When I heard they were making a "House with a Clock in the Walls" movie I immediately thought of you guys. Was never aware of the books until I heard about it on one of your shows. The movie sounds great.
It was so much better than I expected. When I saw the trailers I wasn't sure if it was gonna be good, but it really captured the spirit of the book for me. It even made me pull down my John Bellairs trilogy and start reading it again for the millionth time!
Your description of the Voynich Monuscript reminds me a lot of a traditional applied botanics book where you have the plants, what they do, when to pick them (they are quite superstitious, like you must pick this plant with the full moon or when you seen certain constellation), and you have all these sort of astrological charts and then some nice recipies for different concoctions.
This reminds me of the Toynbee Tiles. The Toynbee Tiles are these mysterious messages that were left on the ground, usually on sidewalks or roads in various American and South American cities starting in the '80s. New messages kept appearing through to 2016. Don't know if there's been more since. Saw a really interesting documentary on them a few years back where they tried to solve the mystery of who was leaving the messages. Just looked it up and the doc is called Resurrect Dead: The Mystery Of The Toynbee Tiles. Worth a watch imo.
Truth. I invented a language when I was a kid. It had all of its own rules and even its own characters. I wrote an entire journal in my made up language. Granted, I was in junior high at the time and most of my made up language journal was me bitching about my brother, which was a pet topic of mine about that time in my life because we did not get along at all then and were constantly doing things to antagonize each other. Seriously, we joke all of the time that we can’t believe we actually made it to adulthood because of all the mean things we used to do to each other. Ironically enough, out of all of my siblings, that same brother is the one to whom I am closest today. But still…My point is chicks do crazy things whenever they don’t want just anyone to know what they’re saying. In particular, they naturally talk in code to each other. I mean remember slam books? To date, my boss and I talk in code about clients and my best friend and I have an entire code worked out to communicate with each other for when we go out and want to get away from pushy men in whom we’re not particularly interested. It’s not even just a code language. It’s code behavior as well. I wonder if anyone has ever seriously entertained the thought that the Voynich manuscript was actually written by a woman who wrote it in code because she was afraid of some sort of persecution if her identity was discovered. In particular, the topics that it covers sort of smells of a female to me; astrology, herbal medicine, recipes. These are the things that early midwives and “wise women” would have practiced and passed along. But, oops, along came the religious inquisitions and suddenly such women were “witches” who were cavorting with the devil. So they could no longer pass along their knowledge safely without some sort of coding. A woman wouldn’t have practiced medicine in Greek. She probably wouldn’t even have known the Greek language unless she was wealthy and well educated and, even then, probably still not unless she was from that region of the world. But a local practitioner would practice in a regional dialect that everyday women could understand, because that would be her audience. That would also explain why the book feels more phonetic in nature. If you have a woman who is, for the most part, self-educated, she may not have had a good grasp on writing in any language. But that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be clever enough to try and even succeed if she really wanted to communicate something, primarily to other women. So part of the manuscript might feel made up because it quite literally is by someone who was more concerned about the message they were communicating than actual words and grammar. I don’t know. Just a theory. This would also make sense why Tom commented that he feels like it’s a copy. If a small group of women were writing these books and passing them amongst each other, it very well may be a copy. Honestly, I don’t know much about the Voynich manuscript. I’ve watched a couple of documentaries and listened to a couple of podcasts about it. That’s about all. So I’m taking a total shot in the dark. But if I recall, correctly, one of the things that has been noted about it and that has been part of the reason they have had trouble decoding it is because there is a lack of consistent punctuation. I mention this because when I made up my language, I specifically left out punctuation and spaces because I didn’t want anyone to be able to decode my language based on that and instead used a counting system (Every sentence was a very specific amount of syllables long. I’m not going to get into it.) marked by characters that I created and included in my “alphabet” to signify where spaces and punctuation should have been. But the characters weren’t just placeholders. They were actually pronounced and became part of the word that preceded them. I got the idea from German class, which I’d just started taking, and the tendency of that language to just shove a bunch of words together into one long word. But I was kind of reminded of it again several years ago when I was living in South Korea and started taking Korean lessons. The Korean language does something very similar in regard to punctuation with respect that there is a very formal way to end a sentence and signify pauses that is actually part of the spoken language. That also might explain why the manuscript feels a bit Asian. But, seriously, if I could figure this kind of stuff out when I was like twelve, I’m sure a grown woman who was halfway intelligent could, even if she wasn’t formally educated. That could also be part of the reason they have not, thus far, been able to decode the manuscript. If they’re thinking like men regarding something written by a woman who was determined not to have men figure out what she was writing for fear of what might happen to her if they did, they’re never going to figure it out. They’re going to have to figure out how to think like her. I suggest they employ some women to evaluate the manuscript.
