Chinese? Japanese? I have no idea.
I'm curious about page 00012 (http://principiadiscordia.com/book/19.php) of the
Principia.
It has this image on it.
(http://principiadiscordia.com/book/images/JumpingGuy.gif)
I am really curious what that chinese-food-menu looking thing is. So I did a reverse image search at tineye and found that somebody made a t-shirt of that image?? weeeeird, what a random thing to turn into a product.
http://www.cafepress.com/discordianist.15930772#
that page gave me a better resolution version of the image.
(http://i.imgur.com/QXj5y.png)
Can anybody here help with translation?
I fed the image into an OCR scan website and it outputted a bunch of chinese characters. Feeding those characters into Google Translate produced the following garbage results:
Quote;. L. | ..
..;|...'| E.. \
Lu Chui rocky hill turn yu cicada 〃
.|;|.| ith |.
.
The situation.
.|.|. j.; | ..
Rangfanjingcheng
Saoyinianxi
The word "situation" suggests that maybe this is from the i ching? Every chapter of the i ching has a line like "The situation is expected to improve."
I'm grasping at straws. Can anybody assist?
I've passed this on to my chinese, Japanese-language-student buddy.
I'll let you know when he gets back to me.
ETA: Okay, he's had a look. He says it is Japanese, but the quality makes it hard to tell. He can't spend the time to translate it, but he says it looks like apartment listings at first glance. Hope that's helpful?
ETA AGAIN: Okay, he looked at it a bit more... it talks about land and building estates surveying. I think that's the most I'll get out of him. :P
somebody on facebook confirms... it's real estate and credit ads from a newspaper :lulz: :lulz:
edit: I wrote this before your reply
I was gonna say apartment listings too, because of the 520m2 and 149m2.
How do you figure the odds are Hill and Thornley had access to a Chinese translator themselves and that they didn't just cut out a snippet from a random Chinese newspaper?
In that case, maybe they took this particular snippet because of some other reason. Perhaps the numbers?
Also the stars, double circle and diamond aren't Chinese characters, what do they mean? The fact that the star and the double circle are repeated indicates they might not just be there for decoration, but serve a specific purpose?
Finally what does the small text below the 00012 say?
Ok after some peering I think it says:
"OF COURSE I'M CRAZY, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN
I'M WRONG. I'M MAD BUT NOT ILL"
(ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY, ROBERT ANTON WILSON)
I don't really see "TRILOGY" in there, but what else would it be :)
The Attribution is to "Werewolf Bridge" by Robert Anton Wilson
I did some digging, and I found a poem by RAW which goes by that name ... but that line does not occur in it.
Werewolf Bridge
page 29 in this book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/51797476/Robert-Anton-Wilson-Coincidance-A-Head-Test
At midnight,as I rise from my coffin,I ask:
Am I Christ or Mehmet Ali Agca?
Am I Count Dracula or just another Hiroshima Werewolf
Howling for human flesh?
In my mad and werewolf heart
I have howled half a century away
In despair and rage:
The bread and wine of werewolf Mass
Every God-damned, man-damned morning,I ask:
Is this the beginning of another cardboard day
Or is it the first day of the rest of the universe?
Will nothing happen or will everything happen?
In my green and bleeding soul
I have sung half a century away
In laughter and in scorn
The flesh and blood of sorrowful werewolf Time
Every twilight as the shadows fall,I ask:
How many missiles are aimed at Moscow?
At New York and London? At Paris and Rome?
At the naked skin of God?
In my high and mountain skull
I have mocked half a century away
In measure and in fact:
The line and square of werewolf Space
One dizzy moment above the Liffey I forget, I ask:
Is this O'Connell Bridge or Butt Bridge?
Am I on the Ha'penny Bridge perhaps?
Is this another endless werewolf bridge?
Until defiance builds of its own ruin
A truth more brave than the truth of death
My werewolf heart shall rage against
Both werewolf God and werewolf Man
Until terror builds of its own heat
A myth more green than the myth of life-
But my werewolf heart is pierced at last
By the silver bullet of the Lady's gaze
My werewolf self is atom-bombed
By the golden sunrise of the Lady's smile:
I am the Beast the Lady rides,
I am the stars within Her hair
Shiho hamada (discordian from facebook) says that the japanese text says things like "House with land, 10 min from Ouji station, 148 sq, 8800K yen" or "Car title loan, low rates and kindness, Fuji inc,." etc.
The upper line is real estates. and the lower is mostly car title loans
Huh is it Japanese or Chinese, now?
And I thought the text said "ILLUMINATUS!" because the squiggle kinda looked like an exclamation mark. I assume you got "WEREWOLF BRIDGE" from a higher res dead tree version?
