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. 🙂