I actually really like this idea, and I think I mentioned it on the show, that it was possibly a sort of "guide" for midwives. And you're absolutely right that it wouldn't be particularly difficult to invent a code of that type, and if the author was in a small circle of other women with whom she shared this code, it would be a great way for them to disseminate information without anyone persecuting them.
Just because the vellum is a certain age doesn't mean the writing on it is the same age. Also, a family have discovered it can be ready and what language it's written in. A form or Turkish i believe.
A note about inaccurate drawings in medieval books, lots of them were drawn by people who had never actually seen the thing they were meant to be illustrating, so the drawings in reality never looked anything like the real thing, Arabic soldiers in lots of Christian drawings from the times of the Crusades are actually wielding European weapons because that's what the artists knew how to draw.
You usually can even trace who coped from whom, because usually they copied it with mistakes. So in fact sometimes you cannot identify a stellar constellation in a medieval star atlas, only by the accompanying picture.
talking about watching scary movies when we were kids, 1.- my mom took me to see jaws 2 when I was about 10 , still hate going to the beach (41 years old now) 2.- when I was in 3rd grade in my school they showed Texas chainsaw massacre 2, and nightmare on elm street, imagine watching that while eating popcorn soaked in salsa!!! fun times those were my friends.
Wow, that was some school, hahaha. I think the worst thing we watched at school was Excalibur...I still remember the crow picking out that dude's eyeball, LOL. And I still recall my parents taking me to the drive-in when I was about nine or ten for an all-night five-movie marathon. The movies were a weird mix of comedies and horror flicks. The first one was some dumb teen comedy, but then the second one was Scanners. As soon as that guy's head exploded, my parents peeled out of the theater.
@@13OClockPodcast maybe "cliched" but parents were a bit loose when it came to toughing up us as kids, today there are so many restrictions, the world has always been full of creeps, dangers, toxic stuff, but hey natural selection will always do its job I guess.
We actually did talk about doing that, haha. Usually Tom has a tequila sunrise or a mojito. On this show I had grapefruit Absolut vodka mixed with cherry and passion fruit juice blend. :-)
I very much enjoy your shows which are always excellent. I agree with what the Ardic family of Calgary has found in applying Old Turkic to the Voynich manuscript. They have said they can translate a certain amount of it but not all of it. Before their work was published I had worked on the manuscript for a period of time, basing my system partly on Croatian Glagolitic cursive. Some of the characters are specific to that system. The language I found was Slavic, Serbo-Croatian in nature. I cannot translate the whole thing, either. I had considered Turkish for a second language but did not have any knowledge of the Old Turkic system which is phonemic rather than alphabetic. My work is available at www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=25732&highlight=voynich .* I believe my translations are also correct. Some of them, especially labels on drawings, really surprised me because I could never guess those words yet the drawings exactly illustrated what I found. There is a lower half of a plant, perhaps a root structure, that looks like a waterfowl's back from the neck down to the tail. We know medieval medicine ascribed certain properties to various herbs but what could this one mean? The translation I got was, "the bottom of the bird," or possibly, under the bird. Then the drawing made sense but I do not know the larger meaning. I believe the VM is a fertility text and that one section has morality tales of good and bad. I believe the language is a mixture of Turkic and Slavic, perhaps written for mutual intelligibility in an area where the two cultures mixed. I believe the writing was devised also to cross language barriers. I believe the true value of the manuscript will be in understanding the language and the people who were able to read and write in this system. (Back in the 1400s, alphabets were frequently regional and there was wide variance. Languages too varied by region. Having standard systems and alphabets is a tremendous luxury! Since I believe in the Old Turkic work of the Ardics, it is easy to see why modern computer programmes could not "crack the code". That is a phonemic system which was transitioning into a more alphabetic one.) I do not believe it is in code. I do not believe it is the work of one person. I believe various scribes wrote the pages as the writing varies quite a bit. Some of the scribes seemed to sometimes say, 'heck with this mess,' and they inserted old Cyrillic characters with which they may have been more familiar. I gained a lot through the scribes' mistakes. *Most of the posts on this thread are mine, about my work as it developed. I published or posted several versions of what I was doing in several places, to at least somewhat protect my original work, to show what I had done and when. On the thread above, there are many clips of my translations. I believe most are correct or reasonably correct.
