A correction was added to this article March 4.

Because of incorrect information provided to the Daily, the March 3 article “26:00:00 and counting” incorrectly identified the winning team of KaleidoQuiz 2004. The team is the Tap-dancing Warrior Pandas from the Insane Asylum of Quetzlzacatenango, not the Lap-dancing Warrior Pandas from the Insane Asylum of Quetzlzcaten. Also, there are 123 non-emergency public telephones on campus, not 40. The Daily regrets these errors.

Question: Before it was renamed last year, where did U.S. Highway 666 begin and end?

If you guessed Monticello, Utah, and Gallup, N.M., congratulations. Give yourself 30 points. That is, if you’re participating in KaleidoQuiz, the annual trivia contest hosted by Iowa State’s student-run radio station, KURE 88.5 FM.

KaleidoQuiz has come a long way since its inception in 1967. The original show lasted 12 hours because of the limits of AM radio. Now, it has become a 26-hour marathon, complete with a scavenger hunt and a list of 200 questions, one of which is asked on the air every six minutes.

Carl Adams, the man behind this year’s KaleidoQuiz, says his involvement with KaleidoQuiz stems from pure enjoyment, despite the amount of work involved in putting it together.

“This is my third year doing it, and in 2002, a friend of mine, Chris Crouch, was the director,” says Adams, senior in history. “I was still kind of new, but I knew him. He was all like ‘Come down to KaleidoQuiz, hang out, do your thing.'”

Adams says he liked KaleidoQuiz so much that he stayed for the whole show and ended up becoming KaleidoQuiz director in Crouch’s place the next year.

“We ask 200 questions throughout the night, and I usually write over half of those,” Adams says. “Anything is up for grabs. It’s all up in the air.”

Adams says teams may find answers to the questions using any means necessary, but he tries to make the questions as hard to find as possible so teams can’t just do an Internet search and find things right away.

For the scavenger hunt, Adams says each team is given a packet that has all the clues they need to start out.

“Last year, it had a picture of this little marker for the Lincoln Highway,” he says. “It said ‘This is your starting point. Go there.’ It didn’t say when it was, didn’t say where it was. It was a picture of it. It happens to be out on Lincoln Way and Beach right next to the bus stop.”

Adams says the questions are specific — they give exact directions on where to go to find things without giving away their actual location.

“There’s no actual names on anything,” Adams says. “It’s ‘Go four blocks and turn left.’ That way you have to be where you’re supposed to be to get to the next location to answer the next question. There’ll be random things, like last year I think I had them counting parking meters in downtown on Douglas.”

The scavenger hunts aren’t limited to the Ames area, however. Adams says the craziest stories he’s heard have happened when questions involved finding things in other areas of Iowa.

“My first year, I decided we were going to do a statewide scavenger hunt and I was giving them like 19 hours to do this thing,” he says. “It was just going to start early and they could do it all throughout. They had a deadline of, like, noon on Saturday.”

There was one item on the list that Adams remembers well.

“One of the items on there was a picture of naked soccer from Luther ’cause apparently Luther’s got this naked soccer thing every spring,” he says. “Some people were a little confused and thought I wanted a picture of it going on taken by them, and [I] was like ‘No.’ I wanted them to find a picture of it from Luther.”

This confusion led to a hilarious outcome, Adams says.

“Some people actually went out and, I give them credit for this, took a picture of themselves playing naked soccer,” he says. “And it was cold, you know. It’s early March. If you’re gonna do that, fine, and I gave them credit for it.”

Kendra Schmid, senior in computer science and three-year KaleidoQuiz veteran, says her team cheated when it found a picture of it.

“We found it online and ended up fabricating it to make it look like we took it that night,” Schmid says. “They didn’t buy it, though.”

Schmid says her team lost a ton of points, but still ended up in third place, for which it received 300 condoms and a few other prizes.

The team names for KaleidoQuiz range from interesting to insane and they come from a variety of different sources.

Schmid was the captain of last years KaleidoQuiz champion “Blue Moose Socks Entropy International.”

“We had a bunch of inside jokes that we combined into a name,” she says.

Other strange team names from last year include “See the turtle of enormous girth! On his shell he holds the earth,” and “Captain Loveglove and the Penetrators.”

John Messerly, senior in political science and member of the team “Tongue Stud Muffin,” says his team got last year’s name, “Farti Noys,” off of a random terrorist name generator Web site. “Farti Noys” finished 10th of 11 teams last year, according to final points standings from KURE’s Web site.

Messerly says the hardest part of last year’s scavenger hunt involved searching the Ames bar scene for one of KURE’s DJs whose apparel would easily give him away.

“They made us drive around and find a guy in the bars who was wearing a construction hat,” Messerly says.

“We went to like 11 bars and couldn’t find him. Turns out he was in some obscure bar over by Wal-Mart.”

Adams says he made last year’s hunt long distance because of the response from the statewide hunt in 2002.

“There was a positive response to having a long-distance thing, so last year I had a ton of questions that involved Story, Boone and Hamilton counties,” he says. “They were going all over. They went over to Boone and down through Luther and all the way up to Stratford.”

But this year, contestants won’t know where they’re going before the competition — Adams is keeping his cards close.

“It’s a surprise,” he says.