S. Reading Group Kit

In case you missed the announcement on Twitter, Mulholland Books announced a Group Reading Kit that people can request to help them read S. with friends.

The kit looks rather cool and contains physical versions of some of the things we have seen online, like material from the Eotvos Wheel website, and a CD of the first Radio Straka broadcast.

There are even a couple of coloured pencils to make your own book notes in.

We think there may be the odd extra clue thrown in with the kit, as you can see from the picture there is a cipher to solve and a postcard. Fellow S. blogger Debbie has analysed the postcard and the image is "Rio de Janeiro, Public Park and Monroe Palace, Brazil" possibly related to the world fair in 1939.

The kit is only available for those in the United states and only available while stocks last, so if you want one, I would get requesting quickly.

Click here to visit the Mulholland Books website and request your own copy of the kit.

I am not in the UK myself, but I have friends in the US that have ordered one so we will see the contents once they arrive.

(Apologies for not posting this here sooner, I got rather ill recently and simply forgot !)

References

It is worth pointing out a few items that have recently been found that are direct comparisons to items and words found in S.

The first is from @JillaggieARG and is the original postcard reference that the postcard in S. that Eric sends is based on. As you can see the original is not crimped and has the Rio De Janeiro name present on it.

Oddly I was looking through my folder of S. images for the insert reference I have and found that I had already had this original from a different source. I can't remember if I put something in the comments or just found it and forgot it, but it is the same as Jill's version. Thanks Jill for sending it and a note to self - must remember to follow up on these things !

Next is @MyTheseus who mentions the comparison to page 147 of S. and Belloc's Cautionary Tales For Children

Then we have Clare (@CFish6) who sent in a reference advert used to construct part of the McKay's magazine article

See the original reference here

Finally for now we have @blackwellharb who tweeted this self referential tweet -

"@SFiles22 check out Lopevi (13th Straka book). Tiny volcanic island just like Obsidian Island. #whoisstraka"

Fellow Birders

I realise we haven't posted much recently on the blog, but there hasn't been much to write about and unfortunately the old enemy of time has meant I haven't been able to make any more sense of some of the mysteries of S. Hopefully these small snippets of information will spark some theories and questions of your own.

This post has a couple of updates and potential rabbit holes for us to fall down and I will shortly post a small poll suggested by a reader of the blog.

First of all Jill Aggie sent a question about this postcard via email, it is the Postcard from Eric on the 18th of April and what is intriguing Jill is the postmark. Unlike the other postmarks, this one has a string of numbers to the left of the usual circular stamp, it could just be a product of that particular post office of course but it is interesting as it is almost a regular pattern. Minus two single digits it is a 4 x 8 grid.

-9004100
-9807082
04575220
19644144

If anyone can make sense of these numbers or suggest a potential cipher to try and use to decode them please let us know.

Next Danielle Parker mentioned in the comments that the Santorini Man murders that are heavily referenced by Radio Straka, in the book and on the Eotvos Wheel website has striking similarities to the Taman Shud Case an Australian mystery where a body is found with the last page of a book in his pocket. This is also know as the "Somerton Man" which is again very similar to the S. version.

Inspiration for the events in Ship of Theseus or is there a firmer link to the S. Santorini Man mystery ?

As pointed out by Mystimus in the comments there is another blog with an article about this - The Monkey Dance

Finally for now I was thinking about the negative space mystery that may be something we need to solve and also the twitter icon that @EricHusch had a while ago (see earlier post).

I had a go at manipulating the S. logo and creating a mirror image any laying one S. over the other, in a Palimpsest manner, I came up with this.

Looks a little like an Owl to me, and also seems to form a sort of mask for reading a hidden message, if only I knew where to look ! I have tried printing it, cutting out the holes and placing it over some of the pages but have got nothing so far.

Again if you can find a way of using it to find new information please let us know.

LONOE

I must admit to being slow to recognise the significance of this map, I saw it a few days ago from a comment by Tonzi in the Cipher Explanations page and didn't realise what it was.

If you haven't finished the book yet you may not want to read on.

Then last night @MyTheseus on Twitter pointed out a new blog post on WhoIsStraka.WordPress.com which had the same conclusion, although arrived at via a different thought process.

Firstly the map is quite important as it explains the relationship of the coordinate system to the codes used, they are linear as you can see and these aren't locations from the book, these are all coordinates that can be found when LONOE is in the wheels window.

When you look at the map you can see that Maraú in Brazil (blue pin) is close to this line, on the postcard dated the 20th of April (insert on page 201) Eric writes that he is near this place.



So the conclusion is that the missing letters L O N O E are actually a pointer to the location of FXC should Straka have ever picked up the message hidden in the footnote cipher.

Tonzi very kindly created this as a Google map for us all to use and see this linear relationship.