[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Thanks, Bêthberry.

I thought I'd include the illustrious academics, Doctors Overdale and Tenant because I know that a lot of you are already familiar with their ground-breaking experiments on the Travest-o-Meter®. The paper that these two distinguished pioneers of rotary travestorial measurement eventually published in New Scientist does describe one occasion on which a group of individuals, by their mere speech patterns and physical presence, destroyed one of the early prototypes. Obviously such an event could not have occurred with one of the production models, which feature an emergency shut-down mechanism to be used in the unstable situations that can occur on the frontiers of literary criticism.

Tenant and Overdale were unfortunate in that their invention was revealed to the scientific community only days after a new calculation of Pi, which eclipsed the Travest-o-Meter and lost them their Nobel Prize. However, they managed to console themselves by becoming two of the richest scientists in the history of the world through the mass production of their discovery. Currently they act as remote consultants on the use of Travest-o-Metrics from a five-star hotel in Barbados.