Bill and Ben have never indulged in geeky caches. You know the ones we mean. Minimalist cache pages with naff all on the page, dreamt up in some dark back bedroom. This is not for us, however they do put us in mind of the American composer John Cage. One of his 1951 compositions was entitled 4’33”. It did what it said on the tin – 4’33” of silence. Ground breaking stuff. A decade later, after much soul searching he produced 0’0”, an even more minimalist work. His final triumph came in 1989 with
So, we have decided to pay homage to this triumph of minimalism with a cache in his name. Despite being a product of a bygone age it achieves inclusiveness, in that any one can play it, it is non judgemental, in that you don’t have to be a competent musician, it is sustainable, well at least for 4’33”,and above all it is environmentally friendly, particularly if you don’t breath whilst playing it.
There are doubters out there who are not enamoured of this great work. The legendary man in the pub believes that the work came about at a piano recital where the great man hadn’t realised that the piano was locked until it was too late. Our son, who studied Cage at Uni, described it as “pretentious c**p”. Money well spent, he now uses words like pretentious.
We had hoped to celebrate this work by doing something geeky. Unfortunately, our initial plan of embedding the coordinates in a WAV file failed, due largely to geocaching.com not supporting multimedia. Not daunted, however, we are going to improvise. You will need a bucket, a stop watch and a darkened room to be able to find this cache. Once you have these, place the bucket on your head and start the watch. Hopefully when you emerge from your bucket you should be able to see the coordinates on the inside of the bucket. Simples!
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.