have more free time for XTREME taping of campers to beds. And then we can have a camper barbecue! [Cindy excitement] JAY: Need any duct tape? We still have enough to cover Mt. Rainer three times over. CINDY: Um sure Jay. I am sure I can put it to use. [Cackles evilly.] RYAN: You know, I still could use help with my field trip planning. MIKE: Well I'm leaving midway through camp, so it can't be me either. fMATT: I only plan field trips that are Not This Sunday, so I can't help. SARAH: Sorry Ryan, I'm spending all my time giving out too few cookies to very hungry campers. ROB: Speaking of which, we need to make a trip to Safeway to buy more cookies. RYAN: But I also have Projective Geometry. CINDY: Hyperbolic! RYAN: Right, like I said, I have Projective Geometry to teach! I don't have time to do all this! That is why I need the campers to replicate my brain! CINDY: The campers won't want to replicate YOUR brain Ryan. Not after I have brain washed them all! RYAN: Is that a challenge? CINDY: YOURE ON! [CINDY and RYAN pull out plastic knifes, ready to duel.] fMATT: If you two are going to kill each other, can you do it after the JC meeting? [CINDY and RYAN put the knifes back, but glare evilly at each other, muttering under their breath.] ROB: We still haven’t found a good way to torture the campers. SARAH: I'll just make sure to keep all of them sufficiently confused by spreading Food-Tongue, and if they understand it, I'll just put them in a box and make them sing birthday songs. fMATT: We want to torture the campers, not the staff Sarah. CINDY: I know! We tell campers about a secret event that only the staff are invited to, and when they ask about it we brag about how totally awesome it is going to be. RYAN: [points at CINDY in the Brain-like Manner] YES! [CINDY starts jumping up and down like an excited neuron, the excitement spreads to the rest of the JCs, they all bounce of the stage.] ---------------- MENTORS ---------------- [CAMPER is on one side, mentors take turns teaching her. All mentors enter and exit on the side ALFONSO is on. Mentors start onstage near ALFONSO] ALFONSO: OK so here is the deal. We need to teach the hardest classes we possibly can so the campers will be very tired and then they won't bother us. SAM: Oooh sure I'll try. SAM: [Walks over to camper.] So this class is going to be about Tropical Rainforest Geometry. We'll be working with quaternions that are all very big and very far apart. CAMPER: Wait, but Anti said big numbers don't exist. SAM: Well, erm, drink your smoothie! CAMPER: What flavour? SAM: Erm, I dunno, peach? CAMPER: My favourite! SAM: Grrr....[goes back to Alfonso] ALFONSO: You fail! Who is next? ANTI: Oooh, me, pick me! ALFONSO: OK. Anti! ANTI: [walks to camper] So today we're going to try to define the tensor product on N-categories. This is going to be Moore method, so I'll give you the basics and then you can work out the rest while I put it in my thesis. CAMPER: Wait, but isn't Moore method where you give us the main definitions and we prove the theorems? ANTI: Well this is Anti-Moore method. I give you the major results and then you work out the definitions so that we know what the heck we're talking about. CAMPER: Wait shouldn't Anti-Moore method be where the camper gets the mentor started and then the mentor does all the rest of the work? ANTI: Um...what...no...ugh...grrrrr... [goes back to Alfonso] Those campers! MARK: I could give it a try. [walks to CAMPER] This class is on multivariable complex analysis. We'll start out slow and eventually work our way up to twenty _eight_ variables. Now, this is a four-star class, so I'll be lecturing fairly quickly and writing on the board even faster. Hopefully you'll be able to keep up in your notes, but if not I'd be happy to explain it to you on the hardcore hike this weekend. [Mark starts XTREME writing on the board.] CAMPER: Um...ok. [As MARK is writing and speaking, CAMPER pulls out camera and starts taking pictures of the board.] MARK: So you should be fairly familiar with the triple integral by now. Today we're going to use it to integrate over a knotted 2-sphere in 4-space with this formula here. Any questions? [Turns around and sees camper taking pictures.] Aaaaah...pictures! [Runs back to ALFONSO.] ALFONSO: