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[nineveh_uk]

Hard as it is to beat the headline seen on a newsboard in Bridlington "Horse Fetish Flashed in Court"* for headline of the week, the Iceland Review managed it with Seven-Year-Old Wins Iceland Ram Groping Contest. Even better, this story really is about a seven year-old who won the amateur section of a ram groping contest - prizes include (ram) sperm from the Insemination Center of West Iceland. Despite said prizes, I assume that groping is a mistranslation of a word/phrase about judging the quality of rams. Anyone can read Icelandic and would be good enough to tell me what was actually meant by groping and how the error, er, arose, the source is here.

The competition involves laypersons attempting to rank rams that have been ranked by professional ram-rankers, and explaining why. Says the organiser:

“One year a contestant was able to rank the rams correctly and described them all in a poem. That was very interesting.” Evidently there isn't much to do in Iceland in summer.

*Which turned out to be a mis-print for "Horse Fetish Flaster in Court", and is unfortunately a rather more sad and less funny story than one might have hoped for.

Comments

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Did she get another prize in lieu of the pig, or did she leave empty-handed?

If this contest is really "the highlight of the summer", perhaps best not.

That other article is, as you say, rather sad - an IQ of 60 is very low, and the man in question doesn't sound completely with-it. The newspaper's phrasing raised my hackles here, also: "The woman rider admitted she said hello to him twice at separate points on her ride out before returning home to her stable". Admitted?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I think the pig was the only prize, beyond the satisfaction.

I agree entirely about the newspaper's phrasing. The man's case is sad, but the woman has had a very nasty experience, and "admitted", as the paper's angle on things, feels like a telling choice of phrase. Heaven forfend, she said hello! Why not something neutral like "stated" or "described"? There's nothing in her later-quoted statement that implies she feels responsible, so why imply it, except that assuming the woman is responsible is standard procedure.