Because manuscript paper lacks mystery

BOSTON, November 15—In a discovery sending shockwaves ineffectually in all directions at once, a "blogger" has claimed to have found musical notes encoded in the painting "The Good Life" by American artist Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light^TM.

Kinkade left clues to a musical composition in his painting, said Soho the Dog, Musicologist of Music^TM. Mr. Dog found that, by turning the painting on its side, photographing it through ultraviolet light, rearranging the positions of the rocks on the pastel-laden riverbank according to a complicated algorithm based around the number "3" (as signaled by the otherwise inexplicable need for the outdoorsman in the painting to have three fires going simultaneously), and drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the rocks could represent musical notes. The result is a 3-minute "hymn" which Mr. Dog described as "like a soundtrack that emphasizes the true soul of Kinkade's art".

Artassé Vasari, director of a Kinkade gallery in suburban Genoa, said the theory was "plausible," an Italian colloquialism meaning "your cell phone reception seems to be spotty."

Mr. Dog dimissed suggestions that he was jumping on a bandwagon, and took exception to the phrase "The Kinkade Code" appearing in media reports. "If they're going to call it that, I must insist that they spell 'code' with a 'k,'" he said. "You know, like the Keystone Kops."

Mr. Dog said he was currently arranging a 16-part symphony secretly encoded in another series of masterpieces.