Miljan! Prove yourself! MILJAN: [Walks to camper] So today we prove infinitude of prime followed by the Riemann Hypothesis. Consider first list of all primes, as if primes were finite, you remember what is finite? CAMPER: Yes!! MILJAN: OK. Really? Ok. [halts for a few seconds, stutters back to the board] so multiply all primes in this list together and add 1 and you are done. Now you might think that we have just cook up this formula out of blue sky, but it really comes from bijective correspondence between eliptic curves and potentially Barsotti-Tate Galois representations. OK, so [pauses, staring at board] I am going to go over a minute or so OK? So...[writes on board, everyone falls asleep. Alfonso wakes up] ALFONSO: Next! [Miljan walks off] JULIAN: [Walks on] So today we're going to learn about ratioanlly partitioned generealized Riemann really BIG newspapers! Isn't that just so cewl?! {brittish accent} CAMPER: YEAH!!! {excitedly} JULIAN: Oh bugger. [Walks off] KENNY: Ooh, ooh, pick me! [Alfonso points to Kenny, he dances onto the stage] We're going to spend at least the next 168 hours in this classroom, in fact we won't leave until we've proved the existence of large cardinals from the Zermelo Fraenkel axioms and propositional logic alone. CAMPER: Don't they probably exist? KENNY: Probably? Hmm, let me work out the probability... [Writes feverishly on the left side of the board then writes a big "This sentence is a lie."/0 on the right side - steps back to look at his work] Oh no! That's one Xtreme paradox! I can't take it! [holds up *poof* sign] CAMPER: He's vanished in a puff of logic! [KENNY mutters and walks off] ARI: So now that we've made computer programs to see how well various Chicken strategies work in theory, we're going to see how well what we've learned helps us in practice. CAMPER: Wait so we're going to play Chicken with real cars? ARI: Yes! CAMPER: Sweet! Mathcamp's giving us free cars! ARI: Uhhhh...hmm...[scratches chin, then head in thought, then walks offstage, confused.] ALFONSO: [exasperated]. Who is next? [MARISA enters.] MARISA: Welcome to FUN XTREME Topological Graph Theory. It's going to be like Ari's FUN, but with XTREME math. OK so now everyone close your eyes and arrange yourself into a torus, and then I'll draw graphs on you. CAMPER: [closes eyes] But there's only one of me! MARISA: Oh, hmm...erm...well in that case I'll just go sing some more. [exits, CAMPER opens eyes.] ALFONSO: Sam and Matt! Go teach Palindromic Functions. MATT: [jots down a "Palindromic function" on the board] Ok, Palindromic Functions are a really cool part of the zoo of Functions. They are like a hybrid of the monkey house and the snake pit. SAM: We'll spend the first week talking about Old Tableaux, so if you have seen that you might want to consider comming week two. MATT: This class will also require the viewing of "The Poison Samurai Kid", which will be shown tonight for those who havn't seen it. You need to see it so that you can understand all the completely standard and totally not made up by us terminology that references the movie. CAMPER: Thats such an awesome movie! You guys rule! [SAM and MATT look at each other and leave, very disturbed] ALFONSO: This isn't working! Dave! Noah! Time for your 5 star Moore Method Puzzle Solving. [NOAH and DAVE walk on, each with a large stack of puzzles in hand] NOAH: So in this class we will start with some basic puzzle solving like crosswords and Sudoku. DAVE: And we will end by learning how to extract an English word or phrase from any random string n digits long. CAMPER: But can you do it in polynomial time? NOAH: Of course you can! Because this is a five star class, we'll be expecting you to solve at least five puzzles each day! CAMPER: Dude! That is totally X-treme! [NOAH and DAVE look at each other, then leave towards ALFONSO.] [MIRA walks on.] MIRA: OK, we will have homework in this class. But it's not just regular homework. While I was writing up this problem set I used an error producing code that with probability 1/26 typed the letter wanted, and probability 25/26 typed a random letter. So you have to correct the errors first and solve it. CAMPER: Hey Mira! I did the problem set [Mira looks surprised] It asked for a constructive proof