You say! :( I'm not gonna tell you what I searched for, but I spent like an hour at the computer trying to find a fitting term! And I still haven't!

You know, like I've said repeatedly I won't give hints, but I will confirm whether what you've got so far is correct or not, if you like to PM me.

Thanks for the offer, Pitch, but I think it's unnecessary if you really aren't giving out hints. The words that I got I know I got them, and the ones that I didn't I can't confirm with you since I didn't get them. :) (Now if that wasn't worse than Bilbo's more than half, less than half ... :rolleyes:)

Right then. Week #270's headline story was based on a true story. For the past week I've been bored between supposed to be doing things and have been satisfying my curiosity by going through each and every Paper counting how many times each person has been mentioned.

Two hundred and seventy papers. One hundred and fifteen separate people.

I counted any appearance in a single paper as one appearance. I did not count you if you were not mentioned or referred to by name. There were a few unlabeled pictures of Rune, a couple of Kath, one of Esgallhugwen, Rikae, Mac, Lhuna, me, and Valier, and multiple mentions of an "Editor" in the mix if you want to be 100% perfect like the Downer always is. It is possible that Lhuna and Lommy may be slightly inaccurate because I can't read my own writing sometimes.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay, fun times.

:eek:

That is all I can say. Except that you have waaaaaaaay too much time between supposed-to-be-doing-things. :p (But really, that was a ginormous list!)

Are you counting every single time a name appears or just the number of stories/"also in the news this week"s that mention the person?

Tell me about it. It was fun though. :D

I counted any mention of a name at all, whether in the sidebar, full article, or headline. I only counted names once per Edition.

Good golly! There certainly are a lot of Downers in the paper. From this data, we can deduce that Hookbill's most favourite Downer of them all is the BWH and that Oddwen is ridiculous.

But I'm seriously surprised about the amount of times I've been in the paper. :eek:

I am now rereading the Legend of the Golden Bus Ticket in the vain hope that it will give me any clues.

Malice Manflesh, you're mad. http://forum.barrowdowns.com/ubb/icons/icon14.gif

Do you think that Volume 3 means volume three of LotR?

Well I spent a night going through the indexes of both LotR and HoME III with little avail...

Huh. What other 'Volume 3's do we know of?

REB III? :D

Agk! :eek: Another part of the Downs that I know literally nothing about.

Why are there questions related to WW on this thing? D: There are some Downers who still refuse to play WW.

But only a few of them. :p I don't think they're too obscure, #3 maybe the most so but you won't really need it. You can get #16 pretty easily just reading this thread after Pitch posted the puzzle.

I now have 16. :D

It just struck me what 2 down was. It was so easy when I had the first letter.

We have a winner!
 

... or rather, we have two. It was a tight race, and in the end, the first two correct solutions arrived within 2 minutes of each other. I have therefore, after consulting with the two candidates and with their agreement, made the salomonic decision to split the cement pizza in half between...

*drumroll*




*more drumroll*





EÖNWË
and
LEGATE OF AMON LANC.

*fanfare*

Congratulations, you two, well done! Your pizza halves will be delivered shortly.

For the rest of you, there's still silver, bronze and honorary mentions (or in terms of pizza, quarters and wedges), so don't give up yet. You have until next Monday midnight GMT.

Also, be sure to send me a complete solution = all the answers + the word from the green squares.

Happy riddling!

Bravo!

Just like Agan I've searched ROTK and googled HOME3, and read through the P&A (experts say such amount of craziness at once not good for sanity), and I used the search function in REB to possibly use some known letters, but that didn't yield anything either. I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious...

If it's something as obscure as that (and by "that" I mean that as far as I know every name in REB has like 10 different parody names, so it's pretty much impossible to find anything there) I'd either kill Pitch or myself. :D

Hmm, if we're already dead...



But I've made progress with another word. And I had a great idea for 19 down, just to find that it's 2 letters too long. :/


Eonwe, I didn't know you were doing this at all! :) And Legate - I think this was to be expected... ;)

I have a lot of it done, and I only started it today. I wasn't expecting to finish first by a long shot. I am really very anxious to see what the answers are for this are, but I suppose that we'll have to just wait until Monday...

It isn't really so very obscure in the end, in fact, it is about as obscure as anything else. Like with all things, once you get it, you will be like: "d'uh! So obvious! I am so stupid!" (No joking. You will say that. I can tell you that with 100% certainity. I have done that myself :) )

Not really. I mean, I had serious problems with 7. For a long long time, I had no freaking idea what it was referring to, even after I managed to guess the word based on pure logic. I could have very well still have been out here and not knowing anything, had I not been able to conjecture the word in the first place.

Yeah... you're right... (no sarcasm intended)

Yes really. :p

I guessed that one yesterday! I feel so clever. :p After flipping through all kinds of nonesense solutions I finally had the sense to open a thesaurus that gave me the right answer at a glance. :) I'm having serious trouble with 13, 8, and 19 though. Ugh.

You don't have 8? I wonder how did you interpretate 7, then.

But this is maybe time for some short feedback for Pitch - actually, I did not understand the question at "7" properly in the first place, to me, it was formulated in a really unclear way. That said, of course I had problems guessing the answer anyway, but I was not able to figure out what actually the question says in the first place. I thought that "time of day when 8 downs are the most active" refers to some time of the day, when some eight 'Downs are most active (as in: there are eight Barrow-mounds somewhere, and they are active only at some part of the day). It did not really connect to me with the other examples being all around. It seemed really confusing to me, not sure how it seemed to others, but given what G55 just said... it is obvious how you meant it when looking back, but not sure how well formulated it is in the beginning. Well, that's probably the only thing that really did not 100% "click in" after I had learned the answer :)

*grumbles*
 

I got it. Before any of you others.

