Category: Other

I may simply not have devised a category yet, or it may be impossible for me to categorize it as it may be more than one or two categories at once.

Question about the Voynich Manuscript

A page from the mysterious Voynich manuscript,...
Image via Wikipedia

One reader of this blog brought up the subject of the Voynich Manuscript and asked whether the Goldlist method could be a good tool to someone wishing to decipher this.

I produced the first draft of the below answer in the comments section next to the query, but I thought it was a very good idea to talk about this as a main article on its own account, so I’m reproducing the answer here, and expanding it a bit with a few more thoughts.

It will be a nice precursor to another article I have in the pipeline, namely my story “Otherwise Engaged” which also talks about a special book made by one person and handed down in a family, this one containing a self-fulfilling prophesy. Although it was among my favorite short stories in the ones I ever entered into the Daily Telegraph‘s monthly short story competitions some years back, it was one of the ones that actually didn’t get anywhere, other than some nice comments by other Telegraph bloggers at that time.

Anyway, now to my thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript.

The easiest thing is to assume that it is a hoax, as so many of the unexplained things are hoaxes, but in order not to assume any bad intentions on the part of the author, let us say that it is a work of art.

The paper and the ink seem to be consistent with 15th century Italian, which also had a writing style of the sort used here at that time, a revival of an earlier Carolingian handwriting style.

The manuscript should not be looked at in isolation from the accompanying illustrations. They contain detailed drawings of plants which are not actually consistent with plants to be found in any of the linguistic locations posited, in fact, these plants don’t exist, unless they all existed once and all coincidentally disappeared, or maybe they exist on another planet and the author was a shipwrecked alien, or, most likely they are the product of someone whose psychology is a ‘creator’ style psychology. Continue reading “Question about the Voynich Manuscript” →

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
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The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Sto...
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“A” List, “B” list, etc on the internet?

Shane Dawson finally starts to get it
Shane Dawson appears twice in the top ten. Like all of the most successful channels Shane allows free rating and comments. Like many of the most successful YT artist he cultivates muliple channels which cross refer to each other. The largest category in the YouTube A list is Comedian. Even though hot women get high views, they don't get the same viewer loyalty as the laughsters do.

The terms “A list”,  “B list“, etc – in short just about any letter of the alphabet plus “list”, all the way down to  “ZZZ list” followed by the word celebrity is used in modern speech as a way of categorising the degree of stardom a person in the media has achieved. So they can be said to be on some letter’s list all the way from being only slightly well-known right the way through to being a major international star, or an ex-star who has wained and gone back down the letters again. 

People seem to know who is “A list”, “B list”, etc, although I am not sure that there is any objective criterion for the measurement of this stardom. The most objective you can get for traditional media like television is who draws the most ratings. Even the criterion of makes the most money is not the most objective criterion as there are people that don’t make that much money despite the fact that they are extremely recognisable and extremely popular. Look at the Pope for instance. He is certainly an A-lister even though as a monk he is consigned to earn nothing and live in destitute poverty in the Vatican surrounded by priceless art works and attentive flunkies bearing gold, frankincense and grappa. Continue reading ““A” List, “B” list, etc on the internet?” →

Playing the Odds: The MacGregors, Book 1
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The Fall of Hyperion
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Button Man


This film shows that I was trying to experiment but I still only had the Fuji which was trained on the monitor. This is the last film I took and uploaded that had to rely solely on that one technology, but already you can see the desire to experiment a bit more with the films. The next film I did after this one was a radical departure…

The Butcher's Masquerade: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Book 5
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The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife: A Novel
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Here comes the birde …

Birdy song bride

A few seconds long only, like quite a bit of my early stuff, this shows a bride performing the birdy dance at her wedding reception with her new husband’s nieces.

In much of contentinental Europe, the performance of the birdy dance by a bride dressed in her wedding dress, at her wedding, with children, is a powerful fertility rite. The more iterations of the song performed in this way, the more children you are likely to have.

Animal Farm
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We Are All Guilty Here: A Novel
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Habemus Presidentem!

He's got the whole continent in his hands

Habemus Caesarem! Ave! Ave! Ave!

The white smoke has risen over the Atomium, and the Holy Roman Empire has its Caesar once again, and fittingly one from the province of Beneluxus, which started the whole thing off in the first place by pacifying the tribes of the Belgae, the Low Rhenish-Franconians and the Luxurians and forming a mini-union of peoples, which was destined to grow and grow over subsequent decades, taking over the Roman Empire and in turn being assimilated into it in a way that this Hermann’s arguable etymological forebear Hermann Arminius, two millennia earlier, could only have dreamed of. Finally Hermann has taken the Empire.

Even more fittlngly, this new Caesar is a poet, after the honorable tradition of the Caesar poet Nero, whom we can even say is a type of Rompuy. This New Caesar combines in his surname elements both of a Romulus and of Pompey, the lost treasure of the Roman Empire.

This newly elected (only not by the people, there’s the snag – in fact the old Caesars probably were the product of more democracy than we now have) vicar of Nimrod on Eutopian soil, the man whom fellow Bilderberger Kissinger can now ring up for a cosy chat, or tell Obama to, Mr Hermann Van (note aristocratic Van) Rumpy-Pumpy and his blue-blooded Baroness boiler counterpart, Catherine Ashtonne, are now going to take us into the next chapter of the sorry history of this continent. Are we supposed to get up and cheer for the fact that these two, whom not of the readers of this blog were ever given the chance to vote for the office, are now the most powerful pair of politicians in the world, presiding over the largest economy governed by one president? I’m not cheering. I’m weeping. You may wonder why Obama isn’t weeping suddenly to be displaced as Numero Uno Del Mundo by some chinless haiku-writing wonder from Eutopia? Because he’s in on the deal, that’s why. They are all working for the same masters.

The new European dream seems to be summed up in the fact that every body, regardless of how bad they look, can become President and first laide-y, as the French would have it, as long as they have either a baronetcy or an aristocratic surname. No elitism here. Oh no.

So, to celebrate the (heh) election of this new Poet President of Europe, I’d like to write a special poem in honour of my new state representative, that I didn’t get a vote for.

Here goes:

President Elect?
As in “we choose our leaders”?
I remember that!

If you can do better, please leave your haiku tribute to our Neo-Nero from the land of Samsonite, Brel and Jean-Claude van Damme and his royal consnort the Baroness of Upholland, who is no oil painting even in the Flemish school, in the comments box.

Please no haikus involving “Rumpuy Pumpuy” or any such puns as they are too obvious. I already did some of them myself but edited them out as not being worthy. Anyway, I can’t really see it, can you?

The Gray Man
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Six of Crows
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