EWW extra: It's easy to practise social distancing when you have no friends
I just thought we could all use a distraction.
Well, it’s not Thursday. But I figure we all need to think of something other than Covid-19 for a few minutes. Here’s a lovingly curated distraction and I’ll see you in your inbox, at a socially responsible distance, at 7pm on Thursday.
How to get lost in Wikipedia
Surely there are many, many people who fall into Wikipedia wormholes at 2am because they woke up for a glass of water but then they thought maybe a spider had climbed into the glass of water by their bed and so they went upstairs to get a new glass of water then they were too awake to fall back asleep so they googled “The Dyatlov Pass incident”.
Wikipedia is home to insomniacs. I literally cannot get enough of it. I love getting lost in Wikipedia. I can start at Nebuchadnezzar I and end up at Trancers II The Return of Jack Deth.
Tina Arena’s real name is not Tina. It’s Filippina Arena. Her parents named her Filippina Arena. And she chose another rhyming name as her stage name. Did you know that in 1982, The Australian Woman’s Weekly became a monthly magazine but they kept calling it "weekly" because a woman's "monthly" was a slang term for menstruation. Did you know the inventor of the pill was an American scientist called John Rock and that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s show Ballers was HBO's most watched comedy in six years?
DID YOU KNOW THIS.
Because now you do. And that’s thanks to Wiki. Wikipedia is the best of us. When you think, “How fucking terrible is everyone and everything in the world?” Wiki tells you that actually – not everybody is horrible. Not everything is awful.
There is someone who spent the time to make an entire Wiki article on 2009 American science fiction/adventure/thriller film The Race To Witch Mountain.
Everything is beautiful. Take a deep breath. We are tiny beings hoping to live lives of meaning. We hope our gentle footprints on the Earth might bring comfort to those around us. We try to leave a legacy of significance even if the only difference we made in the lives of others was to share our knowledge of obscure pop culture and/or unsolved mysteries in Russia.
On my last day on this Earth, when I reflect on my life, I will think about these Wikipedia entry quotes.
On 12 May, 2002, a 21-year-old zookeeper had her arm bitten off at the elbow by one of the park's lions as she was conducting a behind-the-scenes tour for her family. Park operations were not affected.
The practice of entering combat without the use of clothing and armour is rare, but not unheard of. The artistic convention of heroic nudity was established in the art of ancient Greece by the Archaic period. In modern Liberia, soldiers under "General Butt Naked" Joshua Blahyi fought naked in order to terrorise their opponents.
The magazine is well known for two major publicity stunts – one for offering Charles, Prince of Wales $45,000 to appear nude in a centrefold in 1990, and another for publishing a nude pictorial called "The Men of Enron" in its September 2002 issue in which some former Enron employees "lost their shirts". [citation needed]
Playgirl UK's brief 2011 relaunch was accompanied by an announcement that it would feature no below-the-waist nudity, and would focus on attractive male celebrities rather than models and pornography actors. It was a failure, and ceased circulation soon after it began. [citation needed]
Python (Busch Gardens Tampa Bay)
A few weeks after the ride opened, a 39-year-old heart patient died shortly after riding the Python. The ride's tagline ("I challenged the Python and lived!") was removed.
Topical issues featured in Dinosaurs include environmentalism, endangered species, women's rights, sexual harassment, LGBT rights, objectification of women, censorship, civil rights, body image, steroid use, allusions to masturbation (in the form of Robbie doing the solo mating dance), drug abuse, racism (in the form of a dispute between the two-legged dinosaurs and the four-legged dinosaurs), peer pressure, rights of indigenous peoples (in the form of the dinosaurs interacting with cave people), corporate crime, government interference in parenting, and pacifism.
Folds has been married and divorced four times. Folds stated that, "As much as I love the idea of being married, it's not for me".
In 1970, Cuddles, a male orca who resided in both the Dudley Zoo and Flamingo Park (now Flamingo Land) in England, became so aggressive towards his trainers, having attacked them twice, that his keepers were forced to clean his pool from the safety of a shark cage.
On 20 April 20, 1971, SeaWorld secretary Annette Eckis was talked into riding the park's main attraction, a 10-year-old female orca named Shamu (this would be the original Shamu), at the park in San Diego, California, as a publicity stunt. As the ride was coming to an end, Eckis was suddenly thrown off the whale's back. The orca seized the woman by her leg and began pushing her through the water. Trainers on the side of the tank grabbed the young woman and attempted to pull her out of the water, but the whale again grabbed the woman's leg and refused to let go. Shamu's jaws had to be pried apart with a pole in order to free her. Eckis was carried away on a stretcher and required 200 stitches to close the wounds she suffered. Eckis later sued SeaWorld, but a monetary award was overturned on appeal. This event was also documented in the show When Good Pets Go Bad.