However, I used a word on #6 that's basically a synonym to the correct answer. They were equally long and ended with the same letter. Only the letter in green was different. Which means I lost my cement pizza to two upstarts. Grrr!

Really? I was the first to comment on it.

But yeah, I suppose. I only gave it a quick glance until yesterday, when I decided to actually do it properly. Which is lucky, considering Legate's timing.


edit: x-ed with an indignant lion. Sorry Agan. :p

I was wondering why wouldn't you get the prize since you said you had it. But then that makes me wonder what other word could you have used instead of the real one. (But, let's not maybe spoil that for those who are still working on it. Also so that they can make the same mistake as you did or something ;) ) But hey, you can still get a cement... cookie, or whatnot. I can share a bit of my pizza, if it came to that, to be fair.

I wouldn't have worked on that yesterday had you not been out there and telling me that you were working on it. So, whichever way :)

Sorry, I forgot about that. It's just that unlike Legate, Agan, TGEW, and myself you didn't talk about it that much. :)

Well, at first I also thought that it refers to eight barrows that are active at a certain point of day. But then....

And, knowing the question for 8 and having some ideas about at least the end of the word (though I'm not at all certain that it is correct thinking)... and then, there aren't that many "times of day" that fit. Elimination from there.

However, now that you asked me, I started doubting my answer again...

(If you're curious about what my answer is, I can PM it to you, since you know it anyways... :))

But I have to disagree with what you said to Pitch. I like that clue, even though I'm not sure about the answer.

The same thing happened to me, before I realised that I need the letter elsewhere!

Yes, you did... almost. Now claim your quarter before you get ninja'd by yet another one.

Obscure? REB? That classic of BD Roleplaying, that timeless masterpiece of parodistic writing, obscure? *harrumph* You need to broaden your literary education, young lady.

Indeed, once you've figured out where to look, it should jump at you right off the page.

Feedback appreciated. Honestly, with all the other cross-references to "across" and "down" in the clues, it didn't occur to me that somebody might read "8 downs" as "8 barrow-mounds" in this case rather than "plural of the word in vertical column No.8" - I would think that's standard usage in English crossword puzzles. But I'm interested in hearing other peoples' opinion on that - preferably after I've posted the solution, when everyone's on the same page.

You know, hard as it may seem to believe, there is a world out there beyond the pages of The Downer.;) (That said, a thorough perusal of the works of our esteemed editor is always time well spent.)
__________________________________________________ __

EDIT: x-ed with G55

EDITEDIT:

AGANZIR

has come in third and won the first quarter of the remaining pizza. (About time!)
She also gets bonus points for being the first to guess the mysterious 13 across, and for the creative audacity of suggesting MORSHUL as the answer to 19 down. (Explain that yourself, if you dare.)

No, no, I meant an obscure name from REB. Unlike searching for Tolkien terms, searching REB terms is much harder.

Aw, I liked the clue much better as a trick-clue... and it turns out that I only imagined the trick. :/

Edit: xed with the EDITEDIT. Well done, Agan!

My head hurts? I am halluciating poultry mountains? III?
 

These are the answers, regardless of what Pitch and his crossword say: 8 down - laptop. 19 down - Amon Fridge. 13 across - East-west corner of the 3rd map. There!



Edit: I think I got 13... even though I don't get how it works, it's the only one that fits...And yeah, I could have though of that earlier....

But the answer is still the east-west corner! XD

Edit2: and 19 down!... is today my lucky day or something? :eek::confused:

Blurgh. I'm obviously not spending enough time on the 'Downs/perusing Tolkien's works - far too many of these questions seem obscure to me! That said, I felt like a total idiot for not getting Little Carcharoth the instant I saw it. :D

Little Carcharoth will not like that. Oi. :D

And I also had to pursue various sources of information to find the answers to many questions since I couldn't get them off the top of my head. I'm still rolling my eyes about the Dwarven City. I racked half the Downs in search of the answer before reading Legate's mind. :D (you know, maybe if you use your singing powers, he'll tell you all and everything... :p ;-))

Okay, I give up because I can't fit mountzoom into 8 Down...heh.

It was hard to explain to my coworkers just why I was laughing so hard when filling in the Little Carcharoth answers. :D

That was the first thing I was trying to do, too :)

That's all I could think of for that one for a long time.

edit: x-ed with Legate, who shared the same fate.

:D I couldn't think of anything that fit, so I put the first legible thing down, no matter that it doesn't really make sense. But it's the only thing that I came up with that fits. I would be very surprised if it's the right answer. :rolleyes:

*kicks himself for not thinking of that and makes a note to include it in a future puzzle*

Soo...what are the answers?

I don't believe it's time yet. :Merisu:

sally's right. Another 24 hours to go. Want to try your luck, BG?

While you're all caught in the vortex of Pitchwife's mysterious mystery, the news will distract you long enough for me to hack into his computer and grab the answers!

http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i2...ah/Week271.png

Now back to your regularly scheduled Phalian.


Don't forget that if you've lost track of The Phantom and Alien, you can look back though the...

PHANTOM AND ALIEN
COMIC ARCHIVE THING

As for you P&A voice folks, please send your talents in! I'm going to be recording my Alien voices some time the week and I'll hope to get the Peter ones done too if my brother will comply. Exciting times, don't you think?