Thanks, we try, haha. A lot of things are listener submissions, but Voynich has been something both Tom and I have been interested in for a while. The other two cases I think I stumbled across on one of the "creepy mysteries" list videos on RUclips.
One thing that came to mind about the McCormick code was maybe it was a language that Ricky made up? Perhaps that's why the codebreakers can't crack it because it doesn't use any known code formulas and is a made up language?
In the art world, artists who want to create a “lost treasure” will buy a painting on some type of canvas that will date to the time period they meed and also create the paint using the time periods “recipes”. Then they paint a work that looks like a known master and appears like one of that artists lost works. The canvas and the paints will check out as legit from time period
I've always been really interested in art forgers and the methods they use. A few years back I read a couple biographies of Hans van Meegeren, the guy who painted a bunch of fake Vermeers and pawned some of them off on the Nazis. He was a fascinating guy, and a lot of the techniques he used were really interesting. Someone needs to make a movie about him.
13 O'Clock Podcast I’m totally obsessed with art forgeries. Well really any forgeries. I just watched a great doc on a guy who was forging wine. Like he was making it in his house but did such a good job that he was able to pass it off as these collector wines. I won’t give away the whole thing if you want to watch it. Totally worth the time. Very fascinating. I’ll have to look up the guy you mention. I’ve watched a few docs on like the Spanish Master and then a more modern guy like from 1970’s who was painting fakes. So fascinating.
A Czech scholar claime she is translating the manuscript, but has neithër finished nor published it yet as far as I know. She claime the code changes through the manuscript, as it is a very personal journal of an Italian clergyman. The drawings are supposed to be just drawings without any meaning, something you do e.g. through phone calls. I am really curious and waiting for her paper.
Re: Ricky McCormick, if the code was meant to be for someone else, why would they have given it back to him? If it was concocted by a drug dealer/supplier, why has no other examples surfaced before or since in the area? I think it is either a nervous tick of Ricky's or a fabrication of the FBI for who knows what purpose.
The guys on true crime garage had a theory about Ricky McCormick. I can't really explain it the way he did but one of the guys was talking about code in shorthand that he would use as a server. Little things that only made sense to him about food orders. He was saying maybe Ricky had shorthand code for drug transactions.
Happy birthday!! :) Great show as always, you guys. The combination of these eclectic cases is pretty unique too. Really appreciate your diverse interests and the way you bring together fascinating stories/ideas in unexpected ways -- it's genuinely a pleasure to listen to every time. I'll be joining your Patreon and buying some books soon, when I've got some extra $$$! Can't wait to see what's next. /＼ ^._.^ ／\
Awww, thank you!!! We have really diverse interests between us, so it always makes interesting discussions, especially since I never script the show, haha.
..its simple. Watch my show on Number Stations. They teach the technique in some versions of Army Basic training. If you know how, a moron can make a unbreakable code. The secert is always basing a code around a "key".
If he did have schizophrenia or Bipolar, one of the symptoms is something known as formal thought disorder. That includes thought blocking/extraction, circumstantial or tangential thinking, all of the above comes out in speech. As we know, writing is crystallised thought; psychiatric research has found that disordered thoughts can be expressed as essentially "disordered writing", so maybe that explains why they can't crack it.
