The other night I had a weird dream.
(e:dragonlady7) 's Norwegian cousin Aleksander was visiting us, and someone suggested that we should take him to a community ed. class about Norwegian Culture & Language. We showed up and there were maybe 100 people in the classroom, mostly just shooting the bull and eating the fruit & cheese trays. The teacher didn't really know anything about Norway and didn't bother to teach the class. I guess it was mostly just a social night called Community Ed. So Aleksander goes up to the front of the class and starts talking about what Norway is like, and some people are listening and some people are not, and nobody's being rude or anything, but really he could really have been talking about anything at all.
He kinda thinks this is totally lame, and there's all these people eating cheese and crackers, and so he says, you know, Norway's very similar to the United States in a lot of ways, except that when we eat cheese and crackers, we don't eat cheddar, we eat havarti.
And you know how in elementary foreign-language classes, when they teach you new vocabulary, the teacher says the word and the students repeat it?
Everybody stopped what they were doing, said "HAVARTI!" in unison, and went back to chatting.
I split a gut and had to leave the room I was laughing so hard. Aleksander had half an idea of what was going on so he went on to explain that in Norway the cheese and fruit trays would be called a smörgåsbord [laying on the accent real thick-like]. And the entire class stopped, replied "SMORGASBORD!" and went back to doing whatever it was they were doing.
Laughing, Aleksander came out to join me in the hallway and asked me what the Hell was going on. I was laughing so hard I woke up.
Turns out neither havarti nor smorgasbords are particularly Norwegian.
- Z
I can't really explain why.
woohoo! beinecke library is awesome! :)
The difficult part of being head-hunted, I find, is when you get offers of three times what you're making to go to an area of the country where houses cost three times as much as they do in Buffalo. I realize I'd gain little or nothing by the enormous salary increase, and this fucks with my mind.
That was super interesting to read.
The theory about Enochian doesn't seem credible at all, considering you can google Enochian and come up with a variety of 'angelic' scripts, which, while fitting in with the whole John Dee still doesn't match the text at all.
The wiki mentioned the Codex Seraphinianus. There is a fantastic site you can read about it here :::link::: it has illustrations from the text. It is really difficult to come across a published copy but UB has one and I am determined to make my way over there and read it.
You should to, it is a treasure.
i love the voynich manuscript. after i first read about it i spent a good month trying to make my own crazy book of weird writing and drawings.
yeah that didn't work much.
Fascinating! It seems like the document is discussing otters, crows and the crops these plants destroy. :)
I think the hoax theory is the most feasible. From the sketches and diagrams, it is apparent that the author is an artist. So it is entirely possible that the "text" is merely a pseudo-alphabetical design to accompany the sketches.