Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-12-24/Humour
Humour
I believe in Bigfoot
Have you seen me?
Folklore
Jersey Devil
Cow as a homeomorphism of a sphere, leading to a related mathematical joke that topologists can't tell the difference between a coffee mug and a donut[1]
| Bird people | The widely recurring motif in legends and fiction of birds who are people, or people who are birds. |
| Behind the sofa | Where young British children hid from menacing scenes in sci-fi TV, now recalled humorously and nostalgically by British adults. |
| Bigfoot trap | Believed to be the world's only Bigfoot trap. |
 Cottingley Fairies
|
A successful photographic hoax in 1910s England. |
| Easter Bilby | How do you have an Easter Bunny in a country that has had a bad experience with rabbits? With an Easter Bilby of course! |
| Kaspar Hauser | A German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell, and was once thought to be linked to the princely House of Baden. |
| Icelandic Elf School | Possibly the only school granting elf-spotting degrees. (Though certificates are also available from John Oliver.) |
| Josiah S. Carberry | An expert on cracked pots, and one of only three fictional people to have won the Ig Nobel Prize. |
| Machine elf | An entity that people claim they become aware of after having taken tryptamine based psychedelic drugs such as DMT. |
| Man-eating tree | Hoaxes and unsubstantiated reports in Madagascar and elsewhere. |
| Monkey-man of New Delhi | Reports in 2001 of a strange monkey-like creature appearing in New Delhi at night and attacking people. |
| Phantom social workers | Mysterious claims of "social workers" seeking to abduct infants and children. |
| Proverbs commonly attributed to be Chinese | ...although they're probably not. |
| Reptilian humanoid | A recurring theme in fiction, especially science fiction, pseudoscientific theories and conspiracy theories. |
| Rods | Photographic anomalies which some think are undiscovered flying creatures or miniature UFOs. |
| Russian reversal | In Soviet Russia, Wikipedia edits YOU! |
| Spring Heeled Jack | A mysterious character said to have existed in England during the Victorian age. |
| Telling the bees | An alternative explanation for the declining bee population. |
| Titivillus | The patron demon of scribes, responsible for many errors. |
| Tsukumogami | According to Japanese folklore, if you keep your straw sandals (or any other household items) around for 100 years, they may become "alive and aware" and develop eyes and sharp teeth. |
| Vampire pumpkins and watermelons | A folk legend from the Balkan peninsula of south-eastern Europe based upon the idea that any inanimate object left outside during the night of a full moon will become a vampire. |
| Vril | A belief that aliens controlled Nazi Germany and helped Hitler and others to escape to the South Pole when the war was lost. |
| Well to Hell | A 9-mile (14 km) borehole drilled by Soviet scientists uncovers the sounds of millions of damned souls. Hot stuff. |
| Witch window | A superstitious practice in the State of Vermont to prevent witches from flying through open windows at night. |
| Monsters under the bed | I promise to write this one so I can be on the main page on 4/1/2019 – Barbara |
Mystery animals and animal folklore
Looks a load of Bonnacon to me...
Pieter Dirkx's imagining of the Mongolian death worm
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That's either one fast-growing plant, or...
| Bonnacon | A mythical ox which flings burning dung at its enemies from its rear and horn. |
| Cattle mutilation | The alleged killing and subsequent mutilation of cattle, sheep or horses by unknown perpetrators. Some say they may be aliens. |
| Chupacabra | A legendary creature in the folklore of parts of the Americas, generally reported in Latin America, that preys on livestock. An episode of the X-files proves this is true. |
| Dog spinning | Do Bulgarians really twizzle their domestic canines to foretell prosperity? The British Green Party thinks so, and they're not happy about it. |
| Drop bear | A fictitious Australian marsupial supposedly related to the koala. |
| Entombed animal | Tales of live toads and other creatures encased in stone. |
| Fearsome critters | North American lumberjack folklore, with Axhandle hounds and jackalopes. |
| Flying pig | The classic impossibility has been officially proved possible by the Internet Engineering Task Force: "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." |
| Gef the talking mongoose | A poltergeist-like creature which claimed to have been an 80-year-old Indian mongoose, alleged to have haunted a Manx cottage during the 1930s. |
| Humanzee | A hypothetical(?) human/chimpanzee hybrid. |
| Hodag | The animal of Rhinelander, Wisconsin and has been confronted by Scooby Doo |
| Jersey Devil | A mythological creature said to inhabit the New Jersey Pine Barrens. This another reason why we should just give New Jersey to Canada as a gesture of good will. |
| Liver bird | A legendary cormorant or eagle that is the symbol of a major English city. |
| Lluvia de Peces | It's raining fish in Honduras. |
| Mongolian death worm | A large, bright red worm that kills using acid and electrical discharges – allegedly. |
| Montauk Monster | Actually a decaying raccoon... or is it? |
| Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus | An endangered creature, whose major predator is the Sasquatch. Apparently. |
| Phantom kangaroos | They're not just found in Australia. |
| Popobawa | A bat-winged monster from Zanzibar said to sodomize people during election campaigns. |
| Pig-faced women
|
A lesson never to compare a person's children to pigs when pregnant, lest you be cursed. |
| Rat king | Not the rodent monarch familiar from The Nutcracker, but a rare (some say nonexistent) phenomenon in which a group of rats grow up with their tails tangled in a knot. |
 Rhinogradentia
|
A fictitious mammal order documented by an equally fictitious German naturalist. |
| Sidehill gouger | Fictional creatures said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the southwestern sandhills of Saskatchewan. |
| Spherical cow | "Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum..." |
| Vegetable Lamb of Tartary | Money might not grow on trees, but maybe sheep do. |
Reffs
- ^ Hubbard, John H.; West, Beverly H. (1995). Differential Equations: A Dynamical Systems Approach. Part II: Higher-Dimensional Systems. Texts in Applied Mathematics. Vol. 18. Springer. p. 204. ISBN 978-0-387-94377-0.
Attribution goes to all the contributors to this Wikipedia page, WP:Unusual articles. Their names can be found here.
Discuss this story
I thot I would just browse through these quickly, but there are some fascinating links! thanks, --Doncram (talk) 08:06, 26 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- NOT ONE mention of Mothman...SO SADCoal town guy (talk) 19:12, 26 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- (Mothman) :D DiplomatTesterMan (talk) 07:02, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Mothman deserves to be here. Or is it mothperson, moth-he/she/it, moth-gender neutral pronoun? Best Regards, Barbara ✐✉ 18:56, 13 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Brilliant! Elfabet (talk) 21:19, 10 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]