He didn't even take a sip from the first beer he bought fell then left to another bar to buy more beer he won't drink?? Fuck off I think it's something other then alcohol or brain injury
If the book was 250-270 pages made of calf skin vellum there are only a handful of establishments that could afford such a luxury. The church, the government, and perhaps some schools. People were becoming more literate by 1400’s, but a book of this size and written not on paper but on vellum would be a luxury item. So, to then write it in some language that wasn’t a common language of the day is ridiculous. I think it’s a fake. Blank books were created for monks to use to transcribe parts of the Bible. I think it was purchased as a blank and the made up language, the text and pictures were Voynich’s creation. So I looked up the cost of 1 sheet of vellum in 1400’s. It cost about 50 shillings. The average blue collar worker made less that 50 shillings a year.
I wanna say 2 teenage girl made their own language to speak to each other and drew the pictures for their imaginary land and language lol people do that exact thing to this day
Yeah, when you put it that way, it's not quite so mysterious. A lot of sets of twins, for example, develop their own language that no one else understands. Or like Amanda said above, maybe this was a book written by women/midwives to impart information to other women without getting accused of witchcraft.
Happy birthday,thanks for all the videos. You both really put everything into them.
Awww, thanks so much. We really do try to make them as fun as possible. :-)
YOG....maybe for yogurt TZE for the additive. But that theory works about the head injury.
When I heard they were making a "House with a Clock in the Walls" movie I immediately thought of you guys. Was never aware of the books until I heard about it on one of your shows. The movie sounds great.
It was so much better than I expected. When I saw the trailers I wasn't sure if it was gonna be good, but it really captured the spirit of the book for me. It even made me pull down my John Bellairs trilogy and start reading it again for the millionth time!
Your description of the Voynich Monuscript reminds me a lot of a traditional applied botanics book where you have the plants, what they do, when to pick them (they are quite superstitious, like you must pick this plant with the full moon or when you seen certain constellation), and you have all these sort of astrological charts and then some nice recipies for different concoctions.
your productions are so way cool !!
I do love codes and cypher! Reminds me... I almost forgot to donate this month!
I love this stuff too, I've always wanted to write my own book in code! :-)
@@13OClockPodcast maybe include some NorstraThomas quatrains :)
This reminds me of the Toynbee Tiles. The Toynbee Tiles are these mysterious messages that were left on the ground, usually on sidewalks or roads in various American and South American cities starting in the '80s. New messages kept appearing through to 2016. Don't know if there's been more since. Saw a really interesting documentary on them a few years back where they tried to solve the mystery of who was leaving the messages. Just looked it up and the doc is called Resurrect Dead: The Mystery Of The Toynbee Tiles. Worth a watch imo.
Oh yeah, I've heard of those! So weird. Those would also make a good episode, I'll have to add them to the list. :-)
Truth. I invented a language when I was a kid. It had all of its own rules and even its own characters. I wrote an entire journal in my made up language. Granted, I was in junior high at the time and most of my made up language journal was me bitching about my brother, which was a pet topic of mine about that time in my life because we did not get along at all then and were constantly doing things to antagonize each other. Seriously, we joke all of the time that we can’t believe we actually made it to adulthood because of all the mean things we used to do to each other. Ironically enough, out of all of my siblings, that same brother is the one to whom I am closest today. But still…My point is chicks do crazy things whenever they don’t want just anyone to know what they’re saying. In particular, they naturally talk in code to each other.
I mean remember slam books? To date, my boss and I talk in code about clients and my best friend and I have an entire code worked out to communicate with each other for when we go out and want to get away from pushy men in whom we’re not particularly interested. It’s not even just a code language. It’s code behavior as well. I wonder if anyone has ever seriously entertained the thought that the Voynich manuscript was actually written by a woman who wrote it in code because she was afraid of some sort of persecution if her identity was discovered.
In particular, the topics that it covers sort of smells of a female to me; astrology, herbal medicine, recipes. These are the things that early midwives and “wise women” would have practiced and passed along. But, oops, along came the religious inquisitions and suddenly such women were “witches” who were cavorting with the devil. So they could no longer pass along their knowledge safely without some sort of coding.
