“So, how can I help you today,” smiled Dr Wayfit breezily but briefly, “Mr., uh, Smedley?”
“I’ve been struggling in lockdown”, the man replied, looking evasively through the third floor window of the medical centre. “My mental health is suffering. I’m feeling very anxious about… the vaccines. You know.”
“For something that does so much good, there are far too many conflicting messages out there”, the doctor said. “Do you… ” – she paused, looking him squarely in the eyes – “…rely on social media for information?”
“Oh no”, the man said, his face suddenly brightening, “I get my information direct. From the source.”
The doctor’s eyes narrowed quizzically. “You mean, from epidemiologists?”
“No!” Smedley laughed raucously, his head tipping backwards. “From the Voynich Manuscript. Everything about the coronavirus is in there, everything. Look at this.” He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from an inside pocket and held it up for the doctor to see. “f69v. Proof. 100%. You can’t deny it. Even back in the 15th century, they knew. They Knew!“
Dr Wayfit shook her head. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but it’s actually a well-known fact that Wilfrid Voynich hoaxed the manuscript himself. You don’t have to look far to find well-illustrated websites arguing this point in a highly persuasive way.”
Shocked, Smedley leapt backwards towards the door, his picture of f69v clutched to his face in horror. “But… that makes no sense at all? What kind of crazy drugs are you self-administering?”
“No, it’s all just common sense”, she cooed reassuringly. “Take your f69v, for example – it’s nothing more complex than a series of brightly-coloured pipes arranged around a starfish, the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams.”
“Really? Is there even one medieval diagram remotely like it?”
She rolled her eyes extravagantly. “To be precise, it’s the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams could have been, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it that way. And so what Wilfrid Voynich was hoaxing was how any one of those million medieval diagrams could have looked, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it as a set of brightly-coloured pipes around a starfish.”
“An eight-armed starfish?”
“It’s a work of imagination, obviously.”
“But… it’s so obviously coronavirus”, Smedley spluttered, now purple in the face. “And even though I’ll happily admit that my conclusion can be difficult for some to accept, your explanation is ten times crazier. Maybe even a hundred times.”
“Look, there’s really no reason for you to feel so upset by the Voynich Manuscript. You’ve been in ‘qokdown’ for far too long, and we in VAnon are desperately keen for people to understand that…”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“So, Dr Wayfit”, the police detective asked, looking at the body crumpled on the pavement far below the medical centre’s smashed window, the picture of f69v grasped firmly in the dead man’s hands, “you must admit this is a bit of a strange tableau, right?”
“Not really”, she replied, her eyes darting around distractedly. “The moment poor Mr Smedley told me that he thought the Voynich Manuscript had meaningful content, I knew instantly he was quite deranged. Honestly, he was a clear danger to himself, and I don’t think there’s anything I could have done to prevent this awful tragedy.”
The spike proteins aren’t very well illustrated and its unclear which variant the author wished to represent.
Thank you for the giggles and a much-needed lift to my chronic depression.
btw – It is a little-known fact that the f69v image was the inspiration for the design of the Walls Cornetto.
Actually one of the missing pages recently discovered is quite clear:
https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/files/2020/03/Voynich-Core-bar.png
Other pages that were discovered can be found there too:
https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2020/04/01/missing-pages-of-the-voynich-manuscript-discovered/
As our expert on anachronism SantaColoma pointed out, corona originated in the roots:
https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f33v/0.663/0.905/2.50
Proving Voynich had an impressive ability to foresee the future. not only including sunflowers and armadillos unknown around 1430, but even viruses unknown at the time of his forging around 1910.
If memory serves me correctly the trade name associated with corona may have come about based on the Corona Beer coy. who chose their label circa. 1920s for its clever move to employ a crown cork top in it’s bottling process. I’m sure Rick Santalacoma sees nothing wrong with conveniently adopting something similar to date his VM thus, though personally I see more justifiable evidence to prove the same point. Could be a Mexican standoff though the way things are going over at Voynich Nịna, we 1404-32 devotees could be mildly confident of cracking an old style cork or two before the virus takes care of any contentions.
That was hilarious. All of you. Explains the notorious dead (sick?) lady. (And here all my students thought the VMS was just a big black hole sucking every one in.)
Thanks so much Nick for this light-hearted moment – and of course that detail isn’t about the corona virus but the tricky business of extracting meat from sea urchins (no, no, just kidding!)
Well, it is a theory I guess in the weird world of the Voynich, I guess a tongue firmly in cheek, time travel one. (and you brought it up Nick!) This is a study where the person who writes the “bible” of it, the late Ms Dimperio(condolences, rest in peace), forgot that she had done so.
LOL! Thanks for the chuckle, Nick.
And I thought it was a dog toy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/fnmhs6/my_dogs_favorite_toy_looks_like_the_coronavirus/
🙂
Jumping through a third floor is hardly likely to kill the average person outright from my experience. I’d say that it wasn’t upon hearing the unwelcome news that made the disturbed fellow leap. More likely he went through the window head first, assisted by an unrelenting agent of VAnon who’d clearly had a gutfull of the medieval nonsense.