The Null Device

When he handed down the ruling in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case, Mr. Justice Peter Smith could not resist byt embed his own coded message into it:

The first clue - the word claimants with the s in italics - is found in paragraph one of the document. In the next paragraph, the m in claimant is italicised. Read together, the italicised letters in the first seven paragraphs spell out the self-referential legend "Smithy code".

After the "Smithy Code" series, there are an additional 25 jumbled letters contained on the first 14 pages of the document, Mr Tench said.

Although some of the more creative members of the bench have occasionally been known to write their judgments in verse or rhyming couplets, few have gone to the same cunning lengths as Mr Justice Smith. "It's not really something that you expect from a judge," Mr Tench said. "Someone said to me: 'Isn't that rather irresponsible?', which I thought was a rather joyless reaction. It just shows that our judges are human."

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The authors of 1980s-vintage Merovingian-bloodline conspiracy-theory-of-history classic Holy Blood, Holy Grail are suing Dan Brown for plagiarism, claiming that he plagiarised their "research" into the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar and the suppressed bloodline of Jesus Christ, in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. Though, by doing so, aren't they effectively acknowledging that their research is a work of fiction? After all, one can't claim ownership of actual historical facts, can one?

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French-American relations have suffered another blow, thanks to Paris being inundated with tourists looking for scenes from the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's repackaging of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in thriller form. When told that the places depicted in the book don't hide the secrets of the Holy Grail and the Merovingian bloodline of Jesus, many tourists become abusive and accuse their guides of covering up the truth for the Catholic Church. Or just steal the signs pointing out that the Da Vinci Code is fiction.

In other news, the EFF is not actually an anarchist terrorist group. (No, that'd be the Cypherpunks mailing list.)

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