Things that make you go WTF

[Condottiere 40K]

[Kyriakos]

Rifki!

[Markas]

[Stívarðr Reynitré]

I want that on boxset...

[Condottiere 40K]

[Stívarðr Reynitré]

I've got a migraine now. Bloody hell...

[Lord Baal]

Wait, wait, wait.... is that... a real promo???

[Kyriakos]

It came from the Desert...

[RubiconDecision]

The 47 Ronin, the most famous tale from Sengoku Japan, that's been the subject of countless renditions in Japan like this



gets turned into this by Hollywood.

WTF

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Yeah that last one confused me. Why not just some magical Keanu is a samurai type of movie. I don't think we needed another adaptation of the 47 Ronin... did we?

[RubiconDecision]

It just is baffling. It's a Neo Goes to Japan movie. It's also the biggest film flop in cinema history too. No one thought it was good. No one attended in such numbers as to pay for it. They picked a guy to direct who had never done an independent or feature film only shorts. It's an utter disaster.

And yes, why another rendition on the most famous historical tale in Japan??? It's supremely weird.

Meanwhile the tale that most needs to be told is Mad Jack Churchill. It's also a WTF story but in a great way.
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/churchill.html
"Jack Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill graduated from Sandhurst Military Academy in 1926 and joined the storied Manchester Regiment of the British Army. He spent his first few years in the army riding his motorcycle across the entire Indian subcontinent (both the paved and the unpaved paths) just for the hell of it and learning to play the bagpipes despite the fact that he was about as Scottish as Shaka Zulu. After about ten years of doing crazy in the army, Jack Churchill retired. In his time off he worked as a newspaper editor, a professional male model and a movie extra, all the while honing his skill at archery and bagpiping on the side. He even represented England in the Archery World Championships in 1939. But guys like Jack Churchill aren't satisfied just by being a bizarre mesh of Robin Hood and Derek Zoolander, so he re-enlisted. And in the early months of 1940, he had his opportunity to prove himself as a distinguished, if not slightly eccentric, officer of the British Army.

He had been shipped to France to assist the rest of the British Expeditionary Force in their mission to reinforce the Maginot Line, but not long after Churchill arrived Hitler decided to send his legions to seriously up France and the Brits found themselves right in the middle of a raging . The British troops were being pushed back towards the sea by the unstoppable Blitzkrieg, doing whatever they could to stall the Germans' relentless advance.

Well Jack Churchill had some ideas. He not only refused to give ground, but he launched small-scale guerrilla raids and surprise attacks on German positions and supply depots. Riding his trusty motorcycle and armed only with a mothering bow and arrow and a Scottish broadsword, he would assault the Germans, catch them completely off-guard, and their up medieval-style. When asked by a fellow officer why Churchill insisted on carrying the broadsword into battle with him, he responded, "In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed".

The man was a maniac and a Hell of a man.


In the old days, Peter O'Toole would have played him. Today, I think Fassbender should do it.

That's actually a really great book if you're looking for a history book that's readable and hysterical too. The chapters are written by Ben Thompson and he's nice enough to put them online at the link. All of the famous soldiers show up in his books.
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/list.html
Don't drink a Coke while reading his chapters or it'll come out through your nose as you laugh.

[ggggtotalwarrior]

That's from Badass of the Week, right? I remember reading about him.

As to the Mike Tyson thing, my reaction was also WTF.

Edit:I saw the link saying it's from Badass of the Week.

[RubiconDecision]

Yeah, since the Rock made the Hercules film, he has a chapter on Hercules.
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=270155699
"Dwayne The Rock “Rock Man” The Rock Johnson has a Hercules movie coming out today. I know very little about it, except that the trailer involves him punching a gigantic Dire Lion in the face, followed by extra-large text explaining that this is the baddest ass movie to feature a man coldcocking a feline of any size directly in the pork chops with a ten-ton knuckle sandwich. But I typically enjoy The Rock’s cinematic performances to the point where my family has a large printed-out photograph of him eating pancakes tacked up in our kitchen, and, honestly, Hercules is the and if you made a movie featuring 90 minutes of non-stop endangered species face-punching you’d still honestly only be covering a very small percentage of what makes the Greek and Roman God of Heroes such an all-time epic mythological wrecking ball.

So, to celebrate me mercifully not bolting myself to a tiny desk at San Diego Comic-Con this year, here’s the over-the-top, action-packed, white-knuckled tale of the unstoppable beefed-out ancient hero, which is completely true in the sense that anything involving ancient mythology can be considered true.

