Thursday, 21 February 2008

Voynich news-bites...

Some tasty bite-sized morsels for you: don't eat them all at once, though...

The April 2008 edition of sci-fi monthly Analog has a 10,000-word Voynich-based story, "Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can" by Thomas R. Dulski. When super-bright billionaire's daughter Pamela Roderick writes an academic book on the idea of UFOs, people are surprisingly OK: but when her second book claims that the Voynich Manuscript describes 15th century humans being taken on a journey into space, the people around her become more tense... Hey, any novelistic take on the VMs without a papal conspiracy or evil Jesuit priests is fine by me. :-)

Incidentally, a key part of Eileen Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks" surprisingly revolves around anti-Jesuit propaganda, most notably Johannes Cambilhom's "Discoverie of the Most Secret and Subtile Practises of the Iesuites", which claimed to dish the dirt on the Jesuits' buried treasure, sadistic treatment of novices, sexual misadventures, and mad politicking. And the Jesuits had only been going 70 years at the time! Anyway...

Change of direction: here's a cool picture called "Arizona" by ~HinoNeko / A. Brenner, depicting a young guy with a Voynich-themed T-shirt (basically, the centre of the 'sun-face' on f68v1). Yet more VMs things edging into the mainstream consciousness, one meme at a time...

Finally: I don't know how I managed to miss the decade-old story of the Swedish parents who were fined for wanting to name their son "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116", in a kind of pataphysical protest at Sweden's child naming law. Amazing: a name that makes Voynichese look sane. ;-)

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