From my small corner of the world, it often seems to me that some things really are not only unexplained, but also just plain inexplicable.
For example: even though the entire world had already learnt from famed transit lounger Edward Snowden that the NSA and GCHQ are silently tapping vast swathes of the Internet and phone traffic, why is it that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now so utterly aghast to discover that the Americans ‘may’ [*] have also been tapping her mobile? Excuse my impertinence, but does she not actually read the newspapers even slightly?
So you can see the big problem contemporary TV producers face: when matched up against modern mysteries of such massive magnitude and moral moronity, how can shows such as “The Unexplained Files” honestly expect to compete? Ohhhh, I seeeee – I hear you resignedly mumble to yourself – by including a piece on The Voynich Manuscript, that’s how. And, sadly, tragically, awfully, you’d be absolutely right.
Having talked with researchers from “The Unexplained Files” at the beginning of the year, I can honestly say that they trawled really hard to dig up some “alien” angle on the Voynich (its unearthly language, its unworldly herbs, William Romaine Newbold’s pet galaxy, putative telescopic technology, etc) to fit the show’s slack-jawed you-would-see-the-aliens-among-us-if-you-only-opened-your-stupid-dumb-eyes televisual conceit. Fox Mulder would have been so proud. Well, dumbstruck.
We gotta have us some talking heads, Mikey: so on they wheeled Gerry Kennedy and even his Royal Hoaxness Gordon Rugg for our viewing pleasure, along with several single-actor historical micro-mise-en-scènes to visually jolly the grindingly dull narrative along to its inevitable heavy question marks.
But of course, without Big Jim Finn and his Star Trek / Hebrew end-times message, or (my personal favourite) Dan Burisch and his “dangerous information” from the future-via-the-past, their overwhipped soufflé came out flatter than a losing politician’s smile.
If I described their Voynich documentary segment as “less than the sum of its parts”, it would be somewhat misleading: because none of the individual parts amounted to much at all either. Really, it was as if some poor bugger was told to eat the dismal Wikipedia Voynich article a paragraph at a time and then regurgitate it to try to entertain our new grey alien overlords. But with a gun at his or her cringing head.
File under AP (for “Alien Pants”). Or better still, just flee. Not so much “Unexplained Files” as “Inexplicably Commissioned”, sorry. 🙁
[*] weasel word included on the advice of my corporate attorneys, Fitz-Suitswell and Plunderham LLP
Much ado about nothing (at all)?
If you think this latest “much ado” about “nothingmuch” to do, is ridiculous, have you taken my latest reference to “National Geographic”s magazine “100 greatest mysteries revealed”, to your local newspaper/magazine vendor yet? You don’t have to buy the whole piece of “cr….., er, junk — to read the top half of page 30.
Oh well, I just now took a look at page 31 of same “piece of..”. “What are the sources of the PIRI REIS MAP?” I’ll catch up with y’all ( a tout a l’heure). 🙂
The “five eyes” have not made a secret of what they are doing. It’s been going on for over 50 years.
Who would syndicate a show consisting of a panel of codicologists, palaeographers, iconographic analysts, computer experts, and spectroscopic data?
You couldn’t get that on tele, not evenfor the Declaration of Independence or the Magna Carta.
Voynich docos are always going to be about “my theory”- sort-of supported by highly selective snippets of real and imagined history with a few second of equally tight-scripted “expert” opinion ~ that’s the tele. for you.
What are the sources of the National Geographic’s writers about the Voynich manuscript?
I wonder now if I should reprint some of the (pause to check) twenty-five posts in which I discuss the voynich ms’ folio 86v, identify it as a worldmap, correlate emblems in it to the portolan-charts (Trebizond, Genoa, Majorca-Mallorca), the French court and the maritime environment including refence to both Piri Reis and Ibn Majid?
… nah. No need. Some overseeing deity has doubtless seen to it that they have copies of the original posts on file.
