Welcome to Whacky Wednesday, where the news is real but the logic has left the building. This week’s lineup: a man who replaced Lego pieces with dried pasta before returning them to Target, three people who dressed someone in a bear suit to defraud luxury car insurers, and — because…
Category: Culture
Culture
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Chinese Robot Beats Fastest Human Half-Marathon Time — The Line Between Impressive and Alarming Just Blurred
A Chinese humanoid robot just completed a half-marathon in less time than the fastest human ever recorded. Not “pretty close.” Not “almost as fast.” Faster. The robot — built by a Chinese robotics company — finished the 13.1-mile course in under an hour. The current human world record for a…
Culture
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Monoculture Began To Decline After 43 Million People Watched This Moment
Bradley Cooper took a selfie at the 2014 Oscars. Ellen DeGeneres posted it. The internet exploded. 43.74 million people watched it happen live — the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years. No one knew it at the time, but monoculture died in 2014 — or at least peaked that…
Culture
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Ancient Beer Tab Proves Workers Have Always Preferred Getting Paid in Alcohol
There’s nothing quite like having a drink to celebrate payday — turns out this tradition dates back 4,000 years, and the receipts are literal. Scientists at the National Museum of Denmark have just deciphered a clay tablet from ancient Umma (modern-day southern Iraq) that records beer payments to workers. Not…
Culture
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The Documentary That Followed People for 70 Years Is Finally Ending
In 1964, a British TV crew pointed cameras at fourteen seven-year-olds and asked them about their dreams. Tony wanted to be a jockey. Neil wanted to be an astronaut. Bruce wanted to be a missionary. Then they came back seven years later. And seven years after that. And again. And…
Culture
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Airbnb Sex Dungeons Operating Next To Elementary Schools
Welcome to Whacky Wednesday — where reality stops making sense and starts making headlines. This week: a Liverpool fan so unlucky his friends banned him from watching games, Airbnb rentals in quiet American suburbs that turn out to be fully equipped BDSM dungeons, and a North Carolina woman whose “prank”…
Culture
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Reconstruction-Era Booze Ban Ruled Unconstitutional — Hobby Distillers Win After 158 Years
A federal appeals court just struck down a law older than your great-great-grandfather’s moonshine recipe. The Fifth Circuit ruled that the federal government’s 158-year-old ban on home distilling — enacted during Reconstruction to make sure Uncle Sam got his cut — violates the Constitution. The law made it illegal to…
Culture
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Fossil Loses “World’s Oldest Octopus” Title After 300-Million-Year Identity Crisis
A 300-million-year-old blob of fossilized tentacles just lost its title as the world’s oldest octopus. Turns out it was never an octopus. It was a nautilus—a shelled cephalopod that decomposed so thoroughly before fossilization that it fooled paleontologists for 24 years. The fossil, Pohlsepia mazonensis, was discovered in the Mazon…
Community
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Dave Chappelle Bought a Schoolhouse So a Radio Station Wouldn’t Disappear
Dave Chappelle stood outside a restored 19th-century schoolhouse in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on Thursday—not for a Netflix special, not for a comeback tour, but for a ribbon-cutting ceremony that probably won’t trend on Twitter. The Union Schoolhouse, built in 1872, once served as one of the village’s earliest integrated schools….
Culture
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Whacky Wednesday: Aviation Malfunctions, Political Defiance, and Florida Being Florida
Welcome to Whacky Wednesday — the weekly roundup where reality stops pretending it has a plan. This week: a cabin door that decided altitude was the perfect time to open, a mayor caught pantless on surveillance footage who refuses to resign despite a 4-2 no confidence vote, and a Florida…