We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,218,869-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This week’s entry: Quick hits
What it’s about: Lots of things! Over the years, we’ve come across Wikipedia articles that fascinated or amused to some degree, but were too short to write a full column about. So for the next few weeks, we’re going to shake up the format, and move through our 6,218,869-part series a bit faster by tackling multiple subjects in brief.
World’s Longest Hot Dog: There is no more bitterly contentious issue in our divided nation than whether a hot dog is a sandwich. But there’s also a surprising amount of controversy over who has made the world’s longest hot dog. The now-dissolved Sara Lee company made a 1,996-foot dog for the ’96 Olympic Games in Atlanta, but that record is disputed, as while the hot dog was that long, the bun was produced in segments. Many consider a continuous bun necessary to holding the record because the bun is, as Wikipedia artfully puts it, “an integral part of the hot dog unit.”
The dog-and-bun record set in 2001 was a far less-impressive 15.3 feet, but that record quickly escalated until we passed the 50-foot-hot-dog barrier in 2005, and 100 feet in 2006; the current record stands at 718 feet, for a hot dog made in the German town of Flensburg. The real reason the bun is a contentious issue is that making a long hot dog is fairly easy. Per Wikipedia, “the hot dog is structurally quite sound, and remarkably flexible.” As hot dogs are simply casings full of processed meat, it’s not that difficult to create a long casing almost indefinitely.
Baking a bun hundreds of feet long is more of an undertaking. When the All-Japan Bread Association set the record in 2006, their 198-foot bun was baked on a conveyer belt that passed through several ovens at a constant speed, so the bread would be baked evenly.
London Underground Mosquito: Culex molestus is a variety of mosquito found on every continent besides Antarctica, but it’s popularly known as the London Underground Mosquito because in that city (and a few others), it’s found in the subway tunnels, but almost never above ground. (The bugs notoriously assaulted Londoners hiding out in the tunnels during the Blitz during WWII.)
Onfim: Novgorod, Russia, is surrounded by birch forests, and for centuries locals used the bark of those soft trees for writing. As a result, more than 1100 pieces of bark with ancient writing have been found in the last 70 years. Among the most notable are a collection of 17 pieces of bark from a 13th-century schoolboy known as Onfim. Aged 6 or 7 at the time of writing, he used a bark that isn’t that different than a modern child’s school notebook. Alongside practicing letters, syllables, and phrases (largely from the Book Of Psalms), he drew childish illustrations of knights, horses, pictures of his friends and his teacher, as well as, “himself, disguised as a fantastic animal.”
Clowns Gallery-Museum: That the vestry of Holy Trinity Church in Somerset, England, has been turned into a museum devoted to clowns is strange enough. But stranger still, the museum has a collection of eggs painted with clown makeup. Tradition dictates that no two clowns use the same make-up design, so everyone who joins that unusual fraternity paints their own design onto an egg and submits it to the museum, which confirms that their clown face is in fact unique to that performer. The gallery also has a branch in nearby Wookey Hole, one of those small English towns seemingly design to convince Americans the entire country is a whimsical land populated by hobbits and nannies who travel by umbrella.
Japanese Addressing System: America’s largest city, New York, is organized by a grid of helpfully numbered streets. The world’s largest city, Tokyo, is organized by a confounding mess in which most streets, as U2 observed, have no names. Instead, addresses across Japan include a house number and a numbered city block. However, city blocks are numbered from oldest to newest as cities have expanded over time, so there’s rarely any geographical order to the numbers, making the system baffling to outsiders.
To make things worse, some cities have their own system. Japanese addresses also include city district (chō), but Kyoto’s districts are tiny, numerous, and the city has multiple chōs with the same name. Sapporo is at least more organized—the city is divided into quadrants (much like Portland’s addresses all including NW/NE/SW/SE), with the block number indicating distance from the city center. Some cities in Ishikawa Prefecture don’t number their blocks, instead using…
Iroha: The Iroha is a famous Japanese poem dating at least as far back as 1079. It’s a pangram, which contains each kana (the symbols for syllables that make up Japanese characters) exactly once. English pangrams—like, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or “Jovial egomaniac failed Trebek’s poxy quiz show”—repeat characters, as a 26-letter pangram in English is impossible without resorting to abbreviations, as in, “Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.”
