A stone tablet has been found that’s around 3,000 years old, inscribed with a writing system heretofore unrecognized. The tablet, unearthed in Veracruz, Mexico, contains symbols that are apparently reminiscent of Olmec. At first, there was little hope for translation of the tablet’s contents.
Experts who have examined the symbols on the stone slab said they would need many more examples before they could hope to decipher them and read what is written. It appeared, they said, that the symbols in the inscription were unrelated to later Mesoamerican scripts, suggesting that this Olmec writing might have been practiced for only a few generations and may never have spread to surrounding cultures.
However, hope came from a quite unexpected source. Using a breastplate and goggles made of gold, a teenaged farm boy named Jose Herrero has claimed he can translate the text, which he says describes the efforts of an angel named “Moron-y” to establish the first Shoney’s south of what would eventually be called the Rio Grande.
Moron-y was apparently thwarted by the arrival of early Amazon cafés, which sold, among other things, caffeinated beverages that kept the locals up too late to perform a solid seven days’ slavery in the dishwashing and bus pits. As a result Shoney’s never colonized past the Florida peninsula. (There are some claims that the current inhabitants of Shoney’s are actually descendants of the founders, as indicated by their advanced levels of mummification.)
As a result Moron-y banned caffeine, which was more or less directly responsible for the collapse of the Amazon empire.
Asked to corroborate his claims with any single scrap of objective, verifiable evidence, Herrero offered instead the testimony of his “Tres Amigos”, all of whom claim to have seen him go into a room where the goggles were said to be, then emerge a while later bearing a piece of paper with allegedly translated passages written on it. Asked if they had actually seen the breastplate and goggles, the Tres Amigos became silent and slightly fidgety.
Asked further how a boy could possibly have come by a breastplate and goggles made of gold in the first place, Herrero began to cry and said the interview was over.
