Wikipedia fights off boredom with pencil fighting, paint drying, and Ray Bradbury

We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,937,751-part monthly series, Wiki Wormhole.

This week’s entry: Quick Hits

What it’s about: Lots of things! We often come across Wikipedia articles that fascinate or amuse to some degree, (often by reading Instagram’s excellent Depths Of Wikipedia), but are too short to write a full column about. So instead of one long topic, we’re going to run down several short ones.

Pencil Fighting: Pre-smartphones, there was no greater source of creative energy than middle school kids trying not to go out of their minds from boredom in study hall. Paper football, coin hockey, dots and boxes, scratching your hand over and over in the same spot to see if you could draw blood (real thing kids in my middle school did!), but none of them capture pubescent children’s unending desire to break things better than pencil fighting. The game is simple: one person holds a pencil horizontally between two hands, the other hits it with their own pencil. They then switch places. Whoever’s pencil breaks first loses. And because some bored pubescent children never grow up, there’s an adult World Extreme Pencil Fighting League in Seattle (we would have guessed Portland) with referees, penalties, and a championship belt. 

Paint Drying: Speaking of boredom, British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton’s 2023 film is exactly what its title suggests: 10 hours and seven minutes of white paint drying on a brick wall. He shot the film as a protest against censorship by the British Board of Film Classification—submitting the film to the board meant the members had to watch the movie in its entirety. He originally shot 14 hours of footage, but the BBFC has a per-minute rate to review films. Release the director’s cut!

Scientific Wild-Ass Guess: The acronym-loving U.S. military coined the term SWAG for a rough estimate (or, more eloquently, scientific wild-ass guess). The term originated in the 1960s, but came to prominence when Washington Post reporter John F. Harris described President Bill Clinton’s estimate of troop numbers in Kosovo as a SWAG.

China National Highway 110 Traffic Jam: China’s car culture has expanded exponentially in recent decades, and in the late 2000s, traffic on National Highway 110 grew by 40% every year. Things reached a breaking point in August of 2010, when road construction caused a traffic jam that involved thousands of vehicles stretching across 100 kilometers, and lasted 12 days. Local vendors flocked to the scene to sell stranded drivers bottled water, instant noodles, and cigarettes, all at a high mark-up. 

Hollywood Freeway Chickens: Everyone in Los Angeles is also stuck in highway traffic, including a colony of feral chickens that have lived under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of highway 101 since 1970. They quickly became local celebrities, inspiring a Terry Pratchett short story and countless theories as to how they came to arrive there. Theories include 12-year-old twin sisters liberating “two pillowcases full” of baby chicks from a farm and not knowing where else to put them; a man claimed he relocated his pet chickens after a neighbor complained; but the most-accepted explanation is that a poultry truck overturned on 101 and the colony is descended from the chickens on that truck. 

Palm Dog: Since 2001, the Cannes Film Festival has given an award for the best canine performance in a film. (The name is a plan on the Palme d’Or, although why it’s not the Palme d’Og is a mystery.) Recent winners include Kodi (Dog On Trial), Messi (Anatomy Of A Fall), and Britney (War Pony). Grand Jury prizes and special awards are handed out (including a DogManitarian Award, given most recently to Isabella Rossselini), and the rules are flexible enough to include the entire four-legged cast of films like Mondovino, Mid Road Gang, and White God, as well as the fox from Antichrist. (As Wikipedia notes, “rules were bent.”)

Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury: Rachel Bloom is best-known as the star and co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but she got her start with a 2010 viral YouTube video of a parody of teen pop songs, in which she spins a fantasy about the then-89-year-old science fiction author in, as Wikipedia puts it, “rather sexually explicit language.” The video was nominated for a Hugo Award, and Bradbury himself apparently viewed it on his 90th birthday. Author Mark Edward reports that Bradbury “was charmed” and watched it with a “wise old knowing gleam in his eyes.”  

Further down the Wormhole: Bloom’s video was inspired by a re-reading of Bradbury’s 1950 classic The Martian Chronicles, a short story collection about various human expeditions to Mars. One story, “Night Meeting,” is a Day Of The Dead-inspired ghost story, but not Bradbury’s first. Three years earlier, he wrote “The Next In Line,” a horror story about a visit to Mexican catacombs. Catacombs are underground spaces used for burial or other religious purposes, as opposed to your garden-variety tunnel. A tunnel can serve any number of purposes, including helping men work through their midlife crises. We’ll look at hobby tunneling in the new year.