A woman wouldn’t have practiced medicine in Greek. She probably wouldn’t even have known the Greek language unless she was wealthy and well educated and, even then, probably still not unless she was from that region of the world. But a local practitioner would practice in a regional dialect that everyday women could understand, because that would be her audience. That would also explain why the book feels more phonetic in nature. If you have a woman who is, for the most part, self-educated, she may not have had a good grasp on writing in any language. But that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be clever enough to try and even succeed if she really wanted to communicate something, primarily to other women. So part of the manuscript might feel made up because it quite literally is by someone who was more concerned about the message they were communicating than actual words and grammar. I don’t know. Just a theory. This would also make sense why Tom commented that he feels like it’s a copy. If a small group of women were writing these books and passing them amongst each other, it very well may be a copy.
Honestly, I don’t know much about the Voynich manuscript. I’ve watched a couple of documentaries and listened to a couple of podcasts about it. That’s about all. So I’m taking a total shot in the dark. But if I recall, correctly, one of the things that has been noted about it and that has been part of the reason they have had trouble decoding it is because there is a lack of consistent punctuation. I mention this because when I made up my language, I specifically left out punctuation and spaces because I didn’t want anyone to be able to decode my language based on that and instead used a counting system (Every sentence was a very specific amount of syllables long. I’m not going to get into it.) marked by characters that I created and included in my “alphabet” to signify where spaces and punctuation should have been. But the characters weren’t just placeholders. They were actually pronounced and became part of the word that preceded them. I got the idea from German class, which I’d just started taking, and the tendency of that language to just shove a bunch of words together into one long word. But I was kind of reminded of it again several years ago when I was living in South Korea and started taking Korean lessons. The Korean language does something very similar in regard to punctuation with respect that there is a very formal way to end a sentence and signify pauses that is actually part of the spoken language. That also might explain why the manuscript feels a bit Asian. But, seriously, if I could figure this kind of stuff out when I was like twelve, I’m sure a grown woman who was halfway intelligent could, even if she wasn’t formally educated. That could also be part of the reason they have not, thus far, been able to decode the manuscript. If they’re thinking like men regarding something written by a woman who was determined not to have men figure out what she was writing for fear of what might happen to her if they did, they’re never going to figure it out. They’re going to have to figure out how to think like her. I suggest they employ some women to evaluate the manuscript.
I actually really like this idea, and I think I mentioned it on the show, that it was possibly a sort of "guide" for midwives. And you're absolutely right that it wouldn't be particularly difficult to invent a code of that type, and if the author was in a small circle of other women with whom she shared this code, it would be a great way for them to disseminate information without anyone persecuting them.
Just because the vellum is a certain age doesn't mean the writing on it is the same age. Also, a family have discovered it can be ready and what language it's written in. A form or Turkish i believe.
A note about inaccurate drawings in medieval books, lots of them were drawn by people who had never actually seen the thing they were meant to be illustrating, so the drawings in reality never looked anything like the real thing, Arabic soldiers in lots of Christian drawings from the times of the Crusades are actually wielding European weapons because that's what the artists knew how to draw.
Yeah, this was something that had occurred to me as well. Like it was someone drawing plants he'd only heard about but had never seen in person.
You usually can even trace who coped from whom, because usually they copied it with mistakes. So in fact sometimes you cannot identify a stellar constellation in a medieval star atlas, only by the accompanying picture.
talking about watching scary movies when we were kids, 1.- my mom took me to see jaws 2 when I was about 10 , still hate going to the beach (41 years old now) 2.- when I was in 3rd grade in my school they showed Texas chainsaw massacre 2, and nightmare on elm street, imagine watching that while eating popcorn soaked in salsa!!! fun times those were my friends.
Wow, that was some school, hahaha. I think the worst thing we watched at school was Excalibur...I still remember the crow picking out that dude's eyeball, LOL. And I still recall my parents taking me to the drive-in when I was about nine or ten for an all-night five-movie marathon. The movies were a weird mix of comedies and horror flicks. The first one was some dumb teen comedy, but then the second one was Scanners. As soon as that guy's head exploded, my parents peeled out of the theater.
