First off, the case of the mysterious "Toynbee Tiles". These tiles of unknown origin have materialized in several major US cities and South American capitals, embedded in asphalt. Most of them contain a similar crypic message, along the lines of:
TOYNBEE IDEA
IN KUBRICK'S 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER.
Uh, yeah. No one knows who's responsible for these tiles or what, if anything, the message means. Perhaps the most mysterious tile is one in Santiago de Chile that references a street address in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The couple who live at the address in question don't know anything about the tiles, and apparently get quite annoyed when people ask. Legitimate response, or crazy conspiracy coverup?
Figure 1: Toynbee Tile embedded in crosswalk
Mysterious internet thing number two is the "Markovian Parallax Denigrate", a cryptic series of messages that got posted to Usenet in 1996. Like the Toynbee Tiles, no one has been able to figure out what the post means, if it means anything at all. There are a few strange indications that it might be something more than random words, though... The person listed in the "From" field, Susan Lindauer, was arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage in 2004. Could the words in the Markovian Parallax Denigrate posts be some kind of secret spy code? Mysterious!
1 comment:
You may not know this, but Polly Toynbee is an infamous and much-derided (somewhat unfairly) left-wing British journalist who writes for the Guardian newspaper.
Is there a reference to Toynbee in 2001?
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