best obscure Wikipedia pages?

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
This is amazing:
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
Linguist Thomas Sebeok, building on earlier work by Alvin Weinberg and Arsen Darnay and working as part of the Human Interference Task Force, proposed the creation of an atomic priesthood, a panel of experts comparable to the Catholic church, which has preserved and authorized its message for almost 2,000 years
 

Leo

Well-known member

and the next bit:

French author Françoise Bastide and Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed that domestic cats be genetically engineered to change color in the presence of dangerous levels of radiation. The significance of these "radiation cats" or "ray cats" would be reinforced through fairy tales and myths, the story being that one should move away from sites where such creatures are encountered, or where domesticated cats begin to exhibit such behaviour.[8][9][10][11] In 2014, musician Emperor X wrote such a song called "Don't Change Color, Kitty", designed to be "so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years"
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Don't regular cats already indicate the presence of dangerous levels of radiation by changing from "being alive" to "being dead"?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Leo

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just a random one but mildly interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wedders

Also

Strand Magazine, Vol. XI, (published in 1896) described Wadhouse as the following:

"Thus, if noses were ever uniformly exact in representing the importance of the individual, this worthy ought to have amassed all the money in Threadneedle Street and conquered all Europe, for this prodigious nose of his was a compound of the acquisitive with the martial. But either his chin was too weak or his brow too low, or Nature had so exhausted herself in the task of giving this prodigy a nose as to altogether forget to endow him with brains; or perhaps, the nose crowded out this latter commodity. At all events, we are told this Yorkshireman expired, nose and all, as he had lived, in a condition of mind best described as the most abject idiocy."
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
Just a random one but mildly interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wedders

Also

Strand Magazine, Vol. XI, (published in 1896) described Wadhouse as the following:
i saw a woman a massive nose this week. it made me think of how that sort of thing would have been something that people would have worried about in i don't know the 19th century, whereas now the same anxieties are focused on like thigh gaps and lats
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Probably if it was seven inches long she would have worried now... in fact, to be honest, people can worry about anything can't they, it's a horrible thing that kind of personal paranoia about the part of you that you really hate and no amount of sensible persuasion can change your mind... but I digress, yeah I take your point, the centres of self-loathing have moved over the years, decades, centuries. I dunno if that's good, bad or indifferent but they have.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This sounds like it ought to be a proto-punk garage-psych band that released an almost unlistenable 7" in 1966 before all of its members got sectioned following a massive acid binge, but unfortunately it isn't.

 
Top