The WTF? Thread

[Benjm]

Oxbridge uncovered: More elitist than we thought, says the BBC.

Obviously Oxbridge being elitist could hardly be less WTF, but I was startled by the BBC, of all organisations, trying to get away with '...than we thought', given its own time honoured recruitment practices.

Next week: Panorama uncovers an illegal gambling operation at Rick's Place.

[Sean of the Shed]

WHO make Mugabe a goodwill ambassador.

[Various Artist]

Fucking absurd, isn't it? A man monster who's presided over the collapse of his own country's health system and has reached the grand age of 93 by travelling abroad for his own healthcare. They might as well appoint him as an advisor at the World Bank, or award him the Nobel Peace Prize.

[ursus arctos]

Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of stunt that the rabid anti-UN wing of the Republican Party will dine out on for months.

[SouthdownRebel]

I can get how this might be a case of the old dictators network in action, but it's staggering to think there's so few checks and balances that nobody at the UN has been able to understand the folly of it and exercise a veto.

[tee rex]

Not really a WTF, more a scratch of the head and look puzzled. Eminem sues NZ National Party.

Eminem wins. Sadly, verdict delivered after the election, might have swung a few votes.

But still, Schadenfreude abounds. New Labour Prime Minister (a sometime DJ) trying to keep straight face, failing.

[Ek weet nie]

Thanks for posting the mattress reviewing story dm. Those weird unboxing videos make much more sense to me now.

[Various Artist]

I've just read all that extraordinary mattress-reviewing article too as a result. What a bananas story, and a whole internet ecosystem many or most of us would never be aware of. Ultimately pretty depressing, of course.

[Janik]

The last episode of the recent BBC music series Tunes for Tyrants included some footage of this. As Klein dryly notes, they were careful not to include close-ups of the chorus line.
Oh, and the song for the routine was a rip-off of Vera Lynn. Because it wasn't bizarre enough already.

[Hot Pepsi]

Tonight I learned about the existence of this guy.
It’s mesmerizing. I recommend trying to follow along.

https://youtu.be/dm7yAWpX1Mc

[Ginger Yellow]

When an investor relations department has too much time on its hands.

[Sam]

Tonight I learned about the existence of this guy.
It’s mesmerizing. I recommend trying to follow along.

https://youtu.be/dm7yAWpX1Mc

I love the (currently top) comment underneath that.

This guy is either the nicest most kind person on this planet or the father of the zodiac killer

[Sam]

When an investor relations department has too much time on its hands.

That right there might be a thread-winner. Last time I felt this confused reading something it was The New York Trilogy.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Just surfing Wikipedia, I chanced upon this chilling story which I'm calling The Curious Case Of Craig D. Button. The bombs on his plane are unaccounted for.

holy shit. never mind the bombs, it would have been the Cannon that would have done the damage if he'd been of a mind to use it. That's the thing that melted all those iraqi soldiers on the road home from kuwait.

[Hot Pepsi]

I love the (currently top) comment underneath that.

My thought exactly

[Gerontophile]

The new Will & Grace.

That is all.

[Gerontophile]

Didn't really know where else to put this, and it might already be well known to otf-ers with kids, but CBeebies is the place to be for storytelling.

[ad hoc]

Just watched the Tom Hardy reading of Odd Dog Out linked from that. That was brilliant.

[Janik]

Wikipedia in Anglo-Saxon. Even more pointless and weird that Scots Wikipedia. And I don't mean Scots Gaelic (which is clearly a separate language), but vernacular Scots. The stub on Gregor Mendel.

[Various Artist]

WTF indeed. Surely there's only about 60 people who could read the Anglo-Saxon one even if they wanted to, and surely there's no-one who'd even want to read Wiki entries in a strained approximation of spoken Scottish.

[Alderman Barnes]

I love the Wikipedias in dialects and dead languages. They're harmless fun at worst and fascinating at best, and it's amazing that people go to the trouble to make them. Maybe I'm weird, but I quite enjoy grubbing through the Low German, Frisian and Old English sections and surprising myself at how much I can understand. I'm a translator, and Wikipedia is a vital resource for me, and if you're interested in old or obscure languages, these pages - with the caveat that they can't be entirely accurate - really make them come to life.

[Lang Spoon]

WTF indeed. Surely there's only about 60 people who could read the Anglo-Saxon one even if they wanted to, and surely there's no-one who'd even want to read Wiki entries in a strained approximation of spoken Scottish.

There’s about 8000 eejits who pay good daily money for the National newspaper in Scotland. One of their USPs is a column in that there Broad Scots. You can read about some bearded before it was fashionable older than me old man going to a festival and not getting it. But speelin wurrds deeferintly.

[Lang Spoon]

Scots is(was) a Language though, as much as Norwegian is from Danish, it just converged back close to Standard Southron English too early (between Knox’s lads imagining a pan Island Theocracy, the Royal Court going dahn saff and then all the entitled or elected nobility and Gentry/posh merchant Parliamentarian class with the act of Union in 1707). And went from being Language of Law, of Court, courts, snooty literature and Legislation to comedy swears and funny possibly “gritty” wurds that denote rustic then WC or middle class trying it on as central belt working class. Mostly the grammar differences have been worn away to nothing, maistly. Now it’s lexical superficiality. Outside the mad isolated Doric NE Scotland quines and loons, ken, maybe.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Ha, that Anglo Saxon wiki is swithe goed!

[Diable Rouge]

Shane Ross has ignored three transport disputes in little over a year, but thinks he can bring peace to North Korea!

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/poli...78959?mode=amp