An activist/street artist called the Invisible Man has left small plaques on walls and telegraph poles around inner city Sydney, particularly Surry Hills and Darlinghurst. But recently, the Invisible Man’s branched out.

At this spot on Premier Lane, Darlinghurst, and on a few other walls around town, the Invisible Man’s appeared as a copycat of This Is For That‘s alphabaffiti.

We’ve had people searching the blog for various combinations of ‘Darlinghurst’, ‘Sydney’ and ‘invisible’ or ‘invisible man’ every day for the past month or so. And at least one report, in the comments, of hand delivered material from Invisible Man.

Then one of our readers, Steve, noted this plaque on the corner of Farrell Avenue and Kirketon Road, Darlinghurst.

Hard to see, I only caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. It’s stuck to the curb that forms the garden bed on the little traffic island at the intersection of Farrell Avenue and Kirketon Road.

This one is for Lisa Marie Smith and references something happening with her in Bangkok in ’96 – and on a side note, asks to ‘FREI BOGAN SCHAPELLE CORBY’.

It’s also got what looks like a giant spliff on it.

And then this…

Walking down to Cafe Hernandez on a recent morning, we noticed this artwork on a shelf, dated 2007 – clearly by the same artist – Damien Jones.

We hope that the latest “R is for” is not spelling the end of our much-loved chalk alphabet riddle.

Spotted by Rachel a couple of days ago, on Roslyn St, down near St Luke’s Hospital was this.

Deep breath.

It’s all okay. “R” is followed by “S” and “T”.

Moments after that last post, I received news from my co-blogger that he was closing in on the mystery chalker.

Hours later, two emails popped up in my inbox from readers, Shawn and Fred, saying they had (independently) captured the chalker’s latest stunt, on the Hardie Street wall of the Darlo Bar: “L is for Libation.”

Reemski commented about “K is for Kleptomania,” too, but didn’t get a snap.

Following a couple of leads, I found the chalker.

He thought it seemed a shame to ruin a good mystery. I agree, but we reckon we owe it to you guys.

The This Is For That series/chalk alphabet is just a celebration of great words, or at least favourite words. They’re not, as a rule, linked to the location or what’s going on in the world, just words that are excellent for some reason.

The first one was “a is for atom” on a toilet door, then “b is for brain” on the footbridge, then “c is for cephalopod,” which was the first one to get photo’d, and is of course another word for a squid.

Other words are really normal, but when put out there on their own they get weird, like “igloo.”

Some are great sounding like “wobble,” or kind of moving like “heartache” or “fiasco.”

Some are beautiful words and things like “filament” and some are excellent concepts like “entropy.”

Then others are interesting concepts that need a bit of research, like “azimuth” (which someone modified by adding “z is for zenith”, which is a word describing a similar thing, but starting with z… brilliant).

Other great modifications include someone taking letters out of “g is for gyroscope” and making “g is for goop.”

I’m up to my second alphabet now. Currently up to, um, “m”… not sure what that’s for yet.

The z is for zipper is the z from the last alphabet.

So, the mystery is solved!

Hmm, turns out that had we the nous to type “a is for azimuth” into a search engine, the mystery may have been solved long ago. But where is the fun in that?

Incidentally, the letter m, it’s for meddling.

Is that “meddling” directed at us?