I’m secretly waiting for the Voynich, or another of the popular ciphers, to show up on PBS, maybe on Secrets of the Dead or Nova – some of your readers might enjoy the detective work in this particular episode:
http://video.pbs.org/video/2189483449/
But i imagine they’ll probably wait until a credible solution is put forth and there is something concrete to discuss.
Diane: from where I’m sitting, modern documentaries seem more like fashion items, with a glittering array of half-facts deftly arranged in the edit suite to accessorize a hacky theory’s narrative elegance. But the key word here is ‘fashion’: for if a new type of documentary came along tomorrow and made a splash, commissioners would drop the current presentation style like a radioactive turd. 🙂
Nick,
Why do I think I should take that comment personally?
Perhaps becuse I just added new accessory to the left hand column of my retroctive blog.
So this doesn’t sound like an ad, here’s the quote direct:
Attributed to one Angus McFadden by the British Library:-
“If you don’t see what you don’t see, and you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you know what you don’t see?”
😀
PS
To quote a certain person not unknown to ciphermysteries, though this is entirely out of context :
“if commenters … spent even 10% as much time actually trying to get to the truth as spinning yarns around their preferred explanatory narrative, perhaps we’d have all got somewhere by now.”
I won’t name the author of that brilliant comment because he doesn’t agree with my interpretation of the Voynich, and I haven’t yet asked a mate to write a wiki article I can credit instead.
Diane, I’m surprised you haven’t corrected his grammar, quote marks or not: : “…we’d have all ‘gotten’ somewhere by now.” Perhaps he didn’t know how to spell that word. Just so you know, not too long after he made that comment, he lashed out at me. He flat out told me to quit replying to Nick’s blog.
Ennyway (my deliberate mis-pelling), or anyways (my deliberately ungrammatical remark), he reeely dus’nt deserve enny further mention. Jes my point of view, mebbe.
beedy-eyed as usual 😉
bdid1dr: whoever you’re talking about, I like him already. 😉
Just in case anyone thinks I’m being ironicastic about that remark’s being brilliant – no, not in the least. Only sorry it wasn’t said about Voynich studies because it applies so well.
Diane, I’m shocked! Is this the first time you’ve used a “smiley”? Much less a hugely grinning one?
Would I find “ironicastic” in my Webster’s? Are we increasing the “Voynich” vocabulary? Is Nick, perhaps, perfecting presentations of puzzling, ponderous, pithy pharmaceutical prescriptions prior to publishing part II?
;-^ (bd with a wink and smirk)
“their overwhipped soufflé came out flatter than a losing politician’s smile.”
Possibly the greatest clause I have ever read in the English language. Cheers!
Andrew: if you’d forced yourself to sit through that Voynich “Unexplained Files” segment, you too would have plenty of vivid words at the front of your mind to choose from. 😉
I hope the producer is forwarding his resume to the ancient aliens guys. This is my opinion having just seen it in whole…
Bd1bdr
I’ve been hoping for some time and for the necessary programmes in order to run an intersect between Joyce and Websters. My guess is that the Websters will either crash out or return a string of ‘dunno’s.
I suppose one might be kinder, and start the routine with Lear.
T Anderson: if you got all the way through the programme, I’m very sorry for you, we bloggers do these things so that others don’t have to. 🙁
Now there’s a new term for y’all: “blogsloggers”. Do you think it will ever appear in “Webster’s”? Maybe National Geographic’s Homepage?
Nick, I’ve explained over and over — and even found a definition (in Webster’s) for all my efforts, “reiterate”.
😉
I survived, It didn’t hold my attention other than a cringe here and there. I went into it knowing exactly what type of show i was watching though.
When I was a kid my parents had a bunch of books on the mysterious and curious. Readers Digest published a bunch of them I know, and while they aren’t rigorous in any sense they did introduce me to most of the topics you write(in much better quality) about. The Dorabella and Beale ciphers, Voynich Manuscript, Taman Shud case, etc.
Having used myself as an example I’m curious as to how much we have to tolerate the awful tv programs, books, and articles on these topics purely because they generate interest? Are they instead just a parasite on a popular topic like trolls on a website or flys around a full stable?
