Funny old world: the week's offbeat news

Dunkirk spirit
In a rare alignment of the planets, Chinese Lunar New Year, Ramadan, Christian Lent and carnival season all came together this week in a fandango of fasting and feasting.

And nowhere was the mid-winter bacchanalia more bonkers and bizarre than in the French port of Dunkirk, where the festivities reached their climax with local bigwigs flinging shoals of herring from the balcony of the town hall to tens of thousands of revellers dancing in the sleet and snow below.

Many had warmed up earlier at the World Seagull Cry Championship, an ear-splitting racket of squawking and screeching, with competitors cawing into a banana microphone to mimic the local herring gulls.
Curl up and die
From an Italian athlete failing a drugs test because she had Nutella for breakfast to the cursing in the curling, the Winter Olympics has not disappointed.

Biathlete Rebecca Passler was finally allowed to compete after it emerged that she tested positive after sharing the chocolate spread with her mother, who is being treated for cancer.

But curling -- a kind of bowling on ice with the added appeal of vigorous brushing -- has lost its genteel image for ever.

Canadian gold medalist Marc Kennedy complained that "the whole spirit of curling is dead" after a Swede accused him of cheating.

Outraged at such an unbecoming insinuation, Kennedy shot back, "I touched it just once, go fxxx yourself!"
One iguana too many
An Australian TV reporter also went viral after slurring through her report from the slopes with random references to frozen iguanas and the price of coffee.

Channel Nine's Danika Mason later admitted that she "had a drink" before going live, with colleagues back in the studio trying to cover up by blaming the altitude and the weather in the Italian Alps. "It's hard to get the words out when your lips are cold..."

But this was nothing compared to the embarrassment of sports journalists at Italian public broadcaster RAI who threatened to strike over a gaffe-filled commentary on the opening ceremony by its sports department head.

RAI Sport chief Paolo Petrecca was stone cold sober but confused Italian singer Matilda De Angelis with Mariah Carey, the head of the Olympic Committee with the Italian president's daughter and welcomed viewers to the "Olympic stadium" when that is in Rome and the ceremony was taking place in the San Siro in Milan.

He also managed to stereotype the Chinese team -- "naturally many have phones in their hands" -- before drooling over the Spanish athletes, who he said are "always very hot". Petrecca was later forced to quit.
Emotional intelligence
It has been quite a week for those making humans obsolete. China unveiled a troupe of eye-poppingly acrobatic humanoid robots for its Lunar New Year Spring Festival gala. Their martial arts display left social media awestruck and US late night host Stephen Colbert mumbling, "I surrender!"

At the same time the masters of the AI universe were meeting in New Delhi. But the tech bros final photocall at their summit with Indian leader Narendra Modi was hilariously awkward, with ChatGPT tsar Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei refusing to hold hands.

Time to ask Claude for some relationship advice.