Shepard’s Mystery Clues, Part 2
Alright, I finally have a minute to advance the plotline for this. (If you missed Part 1, you can read it over here.)
So Shepard had sent me a cryptic email, and it appeared to be the first clue in some sort of mystery game. There were 12 broken addresses in the CC field, and it looked like the only way to advance the game would be to “say hello to the folks.”
After spending a few days wondering whether I really wanted to pester some of the straight-laced older folks in the group about something as frivolous and odd as a mystery game, I decided to step up to the plate. (Shepard had started it, right?) I repaired all the addresses and emailed everyone asking them whether they had received any strange emails from Shepard.
After about a week, Shepard’s brother, Evan, and then his Mom, Joan, forwarded me the emails that they had received. But I never heard back from the other eight people. I touched base with Shepard and confirmed that I had all the email addresses correct, then tried mailing them again. But still nothing. Eventually Shepard decided to follow up with them himself.
As it turned out, real life concerns had derailed most of them from participating. Little things like undergoing major surgery, or fleeing from their burning homes in California.
Anyway, as the whole thing was predicated on everyone in the list working together and pooling their clues into one knowledge base, the game stalled out and died. After a couple of months it became obvious that there would be no resuscitating it in its original form.
So Shepard got in touch with me, and together we hatched a new plan.
That’s where you come in.
Yes, I’m recruiting a new set of collaborators to help me solve the mystery. Shepard has sent me all 14 of the original emails, and I’ve posted them here.
I should mention that I’m not sure whether these 14 emails constitute the entire body of clues, or whether there will be more to come once we reach a certain milestone… all I know is that this is everything so far.
So who’s ready to roll up their sleeves and help me solve this thing? Post your thoughts and theories here so that we can all discuss them.
34 Comments So Far
3. Lisa wrote:
Synonyms (to ogle): eagle eye*, eye, eyeball*, fix, focus, gape at, gawk, gaze, glare, goggle*, lay eyes on*, leer, look, look fixedly, make eyes at, peer, rivet, rubberneck*, watch
4. Clint wrote:
Yeah Isa, I looked at the “brought to you by” letters and numbers too, but haven’t really come up with anything. Anagrams for “cueter4s” include: cue 4 rest, set 4 cure, curtsee 4…
5. Clint wrote:
I also tallied up all the lowercase letters from within the uppercase words. Those are “rahetrhtae”. Anagrams for that string include: earth heart, rehear that, and heather art…
This probably wraps up my pursuit of anagrams.
6. prnsis_anita wrote:
I loved to play along with this mystery……but alas my own life is a mystery that I am still trying to figure out 
But I have faith in you Clint if anyone can figure this out it is you.
7. Clint wrote:
Hahaha… thanks for the vote of confidence Anita!
Alright, this morning I’m looking for patterns in the actual content. There are 8 of the long-form clues (that reference oglerworld.com) and 6 of the short-form clues (with text in caps).
Pretty much all of the content in the short-form clues, while short, is unique. But in the long-form clues, almost all of it gets repeated identically across all 8 emails. There are only two bits that change (aside from the greeting): the “Fish Fish Pic# 11″ repeated word bit, and the “Today’s e-mail has been brought to you by” bit. If you extract just those parts, here’s what you’re looking at:
Fish Fish Pic# 11, C
Sale Sale Pic# 31, U
Sore Sore Pic# 13, E
A&W A&W Pic# 13, T
Black Black Pic# 44, E
Glide Glide Pic# 29, R
Hover Hover Pic# 2, 4
Flap Flap Pic# 33, S
Hmmmmm. If you arrange the “brought to you by” bits according to the numbers you get: 4CETRUSE. “Forced ruse”? The fact that there are two thirteens erodes the case for that sort of interpretation though. Not seeing much of anything else there at the moment.
8. Clint wrote:
As far as subjects go…
The short-form clues come in two sets of 3 that each share a subject: “Tim’s #1 (For Monday)” for the first set, and “Tim’s #2 (For Wednesday)” for the second set.
Of the long-form clues, two have unique titles (1, 14), two are titled “Will you?” (7, 8), and four are titled “Won’t you?” (2, 6, 12, 13).
So what does any of this mean? One way of approaching it would be to restrict the emails to groups based on matching subjects, and just look for patterns within those groups… I’ll take a look at that later.
9. Clint wrote:
Alright, getting back to this. I noticed that the lowercase letters provided by each set of “Tim’s” emails is actually the same: “rahet” for Tim’s #1, and “rhtae” for Tim’s #2. Same letters, but different order.
No idea what the significance might be, but that’s probably the first undeniable pattern I’ve found.
There are only three whole-word anagrams that you can make out of those 5 letters: earth, heart, and hater.
10. Clint wrote:
What is the “Tim’s” reference? I have no idea. It doesn’t seem to tie-in to any of the clues, and there aren’t really any Tims that I can envision Shepard having a good reason to refer to. We share an Uncle Tim, and if that was the reference, the #1 and #2 could be taken to refer to his first two sons, Richard and Taylor. But I don’t really see where that would lead, and several of the people who received the “Tim’s” clues have no connection to that Tim anyway.
