a.d. elliott - Take the Back Roads

Dear Henry, I have just heard of the most mysterious book ever made, and now, I want to read it. The trouble is, I can't. No one can. The book is an illuminated codex called the Voynich Manuscript, which has been a mystery throughout the ages. Carbon dating places the creation of the document somewhere between 1404-1438, but that is all anyone knows about its early life. Although it was rumored that Emperor Rudolph II and then Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenez, the royal gardener, owned the book. The first documented owner didn't appear until 1639 when the alchemist Georg Baresch sent script samples to Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher hoping for a translation. After Baresch's death, the book made its way to his friend Jan Marek Marci and finally to Kircher. After that, the book disappeared into the Jesuit archives until 1912, when the book was sold, along with many others, to raise funds for the order. The book was purchased by Wilfred Voynich, a rare book deale...

Dear Henry, This is one of the Tylopilus versions of the Bolete mushroom.  They are gorgeous, with deep purple caps and, like most boletes, are non-toxic (there is a bolete with red spores which is said to be dangerous.  They don't appear to be wide-spread and I haven't seen one). There is, however, a huge variation in the edibility of "non-toxic". Any bolete with a purple cap tastes awful and by awful, I mean so bitter that your tongue tingles. You could not eat this mushroom, not even if you are starving. Ask me how I know. You see, once, Fish and I, armed with the knowledge that "all boletes are non-toxic", picked, sauteed, and attempted to eat one. It smelled heavenly while it was cooking.  It tasted horrific. The taste was so bad that we were afraid we had misidentified the mushroom. We didn't, they are just that inedible. I hear (unverified and unresearched) that they are a component of bitters.  I did, however, make a joke about ...

Dear Henry, Did you know there were vampires in New England? In 1990, a coffin was discovered at a gravel quarry in Griswold, Connecticut, with the initials JB and the number 55 hammered into the coffin lid with brass tacks. The bones within the coffin were arranged, several years postmortem, into a Jolly Roger. Intrigued by this arrangement, local archeologists started "digging" (couldn't help it) into the mystery, and through historical records and DNA testing, they were able to put together his story. JB was a man named John Barber, and he had tuberculosis. Oddly enough, what happened to John Barber's body wasn't all that rare. Tuberculosis was a real problem during that period and was called consumption because of the wasting and draining effects of the disease.  The disease was (and still is) incredibly contagious. Because of the disease's symptoms  (paleness, blood at the corners of the mouth, a decaying smell to the breath), there was a be...