Something Nice About Yale

I'm the only one who has deciphered this manuscript.

I’m the only one who has deciphered this code.

It’s called the Voynich Manuscript. Scholars, linguists, and cryptographers have been working like bulldogs to decipher it for several hundred years. It’s the most renowned and mysterious book in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Who else has anything like this? Harvard doesn’t have it, or everybody would already know the simple answer by now. It’s a double book code, keyed to Proverbs in the Bible and Purgatorio in Dante’s Divine Comedy, only in reverse. Well, that’s the obvious part. The kicker is that it’s also keyed to the earliest landscape art in western art, which occurred in this place and is important — Siena. Where absolutely everybody everywhere was gay, with long nipples and leafy underwear.

So. When you make the obvious code substitutions, the text reduces to a fairly prosaic construct, since only about one out of a hundred letters actually means anything and the pictures are there just because they make a nice party decoration at Stillman College.

Yale-elluiah.
Yale-elluiah.
We love dope,
And Buckley’s Pope,
The tree of life,
Tits stiff with strife,
And it’s so cool,
Cause we’re no fool,
And green’s our thing,
Like with nippling.
See the pics,
And suck our sticks.
Just causing fear,
Cause we’re not queer,
In New Haven.
Yale-elluiah.
Yale-elluiah.

You have to imagine the Jeff Buckley vocal for yourselves. It’s really the best thing since Rufus Wainwright almost got into Yale. Wait-listed and passed up for a transgender Rottweiler.


Okay. He got the lyrics wrong. Why he didn’t get into Yale. He should reapply.

Well, Yale still has the Voynich Manuscript. A feather in their lovely hat.