On Monday, a man walked into a bank in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and presented a robbery note to the teller. It said he was armed and demanded money. He left with several thousand dollars. But police were able to catch up with him.

• He had taken a cab to and from the robbery, and the taxi driver identified him from a photograph.  
• He left a gym bag with $2,700 in the cab. The bag has a tag with his name on it.
• He also left the sweatshirt he had been wearing, as identified by the teller.
• And his wallet, containing his ID.
• Also his discharge papers from a drug-and-alcohol rehab center, with a piece torn off that matched the note he gave to the teller.  

On Tuesday, police arrested 25-year-old Jamal Goodwin of Philadelphia, who was found with heroin, cocaine, and about $1,000 on him. Robbery and theft were only the beginning of charges lodged against him.

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user raymondclarkeimages)

When I was a kid, I loved the fresh Christmas trees my parents put up, but I also wished that we could have a lovely space-age aluminum tree like the one my grandparents used, all nice and shiny, illuminated with a rotating light disc. It's one of the Christmas traditions that seem ancient now, but only began after World War II. Sarah Archer is the author of a new book, Mid-Century Christmas: Holiday Fads, Fancies, and Fun from 1945 to 1970. She explains where those those aluminum trees came from.

The company that produced the most aluminum for the war effort was Alcoa, but there were also some smaller companies, too, many of which were based in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, of all places, which was one of the big aluminum capitals of North America. Like a lot of mid-century Christmas items, including the acrylic rubber that coats Christmas lights cords, aluminum trees came from thinking about repurposing a material produced for the military. The aluminum strips that were used to make the trees were originally designed for something called chaff, which was sprinkled over enemy territories to scramble radar because the little pieces of metal would diffuse the signal.

Many 1950s aluminum tree producers used Alcoa branding. The exterior of the box would say, “We proudly use Alcoa aluminum.” You could put ornaments on these trees, but one of the challenges of decorating them was not getting electrocuted, which was mentioned prominently in the how-to pamphlet that came with the tree. Because it was not safe to put electric lights on the metal, the companies distributing the trees would sell a rotating lamp that would shine different-colored lights on the tree to bathe it in magenta or purple.

That's not the only Christmas tradition that arose from the postwar Cold War era. Read about how our modern Christmas celebrations were shaped at Collectors Weekly.

These two women were driving around, looking for a candle shop in what looks to be an industrial area in Pelham, Alabama. The dash cam is on, although it is upside-down. Be sure to stick around for the punch line. 

(YouTube link)

When I saw this a couple of days ago, there was some question as to whether the audio had been added to the video after the fact. HuffPo tells us that the clip was featured on America's Funniest Home Videos and the two women were interviewed on the show. And you can see the hazard on Google Street View. 

Just over 75 years ago, the U.S. became embroiled in a war that quite a few other countries were already fighting in both Europe and Asia. A new website is following the course of that war in real time, as it happened 75 years ago. But there's a twist: the presentation is a news website, as if it were happening today.

World War 2.0 tries to imagine what the reporting of World War II might have looked like if the conflict were taking place today. Articles are based on information that would have been available to the press at the time, but they are written using contemporary journalistic style. The authors are all students at Seton Hall University, working with assistant professor of journalism Matthew Pressman.

World War 2.0 will continue to post news of the war through the 75th anniversary of VJ Day, which will be in 2020. You'll want to bookmark it to keep up with the developments "as they happen," so to speak.  -Thanks, James J Kimble!

Why would a celebrity rent out their home on Airbnb? Well, even if you're not desperate for money, you can't live in more than one house at a time, and extra houses can benefit by someone staying there occasionally. Most of these homes are available because the celebrity no longer owns them, some because they are deceased, like Orson Welles.

Not only was this gorgeous estate owned by Orson Welles, but it has also played host a wide array of celebrities, including David Bowie, Rita Hayworth, and Barbra Streisand. Today, you can rent the 3,000 sq. ft. home with 4 bedrooms/ 3 bathrooms and its 15,000 sq. ft. outdoor space for $595 per night, along with a $395 cleaning fee. While the home’s interior, including boutique bedrooms and spa-like bathrooms, is nothing short of spectacular, the outdoor space, which includes a lagoon pool with Jacuzzi and huge outdoor deck that overlooks Hollywood, is mesmerizing.

Nine other available celebrity Airbnbs are featured today, from simple childhood homes to a Caribbean island, at Housely.

It's been almost three years since Disney made the announcement that the Star Wars franchise was killing off the expanded universe. Suddenly, tons of novels, games, comics, and other media were expelled from the Star Wars canon. The admins at Wookieepedia were sent into a tizzy, as the majority of their information was now in limbo. Should they delete it? Should they wait? They eventually decided to keep the entries from the expanded universe, but label them as "Legends" to distinguish them from "Canon" entries. But why did Disney throw such a blow to Star Wars fans? In consideration of the company's plan to release a new Star Wars movie every year, it turns out they really had no choice.

Imagine the farce: You want to make a movie about what happened 20 years after “Return of the Jedi”? I hope that squares with the two dozen books on that decade. Want to tell a story about how the Death Star plans were stolen? Turns out they were stolen by nine different groups on nine different occasions in the EU. A rampant expanded universe is wonderful right up until the point it isn’t.

When you're the caretaker of a fictional franchise, you must have control over how a story is told. Otherwise, the result ends up like it was "designed by a committee," or in this case, a committee of millions of fans. FiveThirtyEight has an explanation of how the Star Wars expanded universe was created and why it had to be destroyed. -via Digg

(image credit: Disney/Wizards of the Coast)

Strawberries go well with chocolate. Chocolate goes great with peanut butter. Strawberries and peanut butter make a good PB&J sandwich. So the three must taste pretty good together, right? Sure they do; Little Debbie made a snack cake with all three once. There are plenty of food triads like this, that we've used to concoct new recipes. But mathematicians have been seeking a different outcome, called the incompatible food triad.

That conundrum goes like this: Can you think of three foods where any two of those foods taste good together, but all three combined taste disgusting?

Like so many long-lasting mathematical mysteries, this one is more difficult than it sounds. Thus far, it has stymied at least four generations of academics, who have not been able to come up with a group of foods that definitively fit the bill, nor a way to prove that it can’t be done. George Hart, an engineering professor and mathematical sculptor, has been chewing on the Incompatible Food Triad for 36 years. “Is there a theorem that says if a and b are good, and b and c are good, and a and c are good, then a and b and c must be good? That’s something that, on the face of it, seems reasonable,” he says. “But then when you look for an argument, a truth, you don’t find one.”  

It's not that people haven't tried. Read the history and progress of the search for the incompatible food triad at Atlas Obscura.

Holiday Tree Farms in Corvallis, Oregon, ships a million fresh Christmas trees every year. All that harvesting takes place over only six weeks, and they must be shipped fast, which requires chainsaws, trucks, and helicopters.

(YouTube link)

Cut Christmas trees are more eco-friendly than artificial trees, but that doesn't mean you should throw out the artificial tree you already have. Throwing them out is a big part of the problem. But a real tree can be re-used, recycled, or composted, and there are more planted specifically for Christmas every year. -via HuffPo

Brush up on the origins of your favorite eats! 

1. Popcorn

More than 4,000 years old, the earliest popcorn kernels were discovered in a Mexican bat cave once occupied by the Cochise Indians. The practice of popping corn was common among Native Americans: Ancient crumbs have been discovered in Peruvian tombs, while Cortes found Aztecs using it to decorate necklaces. Up north, colonists stumbled