Monday, October 01, 2007

Today in Extraordinarily Odd

The King of Nepal, King Gyanendra is being slowly shut out of his role as the king by the Nepalese government who do passive aggressive things like don’t arrange for proper security for him at public events so he won’t be able to show up. Rather that take it lying down, however, Gyanendra simply showed up and walked through the crowd at a recent religious festival without security and then left. It’s kind of like the moment of triumph at the end of an 80s high school comedy when the nerd finally gets the date with the cheerleader and the jocks are left sitting in a pile of manure. And everyone claps for some reason; like they’ve been following along even though that’s impossible. [source]

There’s nothing more reassuring than discourse about whether something is art from masses of people who walk through galleries and say things like, “But, I could have done that!” or “That doesn’t even look like anything”. Thankfully, the likelihood of that happening right now at the Tate Museum in London is higher than ever with an exhibition of the last 25 years of Turner Prize winners all in the same room. Actually, what’s even better than that type of discourse is when the organizers of the prize say they don’t aim for sensationalism. The thing is, all allegations are true: Yes, you could have done that, no, it doesn’t look like anything, and yes they do aim for sensationalism. [source]

Oh good, Americans are still eating. Who would have thought? Yesterday Pat Bertoletti ate 21 pounds of grits in 10 minutes at the first World Grits Eating Championship in Louisiana. It’s safe to assume that this is a world record too. Not because they’ve actually ascertained that the rest of the world has failed to produce a more accomplished eater of grits, actually because it’s a really safe bet that nowhere else in the world would ever even think of contesting it and nowhere else in the world eats grits let alone feels prompted to want to shovel inhuman amounts of them into humans and celebrate the horror. [source]

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