I have never seen such a bulls--t clue !
Re: link - Diamond ring clues + answers .
The p-ss head who wrote it makes the classic fruedian slip buy commenting on the redbull SOFT drink that he consumed while composing his non lateral thoughts into a rambling mess which in turn , can only leave us wondering if Ebay is actually run by a bunch of spotty teenagers.
I have pasted the diamond ring answers below - judge for yourself :
Clues and Answers Archive
hnutford@ebay.com (view author's auctions)
08/12/04 12:19
Our Clue Master, whose identity will be revealed soon and will be joining us more frequently on the boards has sent us through a fuller answer for yesterday’s clue. See if you can get inside his mind. 🐵
The Mystery Clue Master writes:
Snowman (answer to the diamond ring clue is – Dell Hard Drive)
So: Snowman. A clue to win a beautiful 1.03 carat ‘emerald cut’ diamond ring – one big prize for the day, so the clue trail had to be even more complex than usual if the Treasure Hunters were not to pounce on it too quickly. I sat back, cracked open another Red Bull – the delights of an occasional tipple are long forgotten, because I’ve got to stay sharp as a tack – and set to work…
Hint: Mince Pies
As you all know, I love mince pies (homemade, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, I don’t care) and a misspent youth in the East End of London has left me with a lasting fondness for Cockney rhyming slang. Mince pies = eyes. A Snowman’s eyes, of course, are traditionally made of Coal. Which brought to mind the wonderful Nat ‘King’ Cole and Old King Coal.
A little obvious perhaps, so I hit upon a newer King Coal – Arthur Scargill, leader of the (coal) Miners Union. So far, so good. Hundreds of you were on the case with coal. elven_shadowcat was just one, but deserves a mention for trying to win, in the teeth of weird British culture, even though hailing from Holland, home of all those weird but wonderful Dutchies. But full marks must go to glamour_ville, hamdi5 and haybarn11 for getting Scargill. Now while it was tempting to run off from Scargill to Lord Scarman (who had just died) and even the Scarface movies, I stuck with Arthur. Who is the most famous Arthur to those residing in these fair shores? Why, the Lost King himself, the Winter King…
The easy shortcut (and there isn’t always one this easy) linked Coal and the Diamond in the prize – both forms of carbon – and then it’s a short hop to ‘hard’ (as diamonds are).
Hint:A Misplaced King
King Arthur is a subject attempted by many over the years, but recently, Bernard Cornwell has done it best. The brilliant author of the Sharpe series (which I believe was made into television with that Geordie chap, forget his name but he was in Lord of the Rings too, you know who I mean) has written The Warlord Chronicles which start with The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur. Only a couple of dozen got what seemed a quite obvious hint for Arthur. A kind fish called bilbobaggins2000 was one (good luck with the driving lessons, by the way, and yes, doing the eBay treasure hunt on a laptop while learning to drive is definitely a no no).
But no-one got Bernard Cornwell at all, even though it is painfully obvious that I read far too many books than is strictly necessary, let alone good for health.
Cornwell is a rather strange way to spell “Cornwall”, and there’s one other – very famous – author called Cornwell, name of David Cornwell. Only his nom de plume is John Le Carré. Now Le Carré may have gone off the boil a bit lately, but his masterwork is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (a mere 9000 pages via Google).
The not-so-easy shortcut would either be Arthur having a hard life (some of those pesky Knights were hardly to be trusted) or Bernard Cornwell’s heroes, who have tough lives too.
Hint: Rich or Poor
unipos_systems kindly provided the full rhyme “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief, tinker, tailor, soldier and as thehighlander100 noted, there are lots of references to the brilliant ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ TV series. Also on the trail were splodge42, multiplicity92, cammi040904 – a wise one who proves that inspiration will sometimes come from stepping away from the computer and relaxing in a bath – and ollym1, who was so close and even mentioned Dell!
This utterly great TV starred Sir Alec Guinness as George Smiley, the spy lured out of retirement to hunt down a mole, a double agent in British Intelligence working for the Soviets. (Not unlike a kind deadly treasure hunt, really). I avoided ‘smiley’ routes, and spent a fruitless hour online trying to find someone who would remind me who the mole George finally uncovers is.
Now ‘rich or poor’ (and all the other variants in the song) suggests a multiplicity of roles. And Alec Guinness famously played no less than 8 parts in the quirkily amusing ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’. Having realised that Teamtreasurehunt.co.uk was already recommending this site, and with a naturally bookish bent, I pounced on the author of the book on which the film script was based, Roy Horniman.
The increasingly difficult ‘easy’ short cut – life can be hard, whether you’re rich or poor, it’s a matter of the cards you’re played, as the children’s fortune-telling game around the rhyme suggests.
Hint: Fred & Gus’s Old Things
The top 3 Google results for “Horniman” take you straight to the famously delightful family-friendly museum of the same name (http://www.horniman.ac.uk/). Founded by Frederick (Fred) Horniman, it’s simply brimming with curious and interesting old things, like most museums. In fact, its world-renowned exhibition of World Cultures (ethnography) is a marvel to behold, and second only to the British Museum in London and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as its own website announces (http://www.horniman.ac.uk/collections/world.cfm).
But the real treasure-hunters’ delight is surely the Pitt Rivers Museum (http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/), because Lt. Gen. Augustus (Gus) Pitt Rivers insisted that his collection be shoved in as it came, higgledy piggledy. It’s quite amazing, and well worth a visit. Pitt Rivers (and I was tempted to play around with Brad Pitt and River Phoenix, but thought I’d stick with old things for a while) was a remarkable figure. He also had a collection – this time of buildings – at his beautiful Larmer Tree Gardens in Tollyard Royal, Dorset in the stunningly beautiful Cranbourne Chase. There is a very enjoyable annual Larmer Tree music festival of a size and style to suit the Professor and F’s travelling abode (an easily erected tent).
The hardly-easy-at-all-anymore shortcut from here was that this was, to be quite honest, the hardest hint of the Treasure Hunt yet. So hard, in fact, that I thought someone might try “hard” out of sheer head-scratching frustration. Oh well…
Hint: The Other Man
For a certain type of obsessive – “And aren’t we all obsessive, one way or another?” I often muse to F. “Yes, dear”, she says, meaning nothing of the sort – there is only one towering genius to spin on the record deck in time of need. Hailed as the greatest white blues singer of all time by everyone from Eric Clapton and Tracey Chapman to Mark Knopfler and Andy Kershaw, in times of trouble or joy, you simply can’t been Van ‘The Man’ Morrison at his best. A quick search of Van and snow will yield his delicately beautiful and achingly melancholic song, ‘Snow in San Anselmo’. The song comes from the underrated album ‘Hardnose the Highway’. The title may be slang (another hour lost trying to find out), or simply Van’s inspiration, but it’s meaning is clear enough – in hard times, put your nose to the grindstone and drive on…
The somewhat easier shortcut? To know someone else – the other man – is hard, but worthwhile. Or as the ethnographic type has said, “Man cannot know man except in mutuality: in respect, trust, and equality, if not ultimately love.” ‘Ethnography?’ I hear some say. ‘What’s that then?’ Well, apart from a charming little corner of eBay’s Collectables category, as far as I can make out, if you were to ask it what its job was, it would say “it’s know man”.
P.S. On the vexed subject of why a naughty clue elf (who I suspect may have been supping Santa’s mulled wine, vodka, whiskey or Baileys behind his back) gave out an extra clue about how ‘difficult’ it was: as far as I’m aware she has been sent off to clean the reindeer’s stables, and it won’t happen again.