What's the deal with that exclamation mark after "Illuminatus!", anyway? And why don't they call it "Illuminati" like most other references? (asking, as long as we're trying to find meaning in small details :) )
I thought it was Chinese at first because it was so heavy on kanji. Not much I can add that a native speaker wouldn't pick up.
VERY interesting. Kerry Thornley was stationed in Osaka for a time (I think that Greg Hill was in the military records dept at the time as well, but I'd have to go back and re-read 'the Prankster and the Conspiracy). I think this ties into / was at the same time as the 'Omar Kahayyam Ravenhurst' nickname becoming an 'open character'.
The quoted poem is cited as 'Werewolf Bridge', which comes from a portion of one of RAW's other books.. let me track down the reference....
Ah, here we are, Coincidance, pg 29
Werewolf Bridge
The earliest version of this poem was writtenin Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1962. This versionwas composed in Dublin, Ireland, in 1987.
"A work of art is never finished, only abandoned,"as Paul Valery said.
Werewolf Bridge
At midnight, as I rise from my coffin, I ask:
Am I Christ or Mehmet Ali Agca?
Am I Count Dracula or just another Hiroshima Werewolf
Howling for human flesh?
In my mad and werewolf heart
I have howled half a century away
In despair and rage:
The bread and wine of werewolf Mass
Every God-damned, man-damned morning, I ask:
Is this the beginning of another cardboard day
Or is it the first day of the rest of the universe?
Will nothing happen or will everything happen?
In my green and bleeding soul
I have sung half a century away
In laughter and in scorn
The flesh and blood of werewolf Time
Every twilight as the shadows fall, I ask:
How many missiles are aimed at Moscow?
At New York and London? At Paris and Rome?
At the naked skin of God?
In my high and mountain skull
I have mocked half a century away
In measure and in fact:
The line and square of werewolf Space
One dizzy moment above the Liffey I forget, I ask:
Is this O'Connell Bridge or Butt Bridge?
Am I on the Ha'penny Bridge perhaps?
Is this another endless werewolf bridge?
Until defiance builds of its own ruin
A truth more brave than the truth of death
My werewolf heart shall rage against
Both werewolf God and werewolf Man
Until terror builds of its own heat
A myth more green than the myth of life—
But my werewolf heart is pierced at last
By the silver bullet of the Lady's gaze
My werewolf self is atom-bombed
By the golden sunrise of the Lady's smile:
I am the Beast the Lady rides,
I am the stars within Her hair.
So Thornley and Hill had read a much earlier version, is what I would deduce from that.
(http://www.oldtelephonebooks.com/images/tokyo.jpg)
According to the website I got this from, this is from a 1961 Tokyo phone book. So those numbers are in the right from to be from Japan
ETA
Also, regarding the circle and star symbols, seeing as the bottom low is mostly cars, perhaps a simple indicator of the brand of car?
The Nissan symbol used to be circular, right? And the current Suzuki symbol is a diamond shaped S
Just ideas, anyway
It's a shaggy dog. An obscured message to look like there are hidden codes in the book which in truth are just apartment listings.
Normally the convention of wasting peoples time through obfuscation or cryptography is to use a recipe, like lentil soup or something, because those are actually useful as opposed to fifty year old apartment listings.
Or
Someone needs to go to those apartment and find the secret chaos relics, they will unlock our next clue.
Quote from: Faust on October 25, 2011, 09:56:58 AM
Someone needs to go to those apartment and find the secret chaos relics, they will unlock our next clue.
This is obviously the most sensible course of action.
In the introduction to Werewolf Bridge, Wilson says that he'd been working on it for a long time. He wrote the original version in the late 60s, but it had been an ongoing work in progress until it was printed in the 80s in Coincidence, a Head Test.
I think this is the only time RAW appears in the Principia.
Our translator made the following note:
Shiho Hamada: I have another mystery. I believe Mr. Momomoto is him. http://2chart.fc2web.com/2chart/pic/kusyaojisan.jpg he's famous japanese and he could swallow his nose. but his name was not Momomoto(Narita) and his first appearance on TV was 1975. fnord
the image:
(http://2chart.fc2web.com/2chart/pic/kusyaojisan.jpg)
"because of the accident he could do "kusha""
but not sure what that means
If he's busy trying to swallow his own nose, why is he holding a microphone?? Is he singing at the same time?
EVERY ANSWER LEADS TO ANOTHER MYSTERY
I AM LOSING MY ASPERATION!!
OK!
Kushami is sneeze, and I was getting NO answers to just Kusha
BUT
Looking for Kusha gets me this image of the same dude
(http://pds.exblog.jp/pds/1/201109/16/75/c0080075_055067.gif)
Called 'Kusha ojisan' which we can translate as 'The Sneeze Man' (Literally 'Sneeze Grandfather)
So because of the accident he can sneeze! is the text on image 1.