FBI Tracks Down TTF Member

[wizard2c]

It depends on what you're writing to yourself. If it's things like "Must kill neighbours and co-workers, must kill neighbours and co-workers" then you might be in trouble.

That's why wizards always carry portable laptop shredders for notes of intent to.........well I shall say no more...................

 

[Firawyn]

I'll be darned...that's freaking awsome. I tend to fall more onto Quenyan, acctaully...I wonder if the FBI has got that one down yet!!

 

[Erurainon]

It turns out, the original was being held in Washington, DC, where it was being studied! Fifteen experts could not interpret the "strange writings", due to the fact that it wasn't Arabic, nor was it Albanian, nor Russian....

Was it REALLY in Wash, or are you making it up so it looks cooler?
http://www.hjo3.net/orly/gal1/orly_rock.jpg

 

[Urambo Tauro]

Well, the agent told me it was sent there; I didn't have any reason to doubt him.

I'm a bit surprised that they were willing to wait two days before they could get the note-pad.
They called on Saturday, then waited until Monday to get it. After that, they had only a few hours of studying it before they sent it to WDC.

If it were me, I might have held on to it longer to try to figure it out. After all, I was only using the Tengwar alphabet. The lanuage itself was English, not Quenya or Sindarin. If you were very good at cryptograms, you could figure it out.

 

[Jesse]

That is one cool story!

 

[Rosalee LuAnn]

I dont post much around here, especially not anymore, but when I saw the title of this thread I was curious. I laughed out loud--my family all looked at me strangely, but they're pretty much used to it by now. I often randomly burst out laughing when reading things--usually books, of course.

(At the end of RotK... "Do you think you killed him with that apple, Sam?"... it makes me laugh so hard every time... at least, I THINK thats what he said... hmmm. Time for a re-reading... hooray!

Wait, I don't have time for that.

I don't even have time for THIS. I'm supposed to be doing homework. Thats depressing.)

 

[Urambo Tauro]

Well, it's been a year.
I've managed to keep my nose out of trouble since then. That is, I haven't lost anything. But I still write Tengwar a lot. I can fluently write it, but I still have to read it letter by letter. Or, tengwa by tengwa.

 

[Thorin]

That story is just hilarious!

We have a spy who flummoxed the FBI on our very own forum!


Way to go!

Let this be a warning for all those who feel the need to write in Elvish or Klingon!

 

[Starflower]

A little off topic.. but I work for a translation company, that is we provide translations in various languages for public organisations (police, healthservice etc). Once I got a request to translate a suspicious blogpost in a language noone ever heard of before... turns out to be Klingon. And I tell the police officer, sorry, it's in Klingon, no can do. And the officer asks 'where do they speak Klingon then so I can get it done'

 

[Urambo Tauro]

That's the fun thing about invented languages (or alphabets): their obscurity.

How did you recognize it as Klingon? And did you tell him where they speak it?

 

[Starflower]

the wonderful world of the Internet... lol but also there's a Star Trek geek person at the office.

Well, I had to let the poor officer down gently and tell him 'You do realize sir that this is an invented language, i.e. noone speaks it

Oh, to imagine the country's security is in the hands of these people...

 

[Firawyn]

Well, I had to let the poor officer down gently and tell him 'You do realize sir that this is an invented language, i.e. noone speaks it

Some people speak it! The Geeks.

That reminds me of a book quote: the story was about these kids who go to a summer program for people who wanted to do homework all summer. The part that I was thinking about was one character mentioned something about only geeks would to 'that', and the other character replies - "This is f*cking geek HQ you know!"

I would say the same about TTF, actually.

 

[Urambo Tauro]

Ten years.

It's been one decade since that day. Ain't it funny how time flies? I realize that I haven't been an active member on this forum for some time. Life happens, I guess. Anyway, I was going through some old boxes the other day and found my old notepad, and the old FBI receipt. It got stained at some point, but is still legible.

After my chat with the FBI, I immediately started using a new one, leaving this original unaltered as a souvenir. Here are a couple of sample pages. Instead of translating them for you, I'll just post the images as a fun puzzle for anyone who's interested.

During the time that I was using this pad for notes, I was in the middle of re-reading The Hobbit. There are some things that Tolkien mentions in passing that caught my eye, and I would jot down the page number and a quick note for later research. The page on the left is a good example of this. The page on the right is not Tolkien-related. It is a movie quote that I liked, and felt compelled to write down.

(Wow; has it really been seven years since my last post? I even remembered my login password!)