What about a famous Tim? Not many come to mind. I could maybe see Shepard making a reference to Tim Burton, but it’s a stretch. I don’t think he’s really a huge Burton fan. If he was referring to Burton, the #1 and #2 would make the most sense as references to Burton’s first and second movies. But those are “The Island of Doctor Agor” and “Stalk of the Celery”, which again look like dead ends.
How about Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? There’s an outside chance that Shepard would refer to him, but no candidates come to mind for the #1 and #2 references.
That pretty much exhausts the (tenuous) possibilities for meanings behind ‘Tim’.
11. Clint wrote:
Now I’m trying to read hints in the actual content of the clues, but I’m not seeing much. Actually, this is the first thing I tried to do, way back at the beginning, but I gave up and went looking elsewhere.
The only clues that I’m able to draw any inferences from are #3, #4, and #5:
#3 - “A RIVER RUNS THrOUGH IT (i.e. What it’s about)”. I’d say it’s either about fishing or brothers.
#4 - “THE PHaNTOM TOLLBOOTh (i.e. Watchdog escape tools)”. In the Phantom Tollbooth movie the watchdog character, Tock, helps the main character, Milo, escape from a swamp called “the doldrums” by using his head and thinking. So I would take this as a reference to thoughts, thinking, concentration, ideas, brains, etc.
#5 - “THe MUPPEt SHOW (i.e. An ichthyic act)”. It has been suggested that this could be a reference to Lew Zealand, the muppet character who throws boomerang fish, and I concur. I can’t see how it could be a reference to anything else.
So that’s what I get from those clues. Unfortunately, I don’t see any threads that could help me advance my overall understanding of the mystery at hand. If anything else occurs to me, I’ll post it here though.
12. Joan Kwasiborski wrote:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
NE can refer to:
Northeast, one of the four ordinal directions
Nebraska, United States postal abbreviations
Neon, a chemical symbol
New England, a region of the United States
Norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter
Niue, an island nation in the South Pacific Ocean
Niger, a country in Africa
Nationalencyklopedin, a Swedish national encyclopedia
Night Elves, from World of Warcraft
New Edition, an american singing group who gained fame in the 1980’s and 1990’s
Network element, in telecommunications
Nash equilibrium, in economics
Any, in Instant Messaging short-hand
SkyEurope Airlines, an IATA airline designator
Noble Corporation, New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol
National Express, a transport company in England
NE (complexity), a complexity class
Nicomachean Ethics, a work by Aristotle which plays a prominent role in defining Aristotelian ethics
Neutral Evil, an role-playing alignment in the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game
New Hope (Macau) (Nova Esperança), a political party in Macau, China
Nitro Express, a family of Rifle cartridges
New Executable, a file format used in 16-bit Microsoft Windows and OS/2
National Event, a designation for certain cycling races
Canton of Neuchâtel, a Swiss canton
So, is Shepard referring to a neutral evil?
13. Joan Kwasiborski wrote:
To comment 9, Clint
I found the following, and on another site it said it meant coming before others; early:
Main Entry: rathe
Pronunciation: \ˈrāth, ˈrath\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, quick, from Old English hræth, alteration of hræd; akin to Old High German hrad quick
Date: 14th century
archaic : early
14. Joan Kwasiborski wrote:
We know Shepard used lower and upper case letters for some particular reason, i.e., this means something.
Regarding:
THE PHaNTOM TOLLBOOTh (i.e. Watchdog escape tools)
I don’t remember much, and would have to research it in the book to see what the reference to the watchdog escape tools means.
I do remember the Fibonacci numbers, which I know Shepard also knows, from the Phantom Tollbooth.
from Wikipedia
In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, whose Liber Abaci published in 1202 introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics.
…after two starting values, each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The first Fibonacci numbers (sequence A000045 in OEIS), also denoted as Fn, for n = 0, 1, 2, … , are:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, …[1]
BTW, I use this in my email address, …1235@….
15. Joan wrote:
We may need this web page as a reference:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/tollbooth/section2.rhtml
16. Joan wrote:
I don’t know that it is any help, but I think Shepard is familiar with the character of Tiny Tim from Charles Dickens’ Christmas Story;
God bless us. God bless us, everyone.
17. Clint wrote:
Hey there Aunt Joan, thanks for chipping in! Those are some very interesting insights.
With the NE analysis you must be looking at the line “I have a ne place to lounge around”. I had noticed that too, and wasn’t sure whether to write it off as a typo for “new” or to look closer. Hmmmmm.
You’ve opened up some new avenues to explore!
18. Joan wrote:
I am pretty sure there are not any typos in all that Shepard sent to us. Otherwise I think he would have let us know that.
19. Joan wrote:
You are correct about Shepard’s view of Tim Burton; he doesn’t like him at all, or at least does not like his work.
20. Joan wrote:
I imagine, if Shepard is following all this on Clint’s site, that Shepard is getting his fill of amusements at very little cost to him!
