king of research - season 2

COMPETITION CLOSED

Lex entry - CONFIRMED.

RESEARCH HAS A KING

:D

I think I have been the Ruby Tandoh of this series...

Don't be so down on yourself Lex, everybody doesn't hate you.

Long live the new king!

NB: there is actually a possible chain of 3. I only noticed after I'd got my final entry and it would've involved glomming off anatol's entry too much, but basically - there's a picture of an ilxor with Michael Ontkean.

RESEARCH HAS A KING

WELL DONE LEX!! :-D
Special kudos for ending up with someone not Shaw, ie someone who died more than twenty years before him.
Chain of 3: woah, crazy.

More than happy to reach a podium place in this company. Thanks, Maps!

Huge congratulations, lex, I feel honored to have shared the arena with you

Yes thanks to maps for organising! This was tremendous fun.

Special kudos for ending up with someone not Shaw, ie someone who died more than twenty years before him.

Inspired to try this when I found a picture of an ilxor with a famous retired Canadian hockey player - thought that they must have met the Canadian PM at some point, who must have met...the Queen? who is a pretty good bet to have met a lot of people? In the event I couldn't actually find a photo of that hockey player with any Canadian PM, even though they must exist somewhere, but Queen-Churchill-Balfour were pretty easy links to find - so anyone in an ilx picture who would have been likely to meet the Queen was really the dream. Bizarrely could find no picture of Kinnock with the Queen but her racist husband did the trick.

My actual favourite chain was longer but:

ilxor Tracer Hand with Eve
Eve with Daniel Craig
Daniel Craig with the Queen
The Queen with Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill with Arthur Balfour

(obviously it was my favourite because 1) EVE 2) daniel craig shirtless 3) corgis)

Well done lex. This was all great fun.

Sneaking Lex from the shadows was a great drama, because in previous competition semi-final he had winning entry, and held it for the last second, only for JayMC to steal it away! Great to see redemption for map of Arabia.

Once again, thank you to all competitors, and see you for Season 3!

(If any - watchers or candidates - have any final feedback/suggestions for questions etc, please let me know, so I can do better next time!)

i didn't intend to hold it for the last minute - just hadn't found any winning entry by fri afternoon and had no research time til sun evening!

do any research kingz think they could find out how many people have been killed in branches of mcdonalds or as the result of violence inflicted in mcdonalds restaurants, or as the result of culpable negligence by mcdonalds employees or fellow customers?

enjoyed this a lot maps - thanks v much. impressed to the point of fear by lex's ability despite time to come up with the goods, but all the finalists made me go "ffs you BASTARD" at some point.

xpost

no.

Oh man, definitely not.

For those who were stymied by the initial encoding on the second-to-last round: the reason I recognized it so readily was because it was used a great deal on usenet/newsgroups.
Its primary function there was for hiding spoilers etc. It was common enough that most clients for reading news had a shortcut built in to rotate highlighted text. (e.g. in Forte Agent you could press ctrl+3)

What makes rot-13 so useful is that it's cyclical over the 26 letters of the English alphabet. To encode/decode, you just swap each letter with the one 13 places after it in the alphabet -- starting at A again after Z. So ABBA becomes NOON becomes ABBA. For the challenge I used rot13.com.
Any symbol not in the English alphabet simply gets ignored, so my name becomes Ølfgrva.
Uh, so that's today little history lesson for those who didn't feel like looking it up after it was revealed.

it's also used to drop answers on the xword thread so I was a little surprised lex wasn't aware of it.

i've never encountered it in a crossword...

no, just used in the thread when giving an answer so it doesn't spoil it for people still solving (but might not have been used recently)

oh, i don't think it's been used recently but if it was i wouldn't have known what was going on anyway

i was genuinely surprised to find out that these codes were well-known to the point of being obvious for so many people - it does feel good that this raised my awareness of them though!

> i've never encountered it in a crossword...

then you've not been on the receiving end of one of ledge's tiny rot13 crosswords...

I... have no recollection of those!

^ old age

Damn was this great. Maps isn't on ILX anymore, right? I crave a new season of King of Research.

Yes, I often think of King of Research. Might be the most fun I've ever had on the internet.

^same

I was under the impression 'Maps' was only a King of Research persona for another ilx0r - were they a regular under that name? I bloody loved these threads.

This was loads of fun, yeah.

Amazing! This thread just obliterated my afternoon in the best way.