Known in Ancient Greece as Heracles, Ancient Rome as Hercules, and by pretentious proto-hipster Classicist douchebags as Herakles, the ultra-strong, club-wielding Gatekeeper of Olympus was one of the most awesome mythological figures to ever crush a giant monsters’ balls with his bare hands and then celebrate by going nuts and banging every human being with a pulse in a ten mile radius. Serving as the ultimate paragon of manliness, strength, humping chicks (and dudes), and killing ferocious man-eating beats with a big ing wooden club, Hercules was known as the Gatekeeper of Olympus, the Protector of Mankind, and the Patron God of Heroes, Courage, Strength, Gymnasiums, and crushing reps on the deadlift. He’s also the God of Sports, a title that probably comes from the time he challenged the famous boxer Eryx to a match and kicked that guy’s ass so hard he died from it."

Thompson is a helluva author.

[Condottiere 40K]

The Milky Way was recently believed to have a mass three trillion times bigger than that of our sun.
But now scientists have discovered that our Milky Way is lighter than previously thought - with just 800 billion solar masses.
This means it has about half the mass of one of its closest neighbours, the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz38vaqksNl

[Stívarðr Reynitré]

It took me a while to comprehend mass and weight at school. It's all about the effect that gravity can potentially have upon an object, predicated by its size...yadyadyada...

My head hurts when I think in physics.

[RubiconDecision]

After taking multiple physics courses and astronomy, I thought, "These are the rules of the Universe that we know of. Why isn't everyone taking this class?!?!" . It was incredulity followed by wonder followed by almost a spiritual experience. I felt like I was intoxicated. Chemistry was like that too. So was biology but it was more joy-filled, not WTF.

The true WTF moment in undergrad was Women's Studies, being usually one of three or less guys, and not what I had stereotypically imagined the students would look like, but some really bright, sexy, and charming women. Then I thought, "This must be the best kept secret there is on campus."

In graduate school, going through the incredibly dense Robbins Pathology book which weighs a ton and can't be put very well in a backpack, and ruining my eyesight reading it and thinking, "WTF! Does anyone know all of this by heart? Is that even possible?"

Imagine looking at endless slides of tissue samples that are either healthy(a lot of histology) or unhealthy (a major part of path), and then gross deformaties due to disease states like this charming pic:

Or teratomas which are tumors in which the body loses control of growing the proper cell types and so it's almost like a state of pure insanity at a physical level, and the body makes any old kind of cell like hair, teeth, stomach cells, neural tissue in some odd place where it doesn't belong. I would think pathologists have a WTF nightmare every night.


A patient has a mass on his back and it's deep. It requires surgery. You perform it and open him up, and find hair and teeth inside of him in a gelatinous mass, and it's as if his body is trying to grow a monster there. It makes you shudder.

[Kyriakos]

Re Herakles: Whatever, at least 'Herakles' is closer to the original greek term, and like anything it stands to benefit from proximity to the archetype of beauty- which is always Greek

[Stívarðr Reynitré]

Science is not my forte...not even slightly.

I love the wonder of it, but that is merely scratching the surface and watching the odd documentary wherein I feel as though I've educated myself for an hour or so, when really I'm likely gaining very superficial knowledge...the power and allure of Science is exciting to me, but I'm not even going to begin to claim I've got more than a shallow knowledge of things. My WTF moments probably come a hell of a lot sooner than yours!!

History, geography and literature were my huge passions and remain so today.

I have a masters in English Language and Literature and have attained degrees in Classical and Medieval History.

I'll never run out of the thirst I have to investigate periods of history. My current pursuit of knowledge has taken me to the Onin Wars and the Sengoku Jidai - hence the new AAR...

[RubiconDecision]

Science is not my forte...not even slightly.

I love the wonder of it, but that is merely scratching the surface and watching the odd documentary wherein I feel as though I've educated myself for an hour or so, when really I'm likely gaining very superficial knowledge...the power and allure of Science is exciting to me, but I'm not even going to begin to claim I've got more than a shallow knowledge of things. My WTF moments probably come a hell of a lot sooner than yours!!

History, geography and literature were my huge passions and remain so today.

I have a masters in English Language and Literature and have attained degrees in Classical and Medieval History.

I'll never run out of the thirst I have to investigate periods of history. My current pursuit of knowledge has taken me to the Onin Wars and the Sengoku Jidai - hence the new AAR...

You probably would be interested in Karl Friday, though he's something of an irritation to the Japanese scholars, as he's an iconoclast. He's attempting to demystify the samurai, and since he's a prolific writer and public speaker, then featured in documentaries. A ton of that source material hasn't been translated for it's in some arcane Japanese from the period, full of jargon, with obscure kanji so literally like combing through thousands and thousands of other reference works of a hieroglypic-like language.
http://history.uga.edu/people/people.php?page=11

On the traditional side, William Scott Wilson has written extensively on daimyo house codes, which means he's very trusted by the Japanese, and so they gave him access to medieval documents showing a lineage of thought as it evolved from the time of the proto-bushi figures, and the Five Relationships, and what became codified as Bushido. Wilson understands the kokoro of Bushido in almost an eerie way if you believed in reincarnation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Scott_Wilson

[Stívarðr Reynitré]

Brilliant. Thanks!

+rep