@@13OClockPodcast maybe "cliched" but parents were a bit loose when it came to toughing up us as kids, today there are so many restrictions, the world has always been full of creeps, dangers, toxic stuff, but hey natural selection will always do its job I guess.
I love Tuesday ! !!’
I'd like to hear your drink recipes before each show. It seems like they're different every week.
We actually did talk about doing that, haha. Usually Tom has a tequila sunrise or a mojito. On this show I had grapefruit Absolut vodka mixed with cherry and passion fruit juice blend. :-)
I very much enjoy your shows which are always excellent.
I agree with what the Ardic family of Calgary has found in applying Old Turkic to the Voynich manuscript. They have said they can translate a certain amount of it but not all of it.
Before their work was published I had worked on the manuscript for a period of time, basing my system partly on Croatian Glagolitic cursive. Some of the characters are specific to that system. The language I found was Slavic, Serbo-Croatian in nature. I cannot translate the whole thing, either. I had considered Turkish for a second language but did not have any knowledge of the Old Turkic system which is phonemic rather than alphabetic.
My work is available at www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=25732&highlight=voynich .* I believe my translations are also correct. Some of them, especially labels on drawings, really surprised me because I could never guess those words yet the drawings exactly illustrated what I found. There is a lower half of a plant, perhaps a root structure, that looks like a waterfowl's back from the neck down to the tail. We know medieval medicine ascribed certain properties to various herbs but what could this one mean? The translation I got was, "the bottom of the bird," or possibly, under the bird. Then the drawing made sense but I do not know the larger meaning.
I believe the VM is a fertility text and that one section has morality tales of good and bad. I believe the language is a mixture of Turkic and Slavic, perhaps written for mutual intelligibility in an area where the two cultures mixed. I believe the writing was devised also to cross language barriers. I believe the true value of the manuscript will be in understanding the language and the people who were able to read and write in this system. (Back in the 1400s, alphabets were frequently regional and there was wide variance. Languages too varied by region. Having standard systems and alphabets is a tremendous luxury! Since I believe in the Old Turkic work of the Ardics, it is easy to see why modern computer programmes could not "crack the code". That is a phonemic system which was transitioning into a more alphabetic one.)
I do not believe it is in code. I do not believe it is the work of one person. I believe various scribes wrote the pages as the writing varies quite a bit. Some of the scribes seemed to sometimes say, 'heck with this mess,' and they inserted old Cyrillic characters with which they may have been more familiar. I gained a lot through the scribes' mistakes.
*Most of the posts on this thread are mine, about my work as it developed. I published or posted several versions of what I was doing in several places, to at least somewhat protect my original work, to show what I had done and when. On the thread above, there are many clips of my translations. I believe most are correct or reasonably correct.
Oooouuuuuuggghhhh!!!!!!! Just seeing this notification on my phone and immediately turning my pc on right away
Happy birthday
Thank you! :-D
The Voynich Manuscript .... It's a cook book!😱
makeagif.com/i/74_63R
Kids you have introduced me to some crazy shit. I don't know where you find this stuff.
Thanks, we try, haha. A lot of things are listener submissions, but Voynich has been something both Tom and I have been interested in for a while. The other two cases I think I stumbled across on one of the "creepy mysteries" list videos on RUclips.
One thing that came to mind about the McCormick code was maybe it was a language that Ricky made up? Perhaps that's why the codebreakers can't crack it because it doesn't use any known code formulas and is a made up language?
That's kinda what I'm leaning toward as well. Like it was some kind of shorthand only he understood.
They could erase mistakes they just scraped off the mistake. It wasn't easy but possible.
Falling at the bar could cause a brain injury but earlier then that I don't think so
It's a great movie!, i really loved it, very well done.
I still Remember that Number Station Ep. You did know something about this subject.
In the art world, artists who want to create a “lost treasure” will buy a painting on some type of canvas that will date to the time period they meed and also create the paint using the time periods “recipes”. Then they paint a work that looks like a known master and appears like one of that artists lost works. The canvas and the paints will check out as legit from time period
I've always been really interested in art forgers and the methods they use. A few years back I read a couple biographies of Hans van Meegeren, the guy who painted a bunch of fake Vermeers and pawned some of them off on the Nazis. He was a fascinating guy, and a lot of the techniques he used were really interesting. Someone needs to make a movie about him.