I didn’t intend to write this much, feels silly writing a comment that is much deeper than the program which inspired it. Thanks for screening all the awful drivel for us!
T Anderson: you have to understand that television wears the cloak of learning unwillingly – its default position is to act as a rapacious information-eating machine, consuming everything that it touches (but without ever wanting to compensate beyond travelling expenses for its generally presumed droit de seigneur). The best case scenario is where something genuinely new comes out as a result of having a Major Broadcaster behind you (e.g. the radiocarbon dating for the Voynich Manuscript)… but I’m reasonably sure that this is rarely the case. It takes, but hardly ever gives.
The idea that we have to tolerate bad TV to promote subjects we’re interested in doesn’t seem to hold water any more, now that there are hundreds of thousands of web-pages, reasonable quality books, and entire online communities focused around these various topics (though some, as we can see here, can be fairly dysfunctional). I often think that it should be time round about now to start making TV programmes that instead treat these subjects with the interest and respect I believe they deserve… but TV commissioning is also a fashion business, and the fashion right now is for cheap, rubbish, semi-exploitational pieces with unsupportable voiceovers filled with fake questions [“could it be that aliens…?” etc] rather than ideas and actual history, so that’s what they get. Like a plunge sheep dip filled with piss, pretty much everyone who goes in comes out tarnished and smelling bad. 🙁
Zahi Hawass and the video-robot which showed us the passageway between the “doors” in the Great Pyramid. Even more fascinating to me were the various DNA studies he had done on Tut-ankh-aman and some of his relatives. Rather than TV (which I’ve not watched in over 30 years), I now rent DVD’s from Netflix.
One film I have not been able to find anywhere is “The Price of Tomatoes” (a semi-documentary about itinerant field laborers and Cesar Chavez efforts to form the “UFW”). The film was introducing the actor Peter Falk. Nick, do you or any of your correspondents have the means of locating the film (which may have disintegrated in the canister long ago)?
I’ve just returned from a WWWsearch/google for Nizami’s works. I’ve just located another legendary pair featured in Nizami’s Quintet: “Khusraw discovers Shirin bathing in a pool.jpg
This time, one pale nymph sitting crosslegged in a widening of the (black-water) rivulet, braiding her hair. Again the woman bears a very strong resemblance to “Nymph Small”
So, this makes the third illustration in Nizami’s “Kamsa Quintet”. If you follow the usual Wiki trail and end at the AGA KHAN MUSEUM – online gallery offerings, you may be more adept than I at accessing links to some 120 ‘maybe’ related folio/pages.
“Adventure! Romance! Herring!”
♥ languagehat April 22nd
My query for our host and y’all: Nizami was a poet, true? If Nizami wrote the poems, himself, who did the illustrations in the Kamsa?
Beautifully illustrated folios (three that I’ve found so far) in which two illustrations show very pale women in a pool of black water.
“Fishy” or not, a red herring will sometimes lead to an open corridor and into paths of documented history; the ‘other’ side of the story.
Beyazid and Tamerlane (Timur). The Silk Road (but not Marco Polo). So, I’ll be revisiting the Ali Khan Museum’s online offerings of manuscripts, many of which are Persian copyist efforts (Nast-a-liq).
Here is my attempt to spell “Nastaliq” without any diacritical marks (a la Voynich?)
N = the single barbed “fish hook” glyph
as = a + question-mark with no dot
tl-9 = the tl cipher which “looks like a set of telephone poles with a loop on only one of its poles” plus the numeral 9.
(Large “9” represents the gutterals g and k)
The difference in the size of that “9” and the smaller “9” represents the sound of “ks” or “x”.
So, Nick:, maybe you could write “unexplained” in VMS cipher?
So, Nick, are you going to watch Mr. Fallacari’s televised presentation of “Castel del Monte” (in Brussels) tomorrow (4 Dec, Brussels time)?
I’m hoping it will eventually show on the WWW, if not herein.
Did I read you right that you have purchased his book? Thus making it possible for you to excerpt?