DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
PICTURE: Camille Orgel/Unsplash.
• You can stop fighting – it’s official ‘bestie’, ‘ew’ and the ever-useful-for-getting-rid-of-that-q ‘qapik’ are all now words accepted in the Scrabble board game. Merriam-Webster has published a list of the new words included in the 2018 Scrabble Dictionary. As well as the aforementioned words for “a person who someone likes very much”, a term “used to express disgust”, and a variation on ‘gopik’, a “monetary subunit of the manat (Azerbaijan)”, the new words include ‘frowny’ (“showing a frown”), ‘bizjet’ (“a small airplane used for business”) and ‘twerk’ (“to dance by shaking the buttocks while squatting”).
• A robot-made “Rembrandt” will go up for sale at Christie’s auction house in New York next month. The Portrait of Edmond Belamy, one of a group of paintings of the fictional Belamy family created by a Paris-based collective, Obvious, was created by a robot using an algorithm which learns to generate new images after being shown existing paintings (15,000 portraits in this case). The painting, which is expected to garner between $US7,000 and $US10,000, has a blurry finish but resembles an Old Master such as those painted by Rembrandt. It goes up for auction in late October. The collective have reportedly previously sold another painting, The Count of Belamy, for $US10,000 to a Paris-based collector.
• Hitler and Lennin are facing off in an election in Peru. Hitler Alba Sanchez is reportedly running against Lennin Vladimir Rodriguez Valverde in the bid to become the Andes town of Yungar’s next mayor. Sanchez, who previously served as mayor between 2011 and 2014 and is using the slogan “I’m the good Hitler” as part of his campaign, says his parents were unaware of the Nazi leader when he was born.
• It was an embarassing day for airline Cathay Pacific. The airline has had to send one of its planes for a makeover after an ‘f’ was left off its branding, leaving it with the rather forlorn ‘Cathay Paciic’. Much fun obviously ensued when the mistake was revealed on the web.
https://t.co/20SRQpKXET”>pic.twitter.com/20SRQpKXET</a></p>— Cathay Pacific (@cathaypacific) <a href=”https://twitter.com/cathaypacific/status/1042252802917953536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>September 19, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
