"TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOViE '2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER"

[hot_pastrami]

A recent article on Slashdot got me reading about the mysterious Toynbee tiles. I love this kind of shit. Tiles like the one pictured below have been mysteriously appearing, embedded in the asphalt surface of public roads, for years:



They are made of an unknown, very hard substance, and there are several variations of the text. Some have footnotes as strange as the message itself, such as "Murder every journalist, I beg you," and "Submit. Obey."

In 1992 a chap in Philidelphia by the name of Bill O'Neill starting noticing the tiles and asking around about them, but nobody knew anything. So, he created a website devoted to the mysterious tiles, and learned that it is not just a local phenomenon. Similar tiles have appeared in many US cities, including Washington DC, Pittsburgh, New York City, Baltimore, Boston, and many more. Some have even shown up in South America; in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

Somehow, someone is managing to embed these tiles into public roads without being spotted. They are installed in a way that would require some specialized equipment and some length of time, but no one has ever claimed to have spotted an installation in progress.

The tiles all mention Toynbee, a religious historian born in England in 1889. Some of the tiles mention Kubrick, the fimmaker responsible for 2001: A Space Oddysey, which was a movie that made implications that a man was reborn on a mission to Jupiter, not exactly resurrected. Kubrick's and Toynbee's works don't really seem to intersect anywhere, so it is an odd coupling.

The most tantalizing clue as to the source of these tiles was a 1983 newspaper interview with a social worker from Philidelphia, a man named James Morasco, who claimed that Jupiter could be colonized by bringing Earth's dead people there to have them resurrected. When writing an article on the tiles in 2001, one reporter stumbed upon the original article, found the link intruiging, and tried to call the man. A woman who answered said Mr. Morasco coldn't come to the phone because a mysterious ailment had required that he have his voicebox removed. Another reporter writing another story in 2003 tried to call the man and was told that he had died the previous March at age 88, but that he had known nothing about the tiles:

"My husband doesn't know anything about that. Besides he died in March. But he didn't know anything about it."

Very interesting. Particularly fitting is the last line of the original 1983 article on James Morasco:

"You may be hearing more from Morasco. And then again, you may not."