A copycat!!!

If you are reading this, you're probably a geek like me. And if you are a geek, then you're probably familiar with Something Awful. Well, it turns out that they did something similar to what I do here... a writer compiled the best entries from a forum thread titled "The Least Essential Wikipedia Pages". Though I try not to be critical (and indeed, avoid negativity), they have highlighted some interesting articles.

A few of the articles on their list are ones that I have already covered, such as list of animals with fraudulent diplomas (February 8), defecation postures(February 4), and I was fairly certain that I had already linked to File:DefecatingSeagull.jpg at some point, but I guess it was in a draft that didn't get posted. I first came across this article when it was mentioned in this week's issue of the Signpost, the English Wikipedia's community newsletter.

Judaism in Rugrats isn't as strange as it sounds. You don't think of children's cartoons on Nickelodeon that aired in the 1990s as a pioneer or a venue for social change, but the simple fact is that non-Christian religions in the United States have rarely been mainstream in the media (except for criticism) until the last few years. Many of the cast and crew, including the creators, are Jewish, and they several themes relevant to that culture, including a Chanukah and a Passover specials.

The "Maccababies" from the Rugrats episode "A Rugrats Chanukah"

They have a point with mathematical joke: it doesn't strike me as particularly worthy of an encyclopedia entry. However, it has a cool featured image based on a topology pun:

The coffee mug turns into a torus (donut). So geeky that even I couldn't bring myself to LOL.

Okay, listing Pogs#Military_uses doesn't make any sense to me. It's a subsection of an article, not an article itself, so it has looser restrictions on notability. I have dozens of these things at home, and some of them are quite cool. The military exchange services saved money by using these pog "gift certificates" (issued in the same denominations as US coins) instead of shipping heavier coins to overseas bases. They might be a bit obscure if you aren't related to the military in some way, but there is a sizable collector's market for them.

I suppose I should probably find a weekend to drive down to Fort Bragg and get rid of them, but I don't think I would get enough back to cover the gas I'd spend.

Okay... there is way too much detail at Strawberry Shortcake#Criticisms. That there are such dedicated fanboys (fangirls?) for this franchise is not that shocking, but that it seeped onto the article is.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana is a saying used to demonstrate some language phenomena such as word play (pun, double entendre, antanaclasis), syntactic ambiguity, and garden path sentence. In simpler terms, it proves that grammatically correct phrases can be formed in ways that allow more than one reasonable interpretation; and can be constructed in a way to be misleading without being wrong. It took me a few minutes to get all of the meanings: in that time goes by quickly, a command to record the speed of an insect, that fruit does not fly aerodynamically, and that insects enjoy bananas.

Zoophilia and health... OK, really? Bad enough that the article exists, but it's worse that they had references. Seriously, who the hell does medical research on bestiality?

My surprise at handkerchief code is not so much that the article exists, but that the code exists. And the fact that the list of codes is so extensive is a bit unnerving as well.

Death erection refers to boners after death, not death by boner. It seems like a legitimate medical topic to me, albeit a bit of a strange curiosity, and there is sufficient medical research into this anomaly to justify the article.

Kite Eating Tree seems like an easy merge and redirect to the article on Peanuts to me, especially since it lacks references. This fancruft speculates that the "character" might move after eating Charlie Brown's kites because there is no evidence of the "bones" (stick frames) it spits out when it's done. Good Grief!

Fictional last words in webcomics and Fictional last words in video games are entries on WikiQuote, not Wikipedia. Their whole mission is to transcribe stuff like this, so it's not that odd.

There is a lengthy quote from list of things which are neither production nor consumption, which redirects to anthropological theories of value, but the quote is itself a quote from David Graeber.

The article phantom kangaroo is iffy. Ghost stories aren't really to be taken seriously, but the fact that reports get published lends some import, not to mention that they tend to crop up in places where you'd never see a kangaroo.

Dr. Thunder is a list of generic branded Dr Pepper knockoffs, and could easily be redirected to that article or the one on pepper soda. Have you ever noticed that there is no period in "Dr Pepper"??

The sign is kinda funny, and harkens back to the paradoxy entry I made last month.

List of birds on stamps of Aden Protectorate States, Seiyun: a list with one entry about a place that doesn't exist anymore (what is now Yemen) that nobody had ever heard of, relating to a collecting hobby that few practice anymore, without any references or context? At least the Magpie is a fairly common bird.

Cow blowing: a method of increasing milk production (by blowing air over a cow's vagina) so obscure that even third world nations don't do it anymore.

This entry isn't at all a joke: mirror test. It's a legitimate and well-accepted psychology test that measures an animal's self-awareness by seeing if they can recognize themselves in a mirror. In fact, it's such a common cognitive marker that psychologists refer to the mirror stage in the development of human babies.

CamelCase isn't that odd, but it's funny that the title is written in camel case. Another language article, glossary of fan fiction terms isn't that odd in and of itself, though some of the entries are funny.

Involuntary celibacy is sad, but there isn't anything interesting about it unless you are a sexologist, psychologist, or sociologist. Same goes with File:Rejection.jpg, which I think was staged just for use in the article.

Well, there you have it: some of it makes sense, some of it doesn't. Happy reading!