I'm in ur package, playing with ur puzzlez

So one of the developers I work with, Dave, is quite the twisty-puzzle fanatic. Take a look at some of his photos on flickr, and you'll see what I mean. Here's something like 1/3 to 1/2 of what he has in his office at work:





As you might imagine, Dave is also on all the various puzzle sites, and knows which puzzles are rare, which are worth the most, and which ones he doesn't have. Recently, he worked out a trade with some other puzzle collector in another country. He shipped a Square-1 in exchange for a few other puzzles. This is what arrived in the mail:



Yes, go ahead and look at the larger version of that pic. That's the Department of Homeland Security logo. So what was inside that caused such alarm that they had to open his package in transit to inspect it?



We suspect it was the rare and unusual Rubik's Hat that caught their attention. Had it been your run-of-the-mill 3x3, I doubt they would have felt it necessary to play with it. or maybe they saw The Da Vinci Code recently, and it looked like a cryptex on the x-ray?

Rubik-sniffing dogs?

Dave did note that whoever was fondling his hat didn't seem to have any luck solving it. Good thing he didn't trade for something with batteries and wires.

Update: As if to further prove his cube-geekiness (did I mention that he placed fairly well at the recent cube-solving time trials?) Dave writes:

Nice, although technically it was my custom modified Square-1 that I traded, as a vanilla Square-1 is only worth $20-$30. I hear that the maker may even be doing another round of production, in which case the price might go back down to $9.99 or so. Here's a flickr picture of my custom modification:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/135/362992417_66e4734f8a.jpg

I stand corrected.