Voynich Photoshop gags…
Cracked.com is running a Photoshop contest – “The retarded Truth behind the World’s Greatest Mysteries”. Truth be told, my favourite entry is mrlarry’s tame dinosaur moving Stonehenge’s stones in its mouth. But there are a couple of Voynich Manuscript themed entries too…
Sanchez’s competition entry (quarter size)
The VMs as drawn by a child? Sweet Photoshop technique, but probably not quite ‘retarded’ enough to win. The second entry is a bit like a hi-tech version of David N. Guy’s Voynich “Breakthrough” we saw a few days ago:-
Dan The Great’s competition entry (quarter size)
Yes, it does indeed read “With great haste he removed her underpinings. The hour of fornication was nigh.“ Hmmm… perhaps the smart money’s still on the dinosaur. 
Incidentally, the Voynichese (from f15v) appropriated here just happens to be the two lines where I think the author used a space transposition cipher (i.e. moving spaces around within the ciphertext) to hide the repetitive “or or or” and “or or or or” by writing them as “oror or” and “or or oro r” respectively [Curse, p.160]. It’s also a bit odd that the first letter of the second line is rendered as EVA “l” – in Jorge Stolfi’s transcription, it’s weirdo #138, more like a malformed EVA “s”. Oh well.
Incidentally, John Stojko translated this same passage as “Why are you measuring the measure? The measure is the same. Even after Great One, the bones will be broken. I am telling you. Relic should believe me. ” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether (Dan’s) Babel Fish’s “With great haste…” is better or worse, I couldn’t possibly judge such a beauty contest.
March 21st, 2009 at 5:24 am
Great! I really like the Voynich Babelfish idea. Do you think you could make one? ISTR that you do have some web-based Voynich tool. Come up with something like that and you could really boost your site visits.
Some I don’t quite understand. Who is the sculptor building the Easter Island heads? We could send that one to Frogguy, who I haven’t seen in a while. Who is the guy in the lifeboat leaving the Titanic? How about the fellow saying “Nice rack”?
I like the tame dinosaur building Stonehenge too. I see there’s a John Dee entry. I don’t think the people of New Orleans would appreciate the one about Cthulhu being responsible for Katrina. I like the one about the Flying Spaghetti Monster doing crop circles. Did you know my home state occasioned the revelation about the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Pardon the retarded response,
Dennis
March 21st, 2009 at 7:38 am
Hey – I won’t have any Flying Spaghetti Monster naysayers on my blog, thankyouverymuch.
But as for the rest of them, I guess they’re manifestations of a load of cracked.com community in-jokes that have run for years. Do you think the VMs might just be 240 pages of Quattrocento in-jokes?
March 21st, 2009 at 7:40 am
PS: I did once consider writing a Babelfish-style web tool to do some kind of automatic Stojko or Levitov VMs translation… but luckily I thought better of it in time.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Say, have there been any serious suggestions that the Voynich Manuscript is actually encrypted erotica? I’d almost be surprised if nobody had proposed that.
March 21st, 2009 at 10:15 pm
I think it’s one of those semi-serious ideas that tend to pop back up every couple of years – I’ll have a look in my files, see what I can find…
March 22nd, 2009 at 4:26 am
Ah, so you’re a devout Pastafarian? Who knew?
Actually, I’m a sympathizer.
I believe that the Gospel of the FSM was written in response to Kansas’ creationism law. You’re blissfully spared such things in Merry Olde England.
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:29 am
No, but I fully support the rights of all people to adopt the anti-religion of their choice.
We have creationism in the UK too (though not in law)…
March 24th, 2009 at 5:36 am
All the creationism laws got shot down by a Pennsylvania Federal district judge. Just like the poor, creationism we will always have with us – and flatearthers, for that matter.