* Nelson Rockefeller, former vice president of the US and heir to the Rockefeller family fortune, died in 1979 of a heart attack at age 70, reportedly while having sex with his secretary, Megan Marshack. The unusual circumstances surrounding his death caused the New York Magazine to quip: “Nelson thought he was coming, but he was going.”
* Former US president Barack Obama revealed possible plans to privately perform ‘Gangnam Style’ for his spouse, Michelle Obama.
* There is a Swiss political party dedicated to opposing the use of PowerPoint.
MORE TO THE (POWER)POINT, did you know that Wikipedia could be a purveyor of such fun information? Annie Rauwerda, 22, did. That is why she started the Instagram account, @depthsofWikipedia, where she deep-dives into the bowels of the website and mines it for the most bizarre, wacky and fun trivia. Rauwerda, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, started the account during the pandemic.
“Wikipedia is the best thing on the internet,” she told The New York Times. “It is what the internet was supposed to be. It has this hacker ethos of working together and making something.”
Unlike what she believes, the internet was not made for the purpose of disseminating trivia. In fact, it was first invented for military purposes, when the Cold War necessitated communication links that could not be intercepted by the enemy. Subsequently, all sorts of people infiltrated the web for waging war of different sorts―trolls spewed hatred, fundamentalists used it for purposes that were anything but fundamental, and the political right, left and everything in between used it as a battleground to detonate their own agenda. In between all these lethal spaces were pockets of people armed with the most explosive weapon of mass destruction―humour. Tucked away in hidden corners of the web are gems like OctoNation, the largest octopus fan club on Facebook “filled with artists, underwater photographers/ videographers, researchers and a ton of cephalopod enthusiasts”. It is a treasure house of all things ‘Octopussy’.
Then there is ‘Dinosaurs Against Christians Who Are Against Dinosaurs’―a Facebook group that emphasises that it is not atheist or anti-Christian. It is just against “those people pretending to be Christians who don’t believe dinosaurs ever existed”. On a less Jurassic note, there is ‘A Group Where We Pretend to be Boomers’, where the members, most of whom are millennials or Gen Z, pretend to be baby boomers. The group mostly posts in ‘boomerspeak’―replete with purposeful spelling mistakes, words in all caps, slang and GIFs.
Then there is ‘Genuinely Stoked Goats’, another Facebook group that is about ‘everything goat to fill the hole in your life’. There are memes, posts and pictures of goats playing on sheet metal, goats travelling on trucks, goats riding on pigs, goats yelling like humans…. The group has over 173K followers.
“Back when I was still at secondary school, we had some sort of test that everyone did quite badly in,” says Lauren Cunningham, who started the page eight years ago. “I decided to post a picture of a happy goat to my Facebook account to cheer my friends up, and everyone liked it, so I said I would post one daily for the rest of the year. Everyone got really into it, and strangers from different schools started adding me on Facebook to see the daily goats; they had heard about it from their friends. So, I figured I would start a public page so that everyone could see the goats there, and it just took off.” Cunningham is currently studying animal science in New Zealand.
Cunningham’s goat fetish might be unusual, but what is not unusual is for people with similar kinds of fetishes to band together. Take any group, and no matter how niche, the statistical probability is that it exists. Are there groups for Bengalis with baldness? Probably. People who believe Harry Potter really exists? Highly likely. People who believe Harry Styles is a benevolent alien sent from another planet to spy on humanoids? That’s probably taking it too far. But the truth is that, the internet is a playground for people with similar interests to invent all sorts of games and let loose their inner glorious oddness. Human oddities, after all, can swing from one end of the pendulum to the other. That is why evil Voldemort and funny Wodehouse both have a fan following. “We talk about P.G. Wodehouse books and quotes and about Wodehouse ‘sightings’ (newspaper or online articles about Wodehouse), hold quizzes and discussions and organise virtual or offline meet-ups,” says Shashank Sinha, the electrical engineer who started WodehouseIndia on Yahoogroups in 2000. For them, Wooster, Jeeves and co. are family. Wodehouse quotes such as “Roderick Spode? Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at 60 paces?” can crack them up from 60 paces away. They speak, live and breathe Wodehouse.
Pictures of cats carrying cash, memes of celebrities in awkward positions, screenshots of texts from your ex, funny Larry David jokes―the internet has space for them all. And maybe, in these tumultuous times, it is worth hunting them out. Paraphrasing the great Han Solo, “May the farce be with them.”