This article is more than 1 year old

Stonehenge's HUMAN ABATTOIR was just a prehistoric Burning Man hippyfest site

Or so you say, dear Register readers

CoTW Comment of the Week: In which Vulture Central's very own backroom gremlins award you, dear readers, the Golden Vulture Dropping of Hilarity and the Wooden Twig of Fail for your inane witterings scintillating nuggets of wisdom.

In reverse order this week, we'll be going through those comments which made both us and you laugh, cry and thump your keyboards in either agreement or blind rage.

Starting the proceedings is Stevie, whose comment on the news that a buried city featuring a human abattoir and a pub had been discovered near Stonehenge made us giggle...

Beer, fire pits and a torn down village? Not a settlement then, but the remains of Ye Burnynge Manne encampment. Turns out Stonehenge is not a calculator or a temple or a UFO landing strip, but a piece of neolithic installation art.

Burning Man is not a reference to some cannabalistic pagan rite, but rather a festival whose attendees “dedicate themselves to the spirit of community, art, self-expression and self-reliance”, according to its website.

Next up in the “made us giggle” category is Anonymous Coward, whose experience of getting Google to change inaccurate listings on Maps made 25 of you laugh too...

I went searching for suit hire the other day. Google suggested a place that was near me, so off I went on foot. When I got to the location, the place was empty and boarded up and a sign on the door said they'd permanently closed that branch.

Fair enough, I thought. Mistakes happen. I might as we'll inform Google, so that other people don't fall into the same trap and waste their time as I did. I filed a report and then basked in the glow of civic duty done, and knowledge that I'd helped my fellow man.

Weeks later I got an email from Google from saying they'd decided not to apply my suggested change "as we found the existing details to be more appropriate". Well fuck you too Google.

In a typical example of the tinfoil hattery your dear comment moderation team have to deal with, this particular Anon Coward picked up 18 upvotes and 30 downvotes at the time of writing. What the hell was he on (about)?

Was everyone born yesterday? Erm, You do realise that this whole tedious song-and-dance routine is NOTHING more than a contrived PR/propaganda spectacle, don't you? The US government has its own bloody key FFS! ( http://cryptome.org/nsakey-ms-dc.htm ) ...AND it pwns all the pipes anyway... AND it pwns all the "crypto" AND it pwns all the infrastructure... except for the Huawei bit - a fact which, as they've been hilariously unable to conceal, is DRIVING THEM COMPLETELY UP THE WALL Hasn't anyone learned anything from the Snowden "revelations"? BOTH parties share EXACTLY the same objective

...continued pg.94.

And finally...

Top of the class for this week's Golden Vulture Dropping of Hilarity is Trevor Pott, occasional scribe of this parish and storage supremo extraordinaire. In the comments section on this week's news that the BBC thinks anyone who uses a VPN is probably a copyright-busting pirate, our Trev said...

Dear downvoter: I have a question for you. What is the difference between saying "heavy downloaders are probably pirates" and "black people in baggy clothes are probably shoplifters?" Where does the burden of proof lie? On the internet subscriber? Or on the accuser? Are we innocent unless proven "probably" guilty? Or are we guilty until proven "probably" innocent? Please, do explain your logic.

Hilarious? No, but a damn good point that more than a hundred of you firmly agreed with. Hurrah for the rule of law, we say.

And coming top of the tree for the Wooden Twig of Fail this week is, you guessed it, Anonymous Coward, with this response to another comment by our Trev on the same story:

' but I should go to jail because the beeb thinks that's "suspicious"? '

They are stating there should be mechanisms to verify that the traffic is legitimate, so in honesty I'd say you're being a bit dramatic there. Be punished if it's found to be illegitimate would seem to be more accurate to me. The determination/proof of legitimacy and how that works with journalistic confidentiality (or whatever - I don't know how these things work,) in your and other journalists' cases is likely to be thorny, obviously. I suppose the VMs might be presented as a cause for concern.

A full 58 of you thumped the downvote button there, at the time of writing, making our dear Anonymous Coward once again this week's least favourite comment.

That's all for this week, folks. As the network printers at my university advised me in my younger days, "goodbye, print safely". ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like