FT442

[oxo66]

Wot no 442?

Akron Poltergeist
German Wild Men
the Haunting of William Stevens
..and lots of other stuff including
Princess Di-Morrissey Conspiracy
Skibidi toilet
and two pages of Hunt Emerson

 

[AgProv]

Self-detonating kamikaze khazis. Ouch. I always suspected those clever Japanese contraptions were far more sophisticated than the humble toilet needs to be... as any engineer will tell you, the more sophistication you build into a system, the more the potential for breakdown. Too many moving parts.

The idea of the octopus in your seafood taking revenge on the person eating it. Wonderful.

 

[Stormkhan]

My copy arrived in time for me to read it down t'local.
Wheeeee - got another letter published!

 

[AgProv]

The archaeological discovery that there is a 5,600 year old history, continuous and unbroken, of porridge-making in Scotland. I'm just betting the dried-up stuff from three millenia BC, as found in that Pictish settlement, would if reconstituted taste as good now as it did then!

 

[AgProv]

And in one of the articles, forget which one, the word "segue" is used in its correct context to denote a seamless elision between two states, a managed change in which the transition is managed so smoothly and subtly you might not even be aware it's happening.

The thing with this is.... only ever having seen the word written down, the natural assumption is that it's pronounced "seeg". It has to be; it's got the same "-gue" ending as words like "league", right, as in "Football League"? Self-evident, stands to reason.

Except... it isn't. As I was told when corrected, the pronunciation is "seg-way".

What, when did that happen? How did I miss the memo? Who's mucking with the rules here?

 

[AgProv]

Thinking about 442, this might be one of those editions. It's all good, it's all readable, it's all grist in the Fortean mill: but it's just that there's nothing much about the actual articles that's inspiring any further comments or reflections or digressions in this thread. I've just realised all my comments here have been about the incidental things in the Sidebar columns, or else one tangential digression on what happens when you've only ever seen a word written down and discover the pronunciation is not as you'd expect. (I'd call this the Tiffany Aching Effect, after the Terry Pratchett character who is fated to be intellectually curious in a society where most people aren't, in an agricultural backwater where she's the only person who reads for pleasure, she only ever sees long words written down and can use them accurately in context - but has nobody to speak them to. Hence, "per-sick-ollogy" and similar.)

I'm wondering , is this a universal sort of thing about some FT issues - you can appreciate the content but not find anything much to actually say about it?

 

[JamesWhitehead]

I picked it up today. Leafing through it, waiting for the check-out, I spot the article on Skibidi Toilet.

I had not heard of this delightful subject until last night, when Youtube stuck it in my In-tray. Suddenly it's everywhere!