25
Jun'08

Always good for a laugh

   Posted by: thebruce

The Joker’s just released his HaHaHa Times volume 3.  Once again making light of serious Gotham news, and yanking Batman’s chains.  Check it out

Wednesday morning, on hovering the mouse over the upper left corner of the most recent Gotham Times, the paper slowly smolders to reveal the link to the Joker’s spoof.

Throughout the paper, in typical Joker fashion, are circle words and letters.  The letters spell:

Herrings are red
Corpses are blue
You’re on the right track
But you don’t have the clue

And the words: party, chaos, level, aren’t, twice, world, level, Dent’s, Dent’s, faced, urban

Where’s the Joker taking us now?

UPDATE:
Shortly after, people began receiving text messages from the Joker, containing image attachments labelled 1A.jpg through 6F.jpg.

After aligning all these image attachments in a grid once they were reported in, it was noticed that each image was made up of four smaller patterns.  Replacing each of these patterns in the 12×12 grid with a letter produced a substitution cipher!  The solution to that puzzle was another clue:

color me impressed just use the second letter of the fourth word to the right of each circled five letter word to find out where to go from here

That takes us back to the new HaHaHaTimes from the Joker.  Looking for each five letter word, then the fourth word after each, and the 2nd letter of each of those words results in the Joker’s next game – Red Balloons.

Now, while it’s a fun game in and of itself (YMMV), it’s similar to the Joker’s previous game – LaughTilItHurts – there’s a ticket slot.  The game requires pushing the clowns’ noses to blow up the balloons to exploding within the allotted time.  But if you look closer, the clowns’ eyes turn blue at a certain ‘pressure’.  Try getting each clowns’ eyes blue simultaneously!  If you’re successful, you’ll be given a ticket, and a pass to Inept Lackeys, where the Joker left us a new message:

Hired goons are so unreliable these days. That’s why I only employ the ones who graduated at the top of their class from Clown College (and being opera-lovers didn’t hurt, either). But Maroni’s got his hands full with inept lackeys like little Stevie and Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?  I’ll tell you where they are: sittin’ pretty with a smile on their face. They tried to reschedule their pick up service at Pasquale’s, but things didn’t go according to plan.

HAHAHAHA.

Analyzing this message, and the number of subtle opera-related hints, composer Giuseppe Verdi seemed to be fairly important.  Calling Pasquale’s business number, 1-877-678-7277, forwards you to voicemail, where you have the option of providing a 5-digit administrative PIN.  Guess what?  “verdi” is 5 letters.  Entering 83734 gets you into the voicemail.  The first and only voicemail says:

Hey, Frenchie – me and, uh, Rosolio ain’t gonna to make it to, uh, Sunday Night Crepefest. Something came up – in the Gotham River. I think his name was…Fred. Anyways, we’ll be there Monday night for our ‘box of pastries.’ Baker’s dozen this time, capiche?

This eerily seem to explain what may have happened in regards to to this security feed at the end of LaughTilItHurts

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42E

Categories: ARGs General, Movies

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 8:42 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 comments so far


Don
 1 

Pagliacci was not composed by Verdi — but rather Leoncavallo. So that clue doesn’t make any sense. Verdi was another Italian composer but never did anything like The Clowns.

June 26th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
 2 

Yeah, the precise connection that got to Verdi isn’t yet clear – but thanks, I’ve adjusted the wording.

June 27th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Don
 3 

Verdi did compose a clown based opera named Rigoletto…about a court jester. I guess that has to be the link. But there’s no mention of a stevie or a romeo.

If I’m not mistaken, Maroni is from the Dark Knight comic book, the Long Halloween, right?

June 27th, 2008 at 10:59 pm

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