Day 35. 91 pages, 40,763 words.

Yesterday afternoon I was mostly entertaining myself with schadenfreude (and, yes, unangebracht freude), over Laura Huhtasaari’s plagiarised Master’s thesis. It’s a very small and petty thing and it doesn’t actually matter, since the university isn’t pursuing it (the thesis is “out of date”, whatever that means, I didn’t realise graduate theses were written on slices of cheese) and Jussi Halla-aho, chair of the Bigoted Stupid Fucks Party and literal finalist for Worst Human Being Alive, is of course not taking party action for something that happened years ago. “An old thesis has no relevance to the party’s activities,” he said, Hitlerly.

Still, I’m loving it a little bit and can only hope this will finally put an end to her asking for other people’s papers. It’s an almost too deliciously ironic fate for a known thief of other people’s papers.

Edpool also threw some more marketing onto Twitter:

And speaking of marketing, and Nazis…

Did you know that the first mixture of Fanta and cola was made in Australia in 1905, just nineteen years after the invention of Coca-Cola in 1886 and (more impressively) thirty-five years before the invention of Fanta in Nazi Germany in 1940? And did you know that, as part of a marketing campaign for the cola-orange mixture, the company responsible had a swimming pool filled with the stuff in Sydney, and people swam in it a whole bunch?

The pool was then drained (I optimistically assume the despicably tainted cola-orange-human-excretion mixture was disposed of), and would have been demolished except for a small league of die-hard fans of the drink, who took it on themselves to refill the pool with water and pay for the hall’s upkeep? It was named the Jenkins Cola-Orange Youth Centre and became a … well, a youth centre in Sydney, and continued on even to the present day thanks to public donations and fundraisers.

That’s not actually true, no. It was just a weird dream I had last night. Sorry to disappoint you. The part about it happening before the invention of Fanta really should have tipped you off.

The part about Fanta being invented in Nazi Germany was true though. And that whole article is a fascinating read.

– Posted from my Huawei mobile phone while on the bus.