I recall hearing legendary deejay Wolfman Jack talking about the 1973 film American Graffiti. He said something to the effect of when it came out, it only had one star (him). Now it has a dozen stars. And he was right. In 1973, no one knew the names Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss, Cindy Williams, Suzanne Sommers, or George Lucas. We knew Ron Howard only as the young child Opie on The Andy Griffith Show. The movie followed a group of recent high school graduates over the course of one night in 1962, and became not only a box office hit, but a coming-of-age classic. Even if it's been a long time since you've seen American Graffiti, you no doubt remember it. And now you can find out what went on behind the cameras.    

10. The film had an insanely low budget.

George Lucas couldn’t afford to pay a lot of the actors so he gave them screen credit instead. This was one of the first times this happened.

9. Harrison Ford didn’t want to cut his hair for the film.

He had such a short part in the film that he didn’t want to cut his hair for nothing, so he offered to wear a hat so people couldn’t tell how long it was.

Read more about the making of American Graffiti at TVOM.

Surely, being Santa Claus is the best job in the world. Anyone can be a volunteer Santa Claus for a charity or school, but the men who are Santa Claus at shopping malls year after year take the position very seriously. Many of them attend Noerr's Santa University, where they learn the intricacies of making it through the Christmas season in character. For a mature man with a white beard and patience for children, the job can be quite lucrative. Some Santas love the job so much, they stay in character all year! Several professional Santa Clauses spoke about the ins and out of their holiday at the mall.  

3. THEY KNOW WHERE THE MALL’S SECRET BATHROOMS ARE.

“I refuse to go to the public restroom if it’s at all avoidable,” says RG Holland, one of Noerr’s men in red. “The whole deal of being Santa, particularly at the mall, is when you’re dressed as Santa you have to stay in character and it’s kinda hard to be in a Santa suit staying in character in front of a urinal.”

In some malls, Santas have their own designated dressing area complete with a bathroom. And if not, they improvise. “I find the restroom in the mall that is the most obscure and private,” Holland says. “If I have trouble finding those, I find the nearest department store and use one of their restrooms that’s out of the way.”

14. “I’LL ASK MRS. CLAUS” IS CODE FOR “I DON’T WANT TO ANSWER THAT.”

Kids say the darndest things on Santa’s knee, and no amount of studying can prepare a Kris Kringle impersonator for all the odd questions or bizarre requests. You know you’ve stumped Santa when he brings up the wife.

“I blame a lot on Mrs. Claus,” says Holland. “If anything comes up that’s questionable, I say ‘I’ll have to check with Mrs. Claus about that.’ It really defuses a lot of skepticism.”

But Mrs. Claus does more than just take the blame for Santa’s shortcomings. She often helps shy kids feel more comfortable. “Sometimes the little ones are afraid of the big guy in the red suit and the beard but they’ll come to someone who looks like grandma,” says Carol Hildreth. “So they’ll sit on my lap and then talk to Santa.”

Learn a lot more about mall Santa Clauses at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Ross Dunn)

Brian was tired of his older relatives calling for help with the simple task of turning on the TV, so he made a flow chart to guide them. If the text is too small to read, you can enlarge the chart here. The relevant box you are trying to get to is this one.

I've been through this problem as both the younger tech whiz and the older person who can't see so well, and I can tell you that the main problem with modern TVs is too many options and too many buttons. Someone pushes the wrong button and an unfamiliar menu comes up. Pushing more buttons doesn't help, and can change settings you didn't want to change, and you don't know how to get out of it, much less fix what you screwed up. In my house, you have the added headache of a college student who comes in for the weekend, hooks up a laptop or a game console or a video player to the TV, and then leaves without putting things back the way they were. I solved that problem by watching TV in my office.    

And don't get me started on the letterbox/no letterbox disagreement between spouses.

Joining the AARP sounds like a hoot compared with getting older in years past.

In the good old days, it wasn’t so good to be old. Granted, some ancient traditions urge us to venerate the  elderly. The Bible, for instance, commands us to “stand up before the gray-headed,” which is good news for Anderson Cooper and Lady Gaga.

But in practice, disdain for senior citizens was more common than respect. The Greek philosopher Aristotle was a notorious  elder  basher. According to the book Old Age in the Roman World, Aristotle  described senior citizens as “overly pessimistic, distrustful, malicious, suspicious, and small-minded.” (Aristotle lived to be 62, so he presumably was only mildly malicious at the end of his life.)

Max is not allowed in the library. But everyone wants Max to go where he wants. Max has an Instagram gallery that he shares with his sister Gracie, and fan art has been filtering in about Max and his quest to visit the Macalester College campus library. 

This comic is from Macalester art student Mariah Jo. 

Sevinth made him a library card.

