The peculiar manners displayed by US politician and former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney when his colleagues brought him a cake to congratulate him on his 72nd birthday left many social media users scratching their heads.
A video shared on social media shows how Romney, instead of simply blowing out the candles on the cake all at once, proceeds instead to carefully pluck them out one by one and blow them out individually.
Commenting on the vid, journalist Bradford Pearson called Romney “a deeply weird dude”, adding that “in a movie this is how you’d learn that the person you thought was your friend was actually an alien who’d invaded your friend’s body”.
As netizens went on to poke fun at Mitt’s behaviour, a number of people jokingly remarked that maybe he was simply trying to maximise the number of wishes he gets, one for each blown out candle.
Some were also quick to recall a scene from a Netflix documentary on Romney which features a scene where the politician is ironing a sleeve of the suit he’s wearing.
Others, however, claimed that Romney’s behaviour was quite sensible considering that it’s “still flu season”, and that this method insures that no spit lands on the cake.