while reading the judgment, I noticed something odd. Throughout the text, the occasional letter has been italicised. There was an "m" in the word claimant in the second paragraph, and an "i" and a "t" italicised in the next. I supposed it was simply a word processing fault. but I did not seriously consider that the judge could have implanted a hidden message in the judgment. High court judges simply do not do such things.
It then transpires that the judge in this case has a bit of a sense of fun because that is precisely what he had done. I can't help feeling that he missed an opportunity to say something a bit more significant in the grand scheme of things; something like a clue to buried treasure or something, but the fact that it was there was interesting. It seems implausible that a judge might do this, but then again: there you are listening to loads of evidence about hidden messages and codes and the like and after a week or two it must start to get inside your head quite a bit. I could see this as a way of trying to get the thing out of your system. Of course, the significant thing here is to ask what the judge would have done if no-one had noticed. The indications are that the lack of 'pick-up' was concerning him.
The next question is what will I do if people don't with my own response here?
Guardian Unlimited Books | News | How judge's secret Da Vinci code was cracked
Filed in: Da_Vinci_code, copyright, judgement
3 comments:
you also tried to hide a code ;-)
"I wonder if [it] could be a spoof." But instead of finding the letters for "it" I actually found "th" italicized, I'm assuming you meant "it". The letters I found were: iwonderifthcouldbeaspoof
Thanks for the fun!
It's a harder thing to do than I expected! There's a hint in the article that the judge may have needed a generous interpreter to do error correction. In actual fact the 'th' was meant to have been followed by 'is' making 'this'. However, as I recall, I was simultaneously realising that I could run out of text to use, and was also composing further comment to give me more suitable letters. Again that's not as easy as one might suppose.
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