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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 vent, reciprocity and strait of hormuz. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bewildered.
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!
Here is a cute one. A little boy in the Netherlands handed over a letter to the local police bureau to apology for calling the emergency service unnecessarily
Rather than the article itself, I'll translate/localize the letter the boy gave. Including obvious spelling mistakes:
Not quite offbeat, but rather beating off.
There's even a tracking app at https://beatcanceroff.com/. So guys can track their "activities." And, for once, it actually IS for science!
I don't know about you, but for a very long time now, I understood the health benefits very well.
Woman uproots 20-year-old cherry blossom tree while posing for photo at Shanghai park
Sunny Lam's parody (Cantonese language) song has a copy of the video.
Ultimately this is a small silly mistake and although it's sad for the young tree, hopefully a teachable moment for visitors, and good job on the woman for taking responsibility.
I saw this and it reminded me of the story where a guy cut down a very old tree, I think England. Anyway, I don't get it, I do hope the punishment is severe enough so other ppl remember not to be dumb.
At least this one wasn't someone trying to damage the tree, just an honest accident that could have been made by anyone. Way too many tourist stories are fully intentional...
Doesn’t really work with tourists. Even if they happen to have heard of the punishment, they’re so much more clever than the one who got caught.
Pogacar may face fine for running red light in Flanders win
BBC Sport – Mike Peter – 5th April 2026
Fair enough, safety is an issue. I would hope organizers understood this before drawing up the course.
There was a safety briefing to all teams and cyclists, which included the railway crossing.
What makes it entirely absurd, is that in such an event, those who crossed will wait on the other side for the others to catch up, so there is no competitive benefit...
BTW: it were closer to 50 cyclists that ran the red light, and the public reaction was very correct, with no justifying the wrongdoers.
Missing Girl Found After 32 Years
The backstory is sad, dealing with family issues, custody etc., What I think is so interesting is that she has been living her life all this time and all of a sudden she is found. The story of that effort, to me, is what's so interesting.
To me, the most interesting things are what was left unsaid. Clearly, the "girl" is still protecting the original story and her mother. The article's timeline was a bit messy, but it sounds like the police knew it was the mom. So why did they keep the case open instead of "work it out this is a civil matter" like they so often tell people who can't afford horses?
Comedian Christopher Titus had a special called Carrying Monsters where he talked about his family, including the story of when one of his noncustodial parents kidnapped him because the custodial one isn't capable of being a good parent.
We know most kidnappings are by people known to the kids/family, but I do wonder how large of a percentage is due to family court not being primarily about having the best welfare of the child in mind.
Abductions, even parental ones, are not considered civil matters and since she was reported as a missing child there are particular laws around that - not sure how they'd apply to the 90s though.
It doesn't sound like this was a custody enforcement issue but a truly missing child is going to flag and stay flagged (now whether some officer somewhere back then figured it out, realized she was happy and looked the other way seems to be at question)
McDonald’s debuts one-finger gadget that lets you move your character to 'keep you in the game' while you chow down — Pro Gamer Menu's ‘Archie’ designed to keep you from being kicked for inactivity
Nice to see that human ingenuity is being applied to meaningful and significant problems.
I low-key love that the marketing picture shows the controller above a crumpled burger wrapper, nasty grease stains and all. It's highly atypical for fast food ads to portray any part of their products so realistically. So, uh, kudos for that.
Huh, I hadn't noticed that, that is good! It makes it doubly strange to me that they decided to do it via render though, as when you look closer it looks really strange and I feel like they could have achieved a similar effect that looked better fairly easily in real life!
That's because the render was done by some poor
internintern-waged staff who's not only never seen one of these in real life, but would be the last in corporate chain to be able to get their hands on a physical one. They were probably tasked with doing this for an internal presentation when the idea was pitched and then the image never updated again.In the old days, a product is pitched, approved, made, and then an advertising firm hired to do pictures in preparation for launch using an existing real item. Now everything is done in parallel at best