M.J. Rose

Thank you to author Robert Woolcott for his delightful guest post on mermaids:

“Do mermaids exist, or don’t they?  We can ask this question over and over, but the real question is not whether they exist but rather How can they not exist?  It’s the question I chose to explore in my novel The Mermaid Coast (Shanty Publishing, 2013) after realizing that nearly every culture from every corner of the world has some form of belief or worship of these amazing humanoid creatures.

From the earliest illuminated manuscripts—in which Noah’s ark is not just packed with pairs of land animals, but surrounded by marine animals, including mermaids—to primitive African figurines, to the Sistine Chapel in Rome, mermaids have been in our consciousness for centuries.

And it’s not just in our imaginations that they’ve taken hold.  Literally hundreds of accounts of actual sightings exist, most notably in the form of Gaelic tales from the British and Irish islands, and they have even been documented by educated explorers like Henry Hudson and Christopher Columbus.

Do mermaids (also known as selkies, merfolk, and sirens) fill a missing link in our own evolutionary history?  Possibly.  The connections between man and whales, man and ape, and whales and other aquatic life are well-documented.  As are the very likely possibilities of species thought to be extinct which—with newer and more accurate deep sea exploration—are now being re-discovered.  With the recent sightings of prehistoric sharks and giant squids, it becomes more and more likely we will soon be face to face with these amazing and beautiful creatures.”

–Robert Woolcott, author of the novel The Mermaid Coast

Find The Mermaid Coast on Facebook here, and on Amazon here.

The Voynich manuscript. Is it an ancient and brilliant hoax of crypto genius? Is it the lost journal of a shipwrecked space alien? The ravings of a linguistically gifted lunatic? No one has ever been able to decipher it one way or the other. Until now. A new statistical analysis of the medieval book that has “frustrated the world’s best code breakers for a century” is likely to contain “a genuine message”.

Study: mysterious Voynich Manuscript carries ‘genuine message’

by IAN STEADMAN

“A statistical analysis of a medieval book that has frustrated the world’s best code breakers for a century is likely to contain “a genuine message”.

The Voynich Manuscript is perhaps the greatest, most mysterious undeciphered medieval text. Dated from the 15th or 16th centuries in Italy, its 246 pages contain illustrations of seemingly imaginary plants and text that is, as far as anyone can tell, written in an entirely unknown made-up language.

Without any kind of Rosetta stone, cracking the Voynich manuscript has proven impossible — but many of the world’s best cryptography experts have remained convinced that there is a legitimate message in there. Its “alphabet” contains between 19 and 29 symbols, and its words and sentences conform to the lengths expected from other European languages…”

Click here for the complete article.

Ah, this is a very interesting mystery indeed! Was Queen Elizabeth I really an imposter? And was that imposter a man?

It may be time to check the grave…

Is this proof the Virgin Queen was an imposter in drag? Shocking new theory about Elizabeth I unearthed in historic manuscripts

By CHRISTOPHER STEVENS (Daily Mail)

“The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history?

If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie.

And according to a controversial new book, the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire…”

Click here to read more.