And in today’s front page, an article of especial interest to our in-house cheese expert, @Qadgop_the_Mercotan : using cheese to tell fortunes! One of the practitioners of the art says that one of the best things about tyromancy is that after your fortune is told, you get to eat the cheese! Beats all the fortune-telling methods based on examining the raw liver or intestines …
Hey, @JaneDoe42 is a cheese-maker. Wonder what she’ll have to say. 
Good catch!
“Blessed are the cheese makers …”
Tyromancy’s a great hobby, but beware of Pyschopathia Cheesealis. This disorder is described in National Lampoon Magazine June 1974 issue. I still have my copy.
Elogio del Horizonte (“Eulogy of the Horizon”) is a large concrete sculpture in Gijón, Spain.
Fans describe it as “a symbol of the city”.
Critics describe it as “King Kong’s toilet”. (Click on the link to see a photograph.)
Today’s front page has this in the « Did you know… » category:
that Seunghan (pictured) was forced out of his band because of a cigarette and a kiss?
So I checked the article. Seunghan was a member of a boy band, put together by a company that specializes in developing boy bands. The article just says this:
On November 22, 2023, in response to leaked photos from prior to his debut that showed him kissing a woman and smoking a cigarette, SM announced that Seunghan would take an indefinite hiatus from Riize.
Smoking a cigarette I can kinda see (corrupting the morals of the youth, etc).
But what’s so scandalous about kissing a woman? Are Korean boy band members supposed to be chaste? Only interested in teenage girls, not older women? Or presumed to be only interested in BL (gasp) ?
Well, I’m far from an expert on Kpop, but it seems that part of the appeal is that they seem at least potentially available as romantic interests to the fans. Any sign of them being spoken for romantically seems to cause big problems.
Yes. Male and female idols in Japan and Korea have insane expectations on them. If you break the illusion that they are saving themselves just for you (not you specifically) insane obsessed fans go totally apeshit.
Fascinating. Thank you.
Hey! A Saskatchewanian made it to the cover of the Rolling Stone I mean, the front page of Wikipedia, in the “Did you know?” category:
Did you know … that Murad Al-Katib provided 700 million meals of Saskatchewan-grown chickpeas, lentils and wheat to a United Nations program for Syrian refugees?
Murad Al-Katib (born 1972)[1] is an agricultural entrepreneur and the president and CEO of AGT Food and Ingredients Inc. Al-Katib has built a global vertically-integrated supply chain for pulses, making plant-based proteins an integral Saskatchewan export.[2][3] He has been called the “Lentil King of Saskatchewan”.[3][4] Murad Al-Katib received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Saskatchewan Alumni Association in 2024[3] and the Oslo Business for Peace Award in 2017.[5][6]
This article was on the front page a couple of days ago. For 550 years, the statutes of the University of Oxford required candidates for the Master of Arts to swear that they would not be reconciled with Henry Symeonis. But nobody knew who Henry Symeonis was, or why they should not be reconciled with him. The oath was finally repealed in the early 19th century.
There’s a longer and more amusing version of the Henry Symeonis story here.
He knows what he did!
I suppose falsely claiming an Oxford degree while still living in town is sorta like a scab worker in the unionized world: an unforgiveable and unexpungeable sin against all that is holy. One usually good for a beating or three if you hang around much.
The second article makes it sound like Henry was expelled for murdering somebody, got a pardon, got the king to “suggest” he be readmitted to the school, the school admins declined, so Henry went ahead and claimed he’d graduated anyway. Call it aggravated degree-stealing. I’d see how the administration might be … aggravated over that move.
if Henry continued being a dick about it for decades later, I could also see some vindictive shit in charge of Oxford at the time wanting to get the last laugh.
Which also makes me wonder how many other ancient and revered texts around the world have equal measures of residual nonsense embedded in them?
You only have to look at the laws on the books in various US States to find residual nonsense that probably made sense at some time but technology made it obsolete or covered some weird unique edge case. The former State Senator from my district made it his mission to remove some of the ones in California and his staff found thousands of obsolete or redundant statutes that were eventually eliminated.
The main fencing statute in NZ allows for the access of workmen and their hovercraft (among other modes of transport). You will probably be unsurrised to know that this legislation was drafted in the 1970s.
Laika and the Cosmonauts is one of my favorite surf/instrumental rock bands.
An elderly French woman was having to move out of her house, so her family had an estate company come in to take a look to see if there was anything of value.
One of the estate workers noticed an old painting that she kept over her hot plate. They asked her where it came from and she couldn’t remember. Russia, maybe? The estate workers thought they should send it for an appraisal.
It eventually sold at auction for €24 million, and is now in the Louvre. Turned out to be a 13th century painting by an artist named Cimabue, from a transition period from Byzantine icons to more naturalistic works.
Currently “Today’s Featured Picture”