The news that knocks off your crossbar

THE most unlikely Olympic meme hero was a 51-year-old pistol shooter from Turkey, Yusuf Dikeç, who won the silver medal in the mixed team 10-metre air pistol competition with Şevval İlayda Tarhan.

What attracted the meme-makers was his cucumber-cool attitude: in his T-shirt and sneakers, without safety gear or frills, he looked like a factotum at the Kraaifontein shooting range casually stepping up to fire a few shots with his buddy’s air rifle.

An online tall tale that he had only recently started shooting – to prove a point to his estranged wife and get his dog back – launched him like a rocket through the memesphere. But when it emerged that it was all nonsense and that he had been competing his whole life, it only added fuel to the fire.

The funny part is that there is nothing unusual about Dikeç. Not his shooting attire, and not the fact that he stands with his free hand in his pocket while he shoots. Okay, sure, at 51 he is quite long in the tooth.

The commotion made some sharp-witted person think of Uncle Paulie from The Sopranos …

If you stayed up last Sunday to see the incredible Swede Armand Duplantis break his own pole vault world record with his final jump, improving it to 6.25 m (the last 10 world records were his), you would have seen that he is also a new fan of Dikeç.

Speaking of, ahem, poles, you surely saw the French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati, whose greatest asset unexpectedly became his greatest liability with his final attempt to clear the bar at 5.7 m. If you don't know what we're talking about, let's put it this way: if he were a woman, he'd have cleared the bar easily.

In a predictable development, a pornography website, CamSoda, has offered Ammirati $250,000 to show his now-famous and evidently considerable penis to the world, this time without his shorts. It is not known whether Ammirati is up for such a venture. – TMZ Sports

Another unlikely hero is the American gymnast Steve Nedoroscik, the pommel horse guy. The pale-skinned Nedoroscik only competes in the pommel horse event and has won the world's hearts with the way he seemingly awakens from a coma just before his performance, removes his glasses, and transforms from a Clark Kent into a Superman-like gymnast.

Nedoroscik has a serious eye condition – he has no depth perception and is highly sensitive to light due to a hole in the structure of his eye. But he is the world champion in his discipline and won bronze at the Games, also helping the American team finally win a medal again.

The magazine Variety believes there should always be a new sport at the Olympic Games that looks like spontaneous and chaotic fun to the uninitiated spectator, and this year it was kayak cross. Four short kayaks race together down a 210m rapid, overcoming various obstacles, in what looks more like water bumper cars than a serious race.

After the soccer match between Mali and Israel, a fervent Zionist uncle and aunt met their match in a pleasant young man who doesn't take nonsense from anyone.

Despite the fact that Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy his own echo chamber and chat with sycophants there all day, exciting things still happen in his life, like when his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, decided to pull him in line on Meta's Threads app...

Another American star who clearly doesn't care if Republicans buy her music is Bette Midler.

Yes, hippos take short flights

A professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College, John Hutchinson, has found that even hippopotamuses are completely in the air for short periods when they trot. This fact has long been known about other mammals that do the usual two-stroke trot (diagonal legs simultaneously on the ground), such as horses and dogs, but it has always been assumed that it is not the same with unusually heavy animals, such as hippopotamuses.

Hutchinson studied hundreds of video sequences, similar to the study that Leland Stanford (founder of Stanford University) conducted in 1872 with an eccentric electrical inventor, Eadweard Muybridge, to show that sometimes a trotting horse's hooves are often all in the air at the same time. Muybridge took series of photographs of a horse at each stage in the trot cycle to show what the human eye cannot see. By the way, fun fact: this exercise of Muybridge led to the invention of moving pictures on a screen – the motion picture! – The Conversation

Remember the milk when you're drawing bullets, Hon!

Entrepreneurs in Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama have just made it even easier to get hold of ammunition for firearms by installing automatic cartridge-vending machines next to the automatic teller machines at supermarkets. More than 4,000 people are shot and killed each year in Texas alone.

Almost a century later and dance moves are catching up, Adolf

A video of Adolf Hitler swaying rhythmically during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin resurfaces every few years with the claim that it is further evidence of the man's addiction to methamphetamine (yes, tik). The credibility of the video is not in doubt, but experts differ on the explanation for his almost spastic movements.

Some say it could be that he was simply excited by the athletics on the field and the film is running at high speed. Anyway, here's a nice X-thread with historical videos.

Journalist runs into shockingly sober person

We're sharing the following video simply because it's so refreshing to run into a logical person on the street, especially about immigration, of all things. A journalist's nightmare – someone who makes sense.

Robert F Kennedy Jr. ready to become roadkill

It is difficult to say whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s hopeless presidential campaign will benefit from his admission that he left a dead bear in Central Park 10 years ago, or whether it will further worsen his chances. Kennedy stands as an independent and his support in opinion polls hovers around 5%. Kennedy posted the video on X in which he tells the bizarre story to Roseanne Barr.

Time for our classic television commercial. Simba chips must be responsible for one of the most annoyingly effective ads yet. People still sing this stupid song today.

From our old but gold archives, that prank on the train with the silly book covers. It remains funny!

♦ VWB ♦

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