| Traditions | |
- Bar Monkey: Engineering for student purposes is a tradition at Mudd. If you visit the Bar Monkey at Harvey Mudd College’s West Hall, you can choose from its selection of 188 mixed drinks, and the Bar Monkey will gladly serve you eight ounces of it in less than ten seconds. Designed and built by HMC sophomores Steve Avery, Brad Greer, and Dustin Cooper, the Linux-based Bar Monkey is an automated bartender. It contains 16 ingredients, allowing it to dispense the 188 mixed drinks that are stored in its database.
- Happy Wednesdays!: It’s happy hour! It’s Wednesday! Platt is host to this venerable tradition of, well, donuts and music every Wednesday night. In fact, it's one of the best things about the middle of the week. Happy Wednesdays are a great way to meet people, while avoiding homework that desperately needs doing.
- Hundred Taco Night: Del Taco sometimes has specials where you can get three tacos for a dollar. Hundred taco night involves a bunch of people watching “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and eating as many tacos as they can. First one to 100 wins!
- A Living Calendar : Case is also the dorm that celebrates the seasons. The Casemas party is always thrown as close to Winter Break as possible and features a snowbank in front of the dorm. For Slippery When Wet, a party heralding summer, the Case dorm courtyard is flooded. Autumn and spring are left out because Southern California doesn’t “do” the seasonal thing.
- Parties: There are annual parties at Mudd that have been around for as long as any of us can remember. Here’s a small sampling of traditional parties: Foam Party, Halloweiner, Long Tall Glasses
- Puddle Jump: Every year, a group of people gather together to run through the 5C, jumping in all of the fountains and pools of each college. There are wild chants, all of which are entirely too offensive to be set in print. The secret chants are passed down from year to year, in an entirely oral tradition frowned upon by many a dean at the 5C.
- Roster Signing: When freshmen first arrive at Mudd, they are required to sign the roster of students and agree to abide by the Honor Code. The Associated Students of Harvey Mudd College President presides over this solemn event, which is interrupted every year by a group of freshmen who volunteer to “assassinate” the President in whatever way they see fit. Be warned, those who attempt this task are always intercepted by the President’s two armed (with water pistols) bodyguards.
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| Urban Legends | |
- An artist donated a sculpture of a plow to be placed in front of Platt Dining Hall, saying that the sculpture was made of a material that would never rust and could never be corroded. This was the equivalent of throwing down the glove. A group of chemistry majors decided to take on the artwork’s integrity. Using a combination of acids and other corrosives, the students succeeded in turning the bright, shiny sculpture into a rusty mess. It still stands outside Platt, and is a reminder to all students that when art and science try to compete, the result is never pretty.
- An artist painted a mural in Platt that consisted of some landscape, mountains, and trees that represented the foothills. Unfortunately, it was a student who noticed that the hills and trees in question really resembled lettuce-filled tacos (they really do look like tacos; it’s a very sad thing). The next day, a monster had been painted into the landscape with a dialogue bubble saying “Mmm, Tacos!” It was coincidence that the artist came to lunch that day, and took great offense to the desecration of his artwork. The monster was removed, but the tacos remain.
- Down at Pitzer, the college prides itself on its architecture, especially the skylights in the main building. A group of Mudders somehow managed to climb onto the roof and cover parts of the skylight, turning it into a Bat Signal. It remained there for a while until Mudders admitted their pranking.
- In 1966, a Volkswagon bug mysteriously appeared in an East Hall hallway, with less than an inch to spare on either side. Pranksters had tipped the bug on end, and squeezed it around a corner and into the hallway. Eventually, the perpetrators reversed the same technique to free the bug.
- Not quite a legend yet, but rather a standing memorial to drunken carousing, this event took place in the backwaters of Linde Dorme. A very drunk student, armed with bottles of shaving cream, sprayed the words “Fat Joey” onto the wall of the Linde Dorme upper lounge. Unfortunately, the student failed to realize in his incoherent state that shaving cream soaks into the cinder wall, making the words impossible to scrub out. After a year of pressure washing, the words still stood, so we decided to make a dedication. A plaque now hangs officially in the upper Linde lounge, the Fat Joey lounge, “in order to celebrate in part the generosity of Adam Kangas with a bottle of shaving cream on the date of…”
- One morning, students awoke to find a replica of Stonehenge in the middle of the quad, built entirely out of sofas. The perpetrators said that the sofas were chosen based on a rigorous inspection of their spiritual qualities, structural integrity, and (above all) proximity to the site. Six came from South Hall, some from Engineering, many from the Green Room, and two from the Muddhole. The monument was disassembled later that day.
- ressed as construction workers with “official” documents, a flatbed truck, and a sturdy forklift, six Mudders heisted the Caltech Cannon. The “foreman” said his crew had orders to remove the cannon for repairs. Mudd’s president saw to it that the cannon was returned to Caltech, if somewhat unceremoniously, a week later.
- The day before Case’s foundation was to be laid, a group of students invaded the construction site under the cover of night, and moved all of the construction stakes one foot to the west. Thus, Case dorm ended up being built one foot away from the original layout. This would have caused no problems, except for the fact that the water lines had already been placed underground. The water pressure in Case dorm is terrible to this day.
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