On Friday, we all thrilled to the exciting mystery of Indiana Jones and the Case of the Awesome Package. In short, the University of Chicago’s admissions department posted to their Tumblr (the mystery of why a prestigious university’s admissions department has a Tumblr has yet to be solved) a picture of a package they’d received: the journal of Abner Ravenwood, the mentor of the university’s most famous alumni, Indiana Jones. Nobody was quite sure what was going on, but the admissions department cracked the case on eBay, as it so happens. It turns out that eBay user “Paul From Guam” makes Indiana Jones replicas and sends them to buyers all over the world. (Paul From Guam’s job walks a fine line between weird and wonderful.) The journal was on its way to a buyer in Italy when it somehow fell out of the packaging. But Paul From Guam, being the stickler for detail that he is, had put the university’s address on the front of the journal in the interest of authenticity, and that authenticity ended up getting it delivered to the university. So, it was a happy ending after all, and Paul From Guam offered to let the university keep the journal for their Oriental Institute “because,” he noted, “it belongs in a museum” …