Because of Iroha’s elegant use of language, it’s effectively used as alphabetical order in Japanese, with Ishikawa’s block-lettering system in “Iroha order.”
Further Down the Wormhole: Iroha has changed over time along with the Japanese language, and the original version contains characters which are now only used in Okinawan. That language is specific to the southern half of the Okinawa Islands, among Japan’s smallest and most southernmost islands. It’s also spoken in Brazil, as that country has a sizable Japanese immigrant community, and the state of São Paulo in particular has made an effort to preserve the language. São Paulo, which contains the city of the same name, is the wealthiest of Brazil’s 26 states, and its industrial base includes factories of several American companies, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola.
Now that we’re settled into the New Year, we will return to our regular one-article-per-week format. We’ll take a taste of Vin Mariani, the Pope-endorsed cocaine wine that may have been Coca-Cola’s inspiration, next week.
44 Comments
Yes, Hot Dog w/brown mustard & onions is foods from the Gods. Fact. Or maybe only current personal opinion cause am very hungry right now ie empty stomach.Other stuff – Another Ebay Purchase Arrived Today & Now Playing on Boombox: My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts: Brian Eno + David Byrne. Next Up: Dbl cd of Kinks – Ultimate Collection. 2nd copy. Ist copy scratched beyond, etc. Also clown painting in Nuevo Laredo, Mex. residence, hallway, in Judy G.’s home [longtime family friend & most beautiful woman beyond desript etc.] always scared sh*t outta me.
Addendum: Was 3-4 year old child. Mexico scared me very much back then. The air
sorta≤/del> very much stunk* when You crossed the border to Nuevo Laredo. The women were very beautiful & rich. Should’ve marry one of those hispanic babes @ 20-21 years of age. Am now between 50 – 60 years of age & have always been ‘single’ though mostly happily coupled till year 2,000. Hello B.E.D. [Zurich, Switzerland] & S.E.C. [Nation of Hawaii]. Still drink too much beer.¯\_(ツ)_/¯*FU Donald ‘Jefe’ Drumpftard. Didn’t vote for you. Am Democrat. You will soon disappear. Most Americans Hate You. Fact.There is no more bitterly contentious issue in our divided nation than whether a hot dog is a sandwich.Rejoice, then, for the entire question has been resolved: https://cuberule.com/ which demonstrates that a hot dog is, in fact, a taco.
**Faints in awe**
Whenever I see this posted I can’t tell if the poster is taking it seriously. I know that some people in the world do, and despair.Best touch is calling a category “sushi”, while putting sushi in the “toast” category.
I mean, it’s only as serious as the concept of needing to categorize food is, which isn’t all that important for most purposes, most of the time. Categorization and labelling are useful as shorthands but eventually you need more detail. But the Cube Rule is funny (because of e.g. the sushi thing) so I always post it when it comes up.
Yeah, my main gripe is when it feels like people are posting it earnestly; and it’s hard to tell in the context of hotdog/sandwich debates which can get quite heated.
If you’re doing weird, random Wikipedia articles, might I recommend en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_County,_Nevada just because it never should have existed.
Thanks for the recommendation. That might be the strangest Wikipdia article on a US county that I have ever read… and for some reason, I’ve read too many.
Same boat, man. Why was I reading Category: Defunct Counties of Nevada?
That’s a great one. Adding it to my to-do list!
That’s a shame, Mike, I was enjoying these amuse-bouche version of the main article.
They were fun to write (and frankly, easier), so I’ll probably come back to the format a couple times a year.
Wikipedia is essentially my homepage (well, aside from Google, ya know), but I have loved this weekly column from the get-go. The random bites of the last month have been great and the occasional pop-in would be nice from time to time. Curious: I used to edit Wiki from time to time, never factual, just editing and spelling. When reading up for these articles, do you fix grammatical errors?
As an American who’s been living in England for the past few years (not far from Wookey Hole, in fact), I can confirm that it’s a whimsical land populated by hobbits and nannies who travel by umbrella.
Except for the Nazi insects who live underground and drink the blood of unsuspecting travellers.
