Cipher Mysteries

I just posted up a ten-word description of the VMs on the cool-website-du-jour TenWordWiki:

Unreadable Quattrocento cipher manuscript. Maddening trollbait for PhDs, but cool!

OK, it’s a fairly reasonable first attempt, though perhaps not quite achingly ironic enough for today’s ADD generation. Far hipper bloggers than me would probably have smirkingly jirked:-

Secretly reads: “All your Renaissance base are belong to us”

If you can vaguely remember shorthand advertisements of the 1980s, there’s also an extremely strong argument for:-

If u cn rd ths, u r a fkn genius!

…except that it could be read purely self-referentially. Still, if you’re looking for a high irony factor gag, you’d probably prefer my #2 definition, which I rejected only on the grounds that it wasn’t actually true:-

Proof that bored scribes can obfuscate “Squeamish ossifrage” countless ways.

Of course, with the web being the way it is, there will probably be 200 edits of the page before tomorrow night. But at least you know now what I was thinking!