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Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news
Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like 2fa, citizenship.birthright and tiktok. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was unusually befuddled.
But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat
stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!
For anyone wanting more of this type of thing, I highly recommend AP News | Oddities
You get wonderful articles such as "Elk on a shelf: Colorado wildlife officials rescue elk tangled in rope on ice climbing route"
Here are some additional articles that have flown under the radar.:
QM Labs successfully
aquacultures the Moon
Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita)
Blue Bell is releasing Strawberry Poptart flavored ice cream: Blue Bell announces newest flavor Strawberry Toaster Pastry Ice Cream
Local Mechanic gives tips for maintaining vehicles in extreme weather
This last one is genuinely history-making, and I've rarely seen it mentioned outside small circles: Astronomers watch monster black hole spit out a light-year-long jet
Clicked on link. First article I see:
Italian soccer club Lazio fires falconer for posting photos of his penis implant
That's uhh... Well... That's definitely not a headline you read every day.
Monkey noises from fans: fine
A staff member showing off his prosthetic penis: not fine
Ironclad logic
I don't got time to go through all but yea, that's my 1st stop every day to start my day with laughter.
This week in the Netherlands, someone with a parachute accidentally landed in a zoo right with the monkeys.
Quick Google Translate:
It's all fun and games until someone starts monkeying around. If I was a monkey (insert your punch line here)!
So does that mean, they are expecting this to happen again? Dutch people got to stop with this monkey business.
Lucky to have dropped into a monkey enclosure rather than a lion's den? Honestly, I'd take the lion over baboons any day. The lion is potentially chilling with a full belly, but the baboons will fight you for sport.
I'm aware Bonobos are more benign than baboons, but the general lackadaisical attitude in that response regarding monkeys is worrisome since even Bonobos can be rather vicious and aggressive.
Not just that, they are basically big cats - so you can use the ultimate tactic against them:
Cardboard boxes.
I'd take the bonobos only because "new thing that moves" is immediately interesting to most cats and having any number of lions interested in you is a bad day. Bonobo interest could turn into aggression, especially if the males are prickly, but less guaranteed.
Sure, Bonobos may not be an immediate break glass in case of parachute failure kind of situation but I would equate lucky with missing any enclosure and not just the lions.
Not the monkeys, not the lions or elephants, but also definitely not the polar bear exhibit that Ouwehands has.
I was going to blame the zoo director but tbh it's not in quotes so I think the reporter is just trying to pad the story.
It turns out that cats are, in fact, liquid.
Speaking of liquids, a 200 year old liquor bottle was found reused in a now-expected manner.
Evil spirits are all around me, thank god for science and urine.
(I didn't know they had Amazon warehouses 200 years ago.)
Jokes aside, I had never heard of a witches bottle before. Seems like an interesting subject. I wonder why they thought it would keep bad spirits away. Down the rabbit hole I go...
Mirror of the first link:
https://archive.is/8kgDB
Passenger clings to German high-speed train and survives
BBC News – Robert Plummer – 17th January 2025
Wow. I've 'heard' of subway surfing in NYC but this is another level. It's the next Mission Impossible movie, The Munich Affair with a special guest, a Hungarian national.