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The Plumber’s Faucet - Vol. XXXV No. VI
Medical students aren’t the only campus troublemakers who wear white lab coats. This very faculty has a long history of pranks and heists, including stealing all the toilet flush mechanisms from Concordia’s George Hall and replacing the flag on top of the Arts Building with a Jolly Roger. The dear, departed Plumber’s Pot Magazine was banned in 1989 after McGill engineering students removed the seats from every chair in Leacock 132. The final piece of the puzzle came when I found this article in the 1975 volume of the Old McGill yearbook. In “Engineering Week ‘75,” an old Plumbers’ tradition is described known as The Rip-off Contest, where teams of engineers were tasked with pulling off the most impressive and the most daring heists. For just a taste of the sort of things that were considered good targets: “The Rip-off Contest was difficult to judge. Among the entries were the juke-box from Gertrude’s (plus license plates from a station 10 cop car), Loyola’s campus sign, a jeep from the Physical Plant, Snookum’s costume, a stuffed gorilla from the Redpath Museum, and the Shitmobile, appropriated from Sir George’s engineers.”
Swag from the Rip-Off Contest, 1975 (Old McGill)
There can be no mistake. This is an account of the same incident from a different perspective. The ‘75 yearbook provides illuminating context, but makes no mention of the Smallwood Artifact itself, probably because vandalizing the Rip-off Contest entries before returning them violated the Contest rules. “Students in lab coats” easily fits the Plumbers as well as or better than the meds, and it would perfectly answer the difficult questions in Ditkowsky’s narrative about how the massive beast was hoisted up onto the Three Bares Fountain: After all, who else on campus could possibly pull that off, and who would know more about levers and pulley systems? Clearly the engineers are not only the best matching the description, but also the best qualified to pull off the stunt. Even the timing works out perfectly: The Engineering Week article places George’s abducBut surely no one could claim that engineers have tion in the same year and the very same month as the disappearance an unhealthy phallic obsession... of Ralph the Moose. Ralph may well have been another victim of the same Rip-off Contest. Only one issue arises from making this connection. The legend as told by Redpath Museum curators tends to place the theft in the ‘50s or ‘60s, but the Rip-off Contest first started in 1973 (Kratsios, 2015). However, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that the story, like many urban legends, got pushed further back into the past through multiple tellings. This is the end of Part One. Hugo only let me write an article this long because I promised that I’d keep working the case, keep asking the hard questions like a good private dick ought to do, keep my ear to the ground and my back arched and never give up until I’m holding the Artifact in my hand. So if the next installment of this thrilling caper doesn’t come out in the next drugstore issue of the Astounding Faucet, then that could only mean that They got to me and it’s too late. But meanwhile, now that we’ve determined who took the Smallwood Artifact, how, and when, we can get started tracking it down. As a certain professor once said: “It belongs in a museum.”
Printed at CopiEUS
Don’t worry, buddy. We’ll find it