@librarianrover Please allow this kind and gentle soul the right to good literature that he deserves more than anyone pic.twitter.com/y6e9gFCLNV

— Sevinth (@SevinthStreams) November 29, 2017

Until it's a book, here's a coloring sheet for your kids.#librarycat #max pic.twitter.com/r3GlAX8KAS

— Scott Moore (@AwedJob) November 29, 2017

And there's poetry. In the replies to this Tweet, poet Finn, a Human came up with several verses about Max.

And Joey Michaels left a poem at Metafilter about Max that refers back to an earlier meme. 

ma nam is max
is plain to see
mah favrit place
the library

i sneak to it
cross fields and brooks
and wen im in
i lik the books

If there's more Max fan art, you'll find it on the new Twitter feed that Mariah Jo started for Max fans. And by the way, the project to turn his story into a children's book is real. -via Metafilter

Twenty years ago, Lori and David Moore were doing their best to raise their two children in their Jewish faith, but felt they were competing with the overwhelming way New York City celebrated Christmas. They wanted to make Chanukah more fun for their kids, so they began to buy themed menorahs, first with cartoon characters, then in more eclectic styles as the children grew. They didn't really mean to start a collection, but the number of menorahs grew over the years until they had more 150 of them, all different.      

While some of the Moore’s menorahs are made of Murano glass and other mildly exotic materials, most of them are as American as an aluminum Christmas tree. There are hippie vans and pink Cadillacs, puppy dogs and the Three Little Bears, high heels and skylines, the latter of which features the Moore’s beloved New York City with the Twin Towers still standing.

“We have a few menorahs that are more expensive than the rest,” Moore allows, “and a couple by some Israeli artists, but we don’t have any great antiquities in the collection, or million-dollar menorahs by Jeff Koons. It’s more like—I don’t know what the right word would be—Americana.”

The Moore's menorahs are on display at Museum at Eldridge Street in Lower Manhattan, but if you can't make it, you can see a gallery of them at Collectors Weekly. 

We can't expect dogs to appreciate the holidays as much as we do, or even the way cats do. Dogs already appreciate everything we give them, every day, so the holidays are just another time to be their joyful, wonderful selves. Still, we share the holiday spirit with our dogs because they are good dogs.

(YouTube link)

Maggie Smith Kühn (previously at Neatorama) wrote a song about her little pug Lucy, set to the tune of "Carol of the Bells." From the YouTube page:

Lucy the pug would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. This is the dumbest video I have ever made, and was also a ridiculous amount of fun. What can I say, I'm obsessed with this dog.

You can see more of Lucy at Kühn's Instagram page.  -via Tastefully Offensive  

The 1982 fantasy The Dark Crystal was an artistic breakthrough in puppetry and visuasl effects, thanks to directors Jim Henson and Frank Oz. However, it didn't do as well as expected at the box office thanks to its dark story that gave parents pause, but even more because of the juggernaut E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that was playing in theaters at the time. But it gained a lot of exposure on home video, and generations of kids have enjoyed the movie since. Let's learn some more about The Dark Crystal.   

8. It was banned in Islamic countries.

It was felt that too much of the film resembled their modern religious culture and could not be allowed. Any copies that were found in these countries were destroyed.

7. Henson wanted the film to be dark.

He didn’t want to frighten kids but he did want them to feel just a bit scared and understand what it was like to work through it. Look at half of the fairy tales that kids have been hearing for decades now, the Dark Crystal is tame in comparison.

The only thing I knew about The Dark Crystal before reading this list was that it was a Jim Henson film. The rest I learned in a trivia list at TVOM.

In a case of fake news that goes back 150 years, the many accounts of the capture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis tended to focus on what he was wearing at the time. After Lee surrendered to the Union Army at Appomattox in 1865, Davis fled from Virginia with his family, hoping to regroup in Texas to fight on without his army. The Union Army caught up with him in Georgia.  

According to a handful of accounts from the period, Davis was captured while wearing women’s clothes. The story, as it’s generally told, depicts a man desperate to escape and so, with the encouragement of his wife, Varina, he donned her overcoat and shawl and slipped into the Georgia swamp with a female servant (other accounts say he grabbed his wife's coat and shawl accidentally). Union troops spotted the two “women” and, on closer look, realized that one was wearing spurred boots. Given away by his footwear, Davis surrendered to the Union troops.

The majority of contemporary accounts say this is not true at all. However, the story was too juicy to not share, and, encouraged by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the press pounced on it. The lasting rumor defied even physical evidence to the contrary. The result was the above political cartoon and other ephemera from the period, including a photograph you can see along with the story at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Flickr user Boston Public Library)

Benjamin Franklin invented a complicated musical instrument called the glass armonica as a way of simplifying the usual method of playing music on wine glasses. William Zeitler explains how it works and then shows us what it sounds like. Hint: it's very pretty.

(YouTube link)

So if you are tired of reaching too far and spilling water while playing your glass harp, the glass armonica is a pricey and beautiful alternative. If you're in the mood for something more familiar and festive, here is Zeitler playing "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.

