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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 hiring, sora and three cheers. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bemused.
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!
Decades ago, a Maryland sailor burned his winter socks. Now it's a spring tradition
Coming from a place where winter gets serious, I can completely understand the desire to set its trappings on fire as soon as practical.
Given how expensive things have gotten I hope they use older, socks with holes. Maybe a rebrand of the tradition.
This feels weirder than it does serious, the FIFA world cup song sucks this year. Personally I object that only the Men's WC gets one and I often prefer the Coca Cola WC song. But... This is not a football song!
Wavin' Flag? Waka Waka? Colours?
It's not even Football's Coming Home.
What a great find, been so busy that I didn’t catch this item. You’re so right, this song may foreshadow for the overall tone of the tournament. Sucks is an understatement. I personally have been playing Snoop Dogg My Medicine in a loop. Not that am into country music but not bad.
I have no interest in FIFA or sports in general, and had no clue that it even has official songs, yet even I can tell this is a really weird and unfitting choice. That's just a country rock song. The lyrics literally include "broke down Chevy", that's as country as you can get. It doesn't even have decent energy to it, the song feels like it's just constantly building up to something but never actually gets there.
The Spanish bits have better energy, but they feel so out of place with the rest of the song. And also feel like they're teasing that same peak the rest of the song never reaches, but instead just... Falls off and back into the original "monotone"? Just never actually hits the peak?
I should really learn music terminology at some point. All I know is that some music can give me a boost of energy, and this song does absolutely nothing for my energy levels. Best way I can describe this song is "high tension leading to a big confrontation, but without reaching resolution in the song".
Most of them have lyrics about unity - the world coming together for the joy of the game - with some "rah rah your team" it's basically like the ideal of patriotism/sportsmanship where we're all here for the right reasons.
There are usually different versions these days, ones all in English or with more Spanish and there's been the Coca Cola branded song too. I don't like all of them, but this one is just so bad.
Some examples
Hayya Hayya (Better Together)
Colors
We Are One (Olé Ola)
Waavin' Flag (I like this video better personally...)
Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)
The new song has 1.8 million views and 19k likes after 9 days up ಠ_ʖಠ
I'm guessing the official video, with scantily clad women all dancing happily to vibrant music, is still to come?
I don't even know. I saw someone put the music over a truck ad and it works
12 tons of KitKat bars stolen in chocolaty heist in Europe, Nestle says
My favorite take on this
I hadn't seen that yet, he's been clocking the candy companies for shrinking their offerings in size and quantity for a while (and certainly I have no sympathy for Nestlé either) but he is worth the follow because he is delicious
Ah fuck me, and there I was trying to avoid laughing too hard.
Complaining that 496g of chocolate should not be considered “XL”. My guy, half a kilogram of chocolate is XL.
Oddly enough, while you seem to make logical sense, I find myself trusting the guy who is delicious, over someone who may or may not be in the deep pockets of big chocolate.
Idk whether the XL one changed size but the regular malteasers egg apparently went from 190g to 155g and costs more.
So idk he's got a point in general.
I’m getting paid in the real 1kg XXL chocolate eggs.
You're my favorite :)
The 496g isn't just the egg, but includes the other edible items like the Maltesers bunnies that are included in the package. £15 before any discounts as well.
As I said to my partner when I heard -
Give me a break.
I have always thought it odd to steal something like this, like, who is a quantity buyer for stolen KitKats? Is it everyone and I'm just naive?
No one would buy all of it, but you can resell food so easily. Any smaller store will buy a couple of cases without question, and it's likely that plenty of smaller wholesalers could buy a pallet or two without it being noticeable unless their books were specifically audited.
Yeah I guess, I'm not industrious enough to be a thief at this scale. I don't want to have to hock out of the back of a truck until I sell it all, I want something small, expensive with a buyer rich enough to give me bigger ethical issues with it than the theft itself.
Each bar has a unique batch code.
Why? This is why!
Some VP in KitKat is having the biggest case of "I told you so's"
With unique barcodes nonetheless!
Maybe they just wanted the truck?
Maybe they are going to use the truck as part of an overly elaborate heist!
Maybe they will secretly substitute a shipment of famous art with the equivalent weight in chocolate, and no one will be the wiser until it is too late!
Someone replicated the CSI episode where they committed suicide and tied the gun to a weather balloon to make it look like murder.
https://cbs12.com/news/local/investigators-pbg-mans-elaborate-plan-to-make-suicide-look-like-murder-failed
Did the balloon take the shell casings away as well?
Who expects a murderer to leave both murder weapon and shells conveniently lying around?
It’s not hard to set a gun up to capture spent brass, so the weather balloon would indeed take away the casings.
Eg. https://a.co/d/08Lri44n
...which doesn't make it any less likely to be a murder.
The phrasing is really weird.
....
If you read it at a surface level, it suggests that because no casings were found, the cops naturally concluded it was not a murder.
I think what probably happened, is because there was no easy evidence of murder, they started looking for other evidence that would let them close the case.
As crazy as it sounds... I think they were actually right and not being lazy.
I searched for other suicides staged to look like murders and ended up finding this CNN article about this case that went into more detail about the investigation. All the evidence is circumstantial, but his search history strongly indicated a long history of suicidal ideation. And there's also the fact he bought a weather balloon, and then a helium tank two days before his death. And his search history within the previous year included, "How many cubic feet of helium do you need to raise one pound?" Among other details.
That... Yeah, it really does come across as a very elaborate suicide to potentially avoid a suicide clause blocking the life insurance payout. Even with his family in good financial shape, sudden funerals are VERY expensive, so he may have wanted to at least ensure it would be covered and his family wouldn't be hit with any other financial strain.
Whatever the case, just tragic all around.
There's also the social stigma of suicide which can be stronger or weaker due to cultural influences.
Most people aren't that good at covering their tracks for something like this. It sounds like the logical outcome of the investigation.
A man used AI to call 3,000 Irish bartenders to track the cost of Guinness. Now pubs are lowering their prices to compete
Archive Link
He used ElevenLabs to call up all the pubs, and publish their prices here, after overpaying for a Guinness.
I love this! One of the best uses of LLMs I've seen so far. Perhaps this is how we start to regulate and beat price fixing, the death of antitrust, and the consumer exploitation that's rife in modern pricing.