It would be extremely helpful of course, if Shepard could simply chime in and let us know when we are following a totally non-productice line of reasoning…
21. Joan wrote:
I see I have several typos…
Regarding:
A&W A&W Pic# 13
I copied this from Clint’s list of clues, and when pasted it changes the “and” sign.
I can’t seem to locate on the net a picture I found last week which showed the A&W Root Beer Sign - on that sign the same “and” Shepard used, was also used. Is it a part of the A&W copywrite, or official logo? Is A&W Root Beer hot and cool?
22. Joan wrote:
I meant to post this here, but it is in another post spot on your web; sorry. I guess I made some extra clean up work for you, Clint.
Regarding the clue sent to me:
A POLITE DELeGATION TO A SCIENTIST AND A FINE MAN?
This really puzzles me. For one thing it has just that one letter e in the lowercase, which we all know means something.
Then there’s the whole thing itself, with the question mark.
Why even have the question mark?
It reminds me of those statements which when spelled backwards still says something, but I tried that and that didn’t seem to make any sense.
Then the reference to the scientist and a fine man…Shepard did read a book I recommended to him written by a scientist, Richard Feynman.
But I’m not sure that has any connection, nor what it would have to do with the polite delegation.
23. Joan wrote:
By asking if the website was oglerworld.com (with the question mark) are we supposed to make the jump to the google search engine?
When I go to the google search, and paste in the A&W clue line, and search in the google photos, I do get the A&W picture which I had found last week.
Still, none of this makes any sense to me!
24. Clint wrote:
That’s an interesting bit about Richard Feynmann. More plausible than anything I could come up with.
Just for the record, I checked the A&W ampersand in the original email from Shepard, and it’s just a plain ampersand. So anything wacky about it now must have happened in transit.
Regarding Tim Burton — I do know that Shepard is a fan of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, whether or not he likes anything else by Burton.
25. Evan Williams wrote:
I too read the book on Feynmann, and it’s possible Shephard knows that. It seems to me that several of these picture titles refer to flight. Feynmann was a rocket scientist was he not? One who was hired to determine was went wrong, or ‘was fishy’ about a disastrous shuttle-launch explosion. (I forget which now. Challenger maybe?) Shuttles go into space which is black… can we find out if A&W was a sponsor for the Challenger program? (that’s half-joking).
26. Clint wrote:
Hey there Evan! I’m going to have to look into this Feynmann guy and see what I can learn.
Shepard does draw a lot of attention to the glide / hover / flap keywords by highlighting them again in the latest three clues. And two others could be flight homonyms in a stretch: ’sore’ -> ’soar’ and ’sale’ -> ’sail’…
Now, if he had said ‘Tang’ instead of ‘A&W’ I’d say you had cracked the whole thing wide open. 
27. Evan Williams wrote:
The synonym that I came up with after a thinking spell is float as in A&W root beer float. now the stumpers are where black fits in and what earth shoes toon is and mutant fairy. More thinking…
28. Evan Williams wrote:
Perhaps Northstar the gay x-men is the mutant fairy?
29. Evan Williams wrote:
secret 4u is another acronym for the letters that brought us the messages
30. Evan Williams wrote:
the subject lines on some of the emails say”will you won’t you join the dance?” I believe that is an Alice in wonderland reference from a song/poem called the Lobster’s quadrille. It is sung by the mock turtle in alice in wonderland.
31. Evan Williams wrote:
O K !
Tim Burton is working with Disney (god knows why) to make a new live-action/CGI version of … Alice in Wonderland set for release 2010 anno domine. So there’s our Tim. To be fair, Shephard doesn’t really hate Tim Burton, just the masacre of taste that is Tim Burton’s Batman. If you need more support for this connection, I present to you that solving this puzzle is “like you’re trying to unravel a cable-knit sweater, and someone keeps knitting, and knitting, and knitting…”
32. Evan Williams wrote:
There are not only several flight references, but potential several flying fish references. Lew Zealand’s ‘flying’ fish, it could be said that a River Runs Through it is ‘all about’ fly-fishing, and when Tock in Phantom Tollbooth tells Milo to think his way out of the doldrums ‘fish that fly and birds that swim’ is another thing he thinks about. So do flying-fish and a new Tim Burton Alice film have to a with a rocket scientist partly responsible for nano-tech?
33. Clint wrote:
Re: Northstar… LOL. That very thing had crossed my mind, but I couldn’t remember his name off the top of my head (and like so much of this, didn’t see what the point of the reference would be anyway).
Re: “secret 4 u”… wow Evan, that’s the most compelling take on those letters yet… now I feel betrayed by my anagram utility. Still, what is the secret 4 u?
Re: The Lobster Quadrille… and there’s the home run of the night. Well done. Now we finally have an undeniable reference that goes beyond guessing and speculation. For everyone else, here’s a link to chapter 10 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which includes the entire text of the song.
34. Clint wrote:
This thread of comments is getting pretty lengthy, so let’s move the discussion over to part 3. Danke.
1. Clint wrote:
Just to start with the obvious… there is no oglerworld.com. I tried some of the more likely anagrams (oldgrowler.com, dollgrower.com, growrolled.com…) and didn’t find any live sites.