of the noisy coding theorem, right? MIRA: No, it just asked for Gibbs Inequality! How did you get that! Aaahh! [Walks off] ELLEN: So today we're going to be studying some basic geometry in this class. This [draws a circle] is a circle. And this [draws a huge scribble roughly in a cone shape for like 5 seconds straight] is the cone of semi-definite postive quadratic forms. Next we will do some BASIC programming... [writes "BASIC" on the board] CAMPER: Like, computer programming? ELLEN: NO! This is not computer programming! GRRRAH! [Runs off stage] BOGDAN: I will try, Alfonso. ALFONSO: Bogdan, you are my last hope. [Bogdan sits in front of the blackboard for a while, then looks at his watch.] BOGDAN: It is nine 'o clock. We will start. You will remember that we proved this yesterday with Titu's lemma [draws picture triangle and median, labels with S1 and S2]. Now, we will use this simple fact to prove some interesting things. Consider this problem. [begins drawing a very complicated picture of geometric shapes and stuff on the board] My students in the 1976 Romanian Olympiad were not able to solve this simple problem. CAMPER: How do you expect us to solve this? BOGDAN: Does anybody have any ideas? [CAMPERS are silent and are trying to copy down the diagram] No? Okay, we label these points [label points with random illogical names and cover them immediately] We use this [point back to the triangle] to prove that [lots of algebra written on the board that it almost immediately erased]. And now it is a one-line proof. Slightly long line, but simple one-line proof. [proof has already been erased]. CAMPER: Wait, I missed that last bit. BOGDAN: Oh? [BOGDAN rewrites some of the proof.] CAMPER: No I meant that other part. [BOGDAN erases that line and writes another one.] BOGDAN: This one? CAMPER: Oh wait, sorry, I meant the one you had before. [BOGDAN puts his hands one the sides of his head, then heads back to ALFONSO.] BOGDAN: I am sorry Alfonso. Camper is very difficult problem. ALFONSO: Nooooooo, my plan fails! [covers his face in despair, or something] [All exit.] ---------------- JCs run the camp ---------------- [SARAH, CINDY, MIKE, JAY onstage, FMATT, RYAN coding.] [really really loud stuff, really loud coming from David Roe's room] ROB: [stumble into the office] SARAH: Why are you up, Rob? I thought you guys were up until like 6 this morning. ROB: Because David's alarm clock woke me up... and he's still not up, either! And I barely got two hours of sleep. [sits near FMATT, RYAN.] JAY: [sleepy Jay] We can hear it from here! Haha, I got 10 hours of sleep last night. I... think I'm going to go take a nap though because I'm sleepy. And I might not even hear the alarm clock, because I'm on the third floor. SARAH: But then who's going to do the copy run? CINDY: That's easy! There must be some willing campers around! [sign: four hours later] JAY: That was a nice nap. I only feel kind of sleepy now. [listens a moment] ...is that still David's alarm clock?! [all of the other JCs are up now, and SARAH, MIKE, and CINDY say "yes" in unison. JAY exits. fMATT, RYAN, and ROB are silent and coding at their respective computers] SARAH: [to the coders] Hey, weren't one of you supposed to do the afternoon class counts? Or entertain campers, plan activities or something? [long silent pause as they continue coding] ROB: Yeah, we're making a program that'll estimate the number of campers in a class to within five percent. It will eliminate the need for class counts! It's going to be awesome. ROB: [to fMatt, Ryan] You two keep working on that - I need to dash to the student center to get the mail. MIKE: I'd think you'd need to work on your dashingness first. ROB: [throws Mike into the trash can on his way out] [Mike gets out of trash] CINDY: [pokes Mike's nose] How's the kayaking trip planning going? MIKE: Mmmmmmmmmike. So we need 34 campers to switch to the afternoon trip, which'll be easy! This one said he really wanted to go to the picnic with the morning trip, so there's "random camper 1", and this one bopped my nose too much - "random camper 2", and yeah, the 34 random spots will be filled up right away! [JAY reenters] JAY: Look, 34 volunteers have signed up already. MIKE: Aww, darn. ---------------- HC HIKE ---------------- DAVID: We've been scrambling over these loose rocks and swimming across alpine lakes for three days straight now. The campers must be getting tired. SAM: Soon we'll be able to eat them! MARK: No, no, that was three years ago. SAM: Then we could use them as bait! We could restock our dwindling food supply! CAMPER: Hey is anyone hungry? My backpack's getting kinda heavy with all my extra food and water. DAVID, SAM, and MARK. Grrrrr. ---------------- MISCELLANEOUS METHODS OF TORTURE ---------------- [ARI, SARAH, MARISA on one side of stage, DA on same side further to the side, DAVID on other, MIRA nearby, further back. Move forward when active in scene, back otherwise.] ARI: Our plans for torturing the campers are failing. However, they have not yet heard XTREME high-pitched annoying singing. SARAH: I'm ready. MARISA: Me too. [Walk over to CAMPER and start singing, badly.] CAMPER: Oooh can I sing, too? ARI, SARAH, and MARISA: Grrrr... DAVID: [to self] My plan is much _cooler_ than theirs. It involves liquid nitrogen...and ICE CREAM. There can be no more fool-proof way of causing an "accident". Heh heh heh. [puts on goggles, gloves. quick making of ice cream] CAMPER: Dude David this ice cream is the best! Thanks! DAVID: Grr...these campers are too well taught in Rule 2. Perhaps I can confuse them by breaking Rule 3. Hey Mira, can I make some liquid oxygen and set it on fire? MIRA: Sure, whatever, David. DAVID: Heh, heh, heh. [quick burning of oxygen] CAMPER: Whoa that's so cool. You're the best, David. DAVID: Grrrr... [NOAH walks across stage.] NOAH: Hey guys, any of you know a seven-letter word for "______ Lens" ARI: Contact! [DA strums guitar.] CAMPER: So DA, why is DA pronounced Conan? DA: I'll show you why! [threateningly] Because I can tie you into a knot in C^2! [makes threatening hand motions]. CAMPER: Whoa really? DA: [in DA's quiet tone] Well, no. But sort of. Come to my class about knots in the complex projective plane, with applications to tying up campers so they can't escape. CAMPER: Umm...I'll think about it. [doubtfully, and edges off stage. Everyone exits other side.] ---------------- IL ---------------- [DAN, ARI, ANTI, FMATT stand on one side, RYAN and ROB on the other.] DAN: Welcome to this year's IL. ARI: We've devised a new combat mechanism that should make combat feel more realistic. ANTI: Instead of using dart guns, we're going to use actual laser guns. JAY: Dude I am so totally going to own this! FMATT: You'll also be able to use this archaic computer system to go through the radiation, airlock, temperature, pressure, and camp car logs for the past five years. If you're extra clever, you may be able to discover the infinite loops and crash the system. ROB: Oooooh. DAN: OK so I guess we'll start the game now. RYAN: [to JAY, waving his hands wildly in the process] Martial attack 1. Martial attack 2. Ma... [JAY very calmly pulls out his gun and shoots RYAN [sound effect]. RYAN dies a painful death. JAY starts turning around shooting wildly [sound effects]. ROB, ANTI, ARI, DAN, and FMATT all die painfully. JAY raises his arms victoriously.] [KENNY runs onstage, sees JAY, runs off yelling. Pause. Everyone runs onstage and starts shooting at JAY [sound effects. JAY uses EXTREME laser-tag skillz to evade all the shots and kills the staff one by one. The staff all die painfully, JAY raises his arms in victory. CAMPER is behind JAY and sneaks up on him slooooowly with poison samurai sword and kills JAY. JAY dies painfully.] [CAMPER exits, dead bodies stay.] ---------------- FINALE ---------------- [JOHN, JANE enter, see carnage.] JOHN: Yes! They're all dead! JANE: Our plan to get all the Mathcamp staff killed to put an end to Mathcamp once and for all has succeded. JOHN: I'll call PROMYS so we can collect our money and get out of the country. CAMPER: Not so fast! JANE: A mere camper! You can't stop us! [CAMPER takes out "lightsaber" aka broomstick. JOHN and JANE follow suit. Sword fight ensues, with sound effects. The fight drags on.] JOHN: Our broomfencing skills are too evenly matched. There is only one way to decide this. [The three throw to the side their broomsticks and play poison samurai swords (not for too long). CAMPER kills both, bows to audience.] [ALL come onstage, bow.]