A Perfect Mystery.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen.

My children are debaters. They debate, I provide the bullets they fire. So last night after Liddy kicked me off the computer she had me calling out biblical quotes for her so she could clobber some misinformed person who told her she was an atheist who didn't believe in Creationism. Oh, & obscure scientific facts like the sun pulsates to a beat, that if the world were off it's orbit by the size of a pinpoint life couldn't exist on this planet & ditto freezing water expanding rather than contracting. BTW, there are more atoms in a bucket of water than there are buckets of water in the Atlantic ocean. Just so you know. I have no idea how scientists come up with these *facts*. Probably some mathematical equation I have no chance of comprehending. And I don't specifically teach Creationism, only wonder. Seriously, I'm the lady who tells every one I know some Japanese biologist put the DNA of bog moss & mice to music & came up with something that sounds like Bach. Weird or what?

So I spent last night paddling round cyberspace reading some really random stuff & I got what I so richly deserved ~ the Voynich Manuscript!

It is beautiful ~ & completely unreadable!!! How frustrating is that for a chronic bookworm?!Cryptologists have been trying to decode this for at least 4 centuries & aren't even close to being able to read this. They're not even sure it's not someone's idea of a massive hoax. The beautiful illustrations of plants look like they belong in a herbal ~ except they aren't real. The drawings seem to be composites of several different types of plants. As the book belonged to several different alchemists one can only wonder if they had some weird experiment going on.

Then there are the weird *plumbing* drawings full of naked ladies doing weird things in water. OK, bypass the ladies & try the astronomy. I took one look & figured I was looking at a spiral galaxy before remembering you can only see galaxies from out in space, which a Medieval alchemist certainly wasn't doing. Other drawings look like they are from a microscope. Mind you the mind that came up with making gold from a base metal had an eye for the main chance so anything produced from the medieval era I would view with a good dose of scepticism.

More things, Horatio, & all that. Something to mull over in those quiet moments when you have nothing better to do ~ or if you're of a mathematical persuasion [which I'm not] have a go at decoding the thing yourself.