Stephen Chrisomalis, “anthropologist, linguist, historian, and all-around numbers guy” (oh, and author of the soon-to-be-released “Numerical Notation: A Comparative History“), recently blogged about being interviewed as a talking head for a Canadian TV documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, a show that will apparently be hosted by none other than (as he delicately puts it) “WILLIAM FREAKIN’ SHATNER“.
Chrisomalis seems pretty well clued up on the structural properties of Voynichese (which is nice to see), but somehow omitted any mention of whether the documentary makers asked him about the VMs’ curious quire numbers (“abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals”, technically speaking), which appear to be a unique historical feature of the codex. I mean, he is Mr ‘History Of Numbers’, right? D’oh!
No more significant details about the documentary itself as yet… but given that documentary makers are excited enough to be wheeling in Captain Bloomin’ Kirk, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript has suddenly become the lowest-hanging fruit upon the giant TV tree of enigmas. Expect a blizzard of TV Voynich documentaries to air around December 2010 – OK, perhaps not quite enough to make up an entire “Voynich Channel“, but a relatively cornucopic amount nonetheless. 🙂
Hmmm… the image of countless documentary teams being scrambled worldwide to film the VMs brings to my mind Nina Hagen’s #1 “99 Luftballons“, whose lyrics hinge on the idea that a set of toy balloons could trigger a nuclear armageddon. When does reaction become overreaction?
99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
🙂