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STRANGESIGHTS: THE ‘COVFEFE’ MYSTERY; A BODEGA MADE OF FELT; AND, SPELLING IN THE US…

Covfefe tweet

DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…

Covfefe tweet

It’s the tweet typo that’s taken on a life of its own and jumped out of the Twitterverse to appear on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs and even a car licence plate. Little did US President Donald Trump expect such attention when, in the early hours of last Wednesday, he wrote: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” OK, so sounds like it started on a familiar theme, but just what was ‘covfefe’ supposed to mean? Trump, who deleted the tweet later that morning, responded to the attention it was already garnering with another tweet: “Who can figure out the true meaning of “covfefe” ??? Enjoy!” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer added fuel to the fire in a press conference held later that day when, asked what it meant, he responded rather cryptically: “The President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant”. There’s been no shortage of guesses since but we have to concede that ‘coverage’ does seem like the most logical answer.

It’s a convenience store with a difference – all the products are made of felt. British artist Lucy Sparrow, following a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise $US53,000, has created an art installation called ‘8 ‘Till Late’ (a play on 7 Eleven) in a boutique hotel in New York. The work – a life-sized replica of one of Manhattan’s famous bodegas (the NYC version of a milkbar) – took Sparrow and a team of 10 nine months to stitch up and features everything from felt cans of Coke to felt frozen pizzas and felt band-aids. There’s even a bodega cat known as Krampuss. And everything is available for purchase with prices ranging from $US15 up into the thousands. The display, which follows on from Sparrow’s earlier felt recreation of a corner shop in London, will be on show at The Standard, High Line, in the Meatpacking District for four weeks.

It’s Scripp’s National Spelling Bee time in the US and to mark the occasion, Google has compiled a list of the most misspelled words in the US. Based on searches asking how to spell particular words and compiled by state, they include ‘beautiful’ (California, Ohio, Kentucky, New York and Minnesota), ‘liar’ (Rhode Island), ‘sauerkraut’ (Pennsylvania), and ‘hallelujah’ (Indiana and Delaware). ‘Chihuahua’ also makes the list (South Carolina and Arkansas) as does ‘pneumonia’ (Maine, Michigan, Alabama and Washington) but our prize goes to the residents of the state of Wisconsin whose most misspelled word was…errr…. ‘Wisconsin’.

 

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