DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
• It may not have felt funny at the time. A woman attending the Newlyn Fish Festival in England was ‘teleported’ across the site when she entered a portable toilet on one side of the town’s harbour, only to find herself on the other side when she came out. But don’t worry, there was nothing otherworldly about her transportation, the move reportedly happened when a forklift picked the toilet up and transported her across the site while she was inside. “I think she was suffering from a bit of shock or she thought she had teleported across to the other side of the harbour,” the harbourmaster, Rob Parsons, told BBC radio.
• Kishi railway station in Japan has a new stationmaster. And like the previous one, Nitama is a cat. Nitama reportedly had to wait 50 days – marking a period of mourning – after the death of previous stationmaster Tama in April at the ripe old age of 16 (about 80 in cat years) but late last month Nitama was able to take up its new position. Nitama, Tama’s former deputy, apparently beat several other cats for the job (graduating from Cat Stationmaster Training School probably helped).
• ‘Mic drop’, ‘awesomesauce’, and ‘manspreading’ are among new words and phrases added recently to OxfordDictionaries.com’s lexicon. Other new additions include ‘NBD’ (No big deal), ‘SJW’ (Social justice warrior), ‘Grexit’ (Greece plus exit in reference to the possibility of Greece leaving the eurozone), ‘pwned’ (being utterly defeated in video gaming, it apparently comes from mistyping ‘owned’), and the opposite of ‘awesomesauce’, ‘weak sauce’ (something of a disappointing standard). BTW, ‘mic drop’ is likely to mean “an exclamation to emphasize a particularly impressive point” while manspreading refers to “the practice whereby a man, especially one travelling on public transport, adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent seat or seats”.