Knowing scientists penchant for amusing Latin names I thought Culex Molestus would translate as: pain in the arse. Sadly there seems to have been a disappointing lack of whimsy as Google says it’s Annoying Gnat.
I’ll take the bus instead.
Both translations seem to work out well.Just sayin’.
Wookey Hole is great. It’s a natural feature (a cave) to which a succession of custodians have thought “you know what this place needs?” and come up with a different answer. The collection of vintage seaside arcade machines is probably my favourite incongruous theming.
https://www.wookey.co.uk/caves-and-attractions
I’ll try that again.
https://www.wookey.co.uk/caves-and-attractions
Do they still have cheddar in it?
They do indeed. Cave-aged cheddar. Very nice it is too.
Nice. Love me some cavern-aged cheddar……not just because it tastes good, but because Coles supermarkets down here has it as their own-brand British cheddar under their “Coles Finest” line……and no one buys it. So half the time I go to the supermarket I get that shit for like $9 a kilo on closeout.Best. Cauliflower. Cheese. Ever.
I’ll recommend that to my daughter in FNQ.Although I fear we have headed into a wormhole’s wormhole with this conversation.
Tell her to buy some pantyhose first. Those box jellyfish don’t fuck around. …but I ain’t spending any more time on it because in the meantime, every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in North Queensland.
Cheers for that! She’s more worried about the drop bears.
She’s not a reporter, is she?
But they’re referenced on the Australian Museum website, so they must be real.https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/
In fact you can watch the cheese maturing via a live feed.https://www.wookey.co.uk/cheese-cam/
Ha! I had no idea Sir Terry Pratchet got the clown face painted egg – in men At Arms i think – from real life. It’s such a neat and charmingly practical idea. I have been saving his last few books to read and this reminds me that now is a good time.
It is indeed in Men At Arms. Whenever I come across an article or discussion etc of eggs as repositories (so to speak) of clown makeup— which does not happen often, but happens more than one would think— I think fondly of the book.
Yep, me too.
I love those books .Someone should make a TV show of them .They’d have to use a different name for it than The Watch though , as there’s an unrelated but absolutely fucking terrible TV show using that name, right now. .
mhm, I expected this. Pratchett is so quirky, detailed, and original. And so quintessentially English. leave it to the full Brits to do an adaption.
It also appears in
Oh, the TV show. Because, I didn’t remember in clowns in the Marvel movie.
As in the Steed & Peele Avengers, not the Marvel Comics Avengers.
“Because of Iroha’s elegant use of language, it’s effectively used as alphabetical order in Japanese”Nitpick time (from someone who learned a little Japanese many years ago and then forgot it, but you don’t have to take my word for it): that’s misleading. What the WP article on iroha says is that it’s “*an* ordering for the syllabary”, which is true, but it’s one of several. The rest of the sentence in that article, “…in the same way as the A, B, C, D… sequence of the Latin alphabet”, is the really misleading part which probably gave Mike the wrong idea. A-B-C-D is the only commonly accepted ordering for the Latin alphabet: it’s what’s used in dictionaries, it’s how people are taught the alphabet, it’s what you would expect to see in sorted-by-spelling lists in general (like if you have to pick from alphabetical things on a phone app). In modern Japanese, that’s not iroha. It’s the more predictable gojūon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gojūon): ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, sa-shi-su-se-so, etc. Iroha ordering is a thing people would be likely to know, but it’s kind of old-timey and inconvenient; this is a very bad analogy but if gojūon were Arabic numerals, iroha would be Roman numerals.
The mosquitos who succeed in colonizing Antarctica will be fearsome indeedThe London subway ones are scary though tooMy city had the air force bomb our mosquitos this year they were so bad https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2085404485686/air-force-c-130-aircraft-to-help-spray-mosquitoes-in-aftermath-of-delta
There are several English pangrams with no abbreviations.“Junky qoph flags vext crwd zimb” means that an Abyssinian fly playing a Celtic violion was annoyed by trashed flags that had the 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet on them.“Quartz glyph job vex’d cwm finks” means that the job of carving runes into quartz was bothering ne’er-do-wells from a river valley in Wales.