(YouTube link)

-via Laughing Squid

Hummingbird tongues are super weird. They are so long that when not in use, they are coiled around the bird's skull. They are forked at the end, and each fork curls up into a not-quite-closed tube. The birds use these weird tongues to dip into flower nectar at speeds up to 18 times a second. In 1833, scientists proposed that hummingbirds drink by capillary action, but that has been disproven. Margaret Rubega and Alejandro Rico-Guevara set out to study the exact mechanics of how hummingbirds drink. That involved building glass flowers and teaching hummingbirds to drink from them. Then a high-speed camera revealed what their tongues did.

As the bird sticks its tongue out, it uses its beak to compress the two tubes at the tip, squeezing them flat. They momentarily stay compressed because the residual nectar inside them glues them in place. But when the tongue hits nectar, the liquid around it overwhelms whatever’s already inside. The tubes spring back to their original shape and nectar rushes into them.

The two tubes also separate from each other, giving the tongue a forked, snakelike appearance. And they unfurl, exposing a row of flaps along their long edges. It’s as if the entire tongue blooms open, like the very flowers from which it drinks.

When the bird retracts its tongue, all of these changes reverse.

The tongue acts like a tiny pump, pumping tiny bits of nectar into the tiny bird. Ed Yong gives us an explanation of what happens when a hummingbird drinks at the Atlantic (with video). The original scientific paper is more technical, but it contains diagrams of hummingbird tongues. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mdf)

This sign is at the Macalester College library in St. Paul, Minnesota. Max is well-known on campus, and everyone likes him. He only looks grumpy in the drawing because he's not allowed into the library. Several college students recognized the sign and told us more about Max. Nicolaskg said,

The library isn’t the only place on campus Max visits. A few weeks ago, Max got into our science building and wandered into my class. Our prof laughed it off and tried to continue her lecture, but with no success. All the students were distracted with Max prancing around trying to play with everyone. Eventually after 10 minutes, Max got bored and left to presumably interrupt another class.

He has also snuck into our humanities building and even into my dorm building. It’s a tradition now to snapchat “Max spotted” if he’s seen on campus.

If you are lucky enough to meet Max, it is delightful. He is one of the friendliest cats I’ve ever met.

Keep doing you, Max, you little rebel.

Then uncle2fire posted several pictures of Max.

Why was Max banned from the library? We don't know, but it might have something to do with those books he never returned. -via reddit

When The Force Awakens came out in 2015, viewers found it to be oddly similar to the first Star Wars movie, now called A New Hope. Indications are that The Last Jedi might resemble The Empire Strikes Back. Meaning, the middle movie of a trilogy that's darker, explains relationships between the characters, and instead of a happy ending delivers a bridge to the third film. What is strange is that director Rian Johnson was given freedom to tell his own story, regardless of what Episode IX will reveal. That movie will be directed by JJ Abrams, so who knows where the story will go. Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, has some insight into what we will learn eventually.

Unlike almost everyone else in the world, Ridley has known for years who Rey's parents are, since Abrams told her on the set of The Force Awakens. Ridley believes that nothing ever changed: "I thought what I was told in the beginning is what it is." Which is odd, because Johnson insists he had free rein to come up with any answer he wanted to the question. "I wasn't given any directive as to what that had to be," he says. "I was never given the information that she is this or she is that."

The idea that Johnson and Abrams somehow landed on the same answer does seem to suggest that Rey's parents aren't some random, never-before-seen characters. All that said, Abrams cryptically hints there may have been more coordination between him and Johnson than the latter director has let on, so who knows what's going on here – they may be messing with us to preserve one of Abrams' precious mystery boxes. In any case, Ridley loves the speculation: Her favorite fan theories involve immaculate conception and time travel. It seems more likely that she's either Luke's daughter or his niece, but again, who knows.

Rolling Stone talked to Johnson, Ridley, Mark Hamill, and Adam Driver for a look into their characters and what The Last Jedi may or may not be about. There are no spoilers, of course, but there are plenty of clues about the new film.     

Griff had a birthday, and made sure everyone knew it. You can do that when you're the only one at work who knows how to change the sign. He didn't post this picture at reddit, but he did join in to explain when extramediumjohn did.

To be fair, I did it without asking, but it's not like they can fire the guy in charge of the sign.

Not on his birthday, anyway. And after all, the sign doesn't say anything malicious or derogatory. But at least now everyone at work knows the power of the Griff.

Adult Swim gave us quite a few hilarious Star Wars sketches using action figures. In this compilation, we get a supercut of the interactions between Luke Skywalker and his infamous father.  

(YouTube link)

If you've ever seen Adult Swim, you can figure that there are some strange but funny father-son bonding moments here. And you'd be right. They dance quite well, for action figures. -via Geeks Are Sexy