13 O'Clock Podcast I’m totally obsessed with art forgeries. Well really any forgeries. I just watched a great doc on a guy who was forging wine. Like he was making it in his house but did such a good job that he was able to pass it off as these collector wines. I won’t give away the whole thing if you want to watch it. Totally worth the time. Very fascinating. I’ll have to look up the guy you mention. I’ve watched a few docs on like the Spanish Master and then a more modern guy like from 1970’s who was painting fakes. So fascinating.
A Czech scholar claime she is translating the manuscript, but has neithër finished nor published it yet as far as I know. She claime the code changes through the manuscript, as it is a very personal journal of an Italian clergyman. The drawings are supposed to be just drawings without any meaning, something you do e.g. through phone calls. I am really curious and waiting for her paper.
Re: Ricky McCormick, if the code was meant to be for someone else, why would they have given it back to him? If it was concocted by a drug dealer/supplier, why has no other examples surfaced before or since in the area? I think it is either a nervous tick of Ricky's or a fabrication of the FBI for who knows what purpose.
The guys on true crime garage had a theory about Ricky McCormick. I can't really explain it the way he did but one of the guys was talking about code in shorthand that he would use as a server. Little things that only made sense to him about food orders. He was saying maybe Ricky had shorthand code for drug transactions.
That also sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe he was "illiterate," but had a type of shorthand that only he understood.
Happy birthday!! :) Great show as always, you guys. The combination of these eclectic cases is pretty unique too. Really appreciate your diverse interests and the way you bring together fascinating stories/ideas in unexpected ways -- it's genuinely a pleasure to listen to every time. I'll be joining your Patreon and buying some books soon, when I've got some extra $$$! Can't wait to see what's next. /＼ ^._.^ ／\
Awww, thank you!!! We have really diverse interests between us, so it always makes interesting discussions, especially since I never script the show, haha.
yahtzee!
I don't think hillbilly weed dealers could come up with an unbreakable cypher. I think Ricky wrote it himself
..its simple. Watch my show on Number Stations. They teach the technique in some versions of Army Basic training. If you know how, a moron can make a unbreakable code. The secert is always basing a code around a "key".
If he did have schizophrenia or Bipolar, one of the symptoms is something known as formal thought disorder. That includes thought blocking/extraction, circumstantial or tangential thinking, all of the above comes out in speech. As we know, writing is crystallised thought; psychiatric research has found that disordered thoughts can be expressed as essentially "disordered writing", so maybe that explains why they can't crack it.
You guys have been smashing it from the "shit i've love to see 13 o clock do" list. Voynich really interests me :)
Same here, it's been on the list forever! I love stuff about mysterious books and codes.
Why do 10 when you can give your friend 5 the snitches creedo.
He didn't even take a sip from the first beer he bought fell then left to another bar to buy more beer he won't drink?? Fuck off I think it's something other then alcohol or brain injury
..youd, be wrong though. You can take a head injury be ok for a day or more then have it come back and kill you when the blood clot breks loose.
If the book was 250-270 pages made of calf skin vellum there are only a handful of establishments that could afford such a luxury. The church, the government, and perhaps some schools. People were becoming more literate by 1400’s, but a book of this size and written not on paper but on vellum would be a luxury item. So, to then write it in some language that wasn’t a common language of the day is ridiculous. I think it’s a fake. Blank books were created for monks to use to transcribe parts of the Bible. I think it was purchased as a blank and the made up language, the text and pictures were Voynich’s creation. So I looked up the cost of 1 sheet of vellum in 1400’s. It cost about 50 shillings. The average blue collar worker made less that 50 shillings a year.
Smach that like button
I wanna say 2 teenage girl made their own language to speak to each other and drew the pictures for their imaginary land and language lol people do that exact thing to this day
Yeah, when you put it that way, it's not quite so mysterious. A lot of sets of twins, for example, develop their own language that no one else understands. Or like Amanda said above, maybe this was a book written by women/midwives to impart information to other women without getting accused of witchcraft.
bob berdella would be a good subject
Easy decode