Shepard’s Mystery Clues, Part 3
This just in: Shepard has sent out three new clues sharing the title “Tim’s #3 (For Fri)”. They were sent out on Saturday, March 22, to three new prospective participants: his friends Gary and Paris, and our mutual cousin, Sara. This time I was included in the CC field of each clue to ensure that it would get published. I’ve just added the new clues and participants to the clue page.
To recap for anyone just joining us, Shepard is conducting some kind of mystery game and I’m trying to facillitate discussion by blogging about the whole thing. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and you can reference all of the clues here.
One note about the new clues: They all shared the same footer, which read “You are invited to visit ‘Clintonium.com’ and help solve the mystery!” As with the “say hello to the folks for me” footer, I decided that this wasn’t part of the clue itself, so I stripped it off.
Other than that, the first thing I noticed about these new clues is that the same set of lowercase letters make yet another appearance, this time in the order “ather” and repeating in the duplicated text of each clue instead of spread across all three.
I had a new thought about these letters over the weekend. Aunt Joan had pointed out that there was a fourth english word you could form out of the letters: rathe. That word seemed somehow familiar to me, but I couldn’t immediately place it. Then on Sunday it came to me: Rathe was the name of the villain in Young Sherlock Holmes. He was the likable professor who turned out to be the evil cult leader, Ehtar (and eventually Moriarty himself, if you watched through the closing credits).
John Watson: Amazing, Holmes. Simply amazing. Of course, you did forget one very important clue.
Sherlock Holmes: Oh? Please enlighten me.
John Watson: Well, “Rathe” is “Ehtar” spelled backwards.
Sherlock Holmes: Very clever, Watson. Well, I’m certain I would have arrived at that conclusion sooner or later.
John Watson: [smiling] Sooner or later.
I’m a big fan of the movie (it’s in my top 100 list), and I’m pretty confident that Shepard is a fan too. The Sherlock Holmes angle ties in well to a mystery game, and the Rathe/Ehtar cypher could be looked at in a few different ways. So this feels more like a solid lead than anything else that has occurred to me so far. But even if it is the intended inference, and not complete nonsense, it’s still only a clue that leads to another clue. And I’m again left wondering if there is any meaning to discover at the bottom of all this…
4 Comments So Far
2. Clint wrote:
Here’s a quicknote that Aunt Joan submitted through my contact form last Tuesday. I had been meaning to get it posted:
I am looking at two websites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Writers_Journey:_Mythic_Structure_For_Writers
and
http://www.morewords.com/word/ogler/
I don’t know if they hold some help, but they are interesting…
Only reply if you want to reply at this time.
I will still look things over and think about them.
Joan
The Christopher Vogler link is very interesting. Vogler connects to Joseph Campbell, who in turn connects to George Lucas. All of whom are very much in the realm of plausible targets for Shepard. And, of course, Vogler looks like a good match for the oglerworld.com clue. Hmmmmmm.
3. Clint wrote:
I was just looking over all the comments on parts 1 and 2, and I realized that I never posted my thoughts on the “It’s hot but it’s cool!” line. The first time I read it, I took this as a reference to Pop-Tarts. They had a memorable ad jingle in the 80s that included the lyrics, “So hot they’re COOL, so cool they’re HOT!”
I’m pretty sure that Shepard ate a lot of Pop-Tarts growing up. Well, at least a lot more than me, since I ate zero.
4. Evan Williams wrote:
For Earth shoes toon you may need to speak to Wayne because it seems as though those are sent to specific people that would assumably understand the reference (i.e. fairy mutant for matthew)
1. Clint wrote:
I don’t see how it could be important, but each of the new clues intentionally uses a different type of quote marks to set off the word at the end of the first line. For #15 it’s double curved quotes, for #16 it’s single curved quotes, and for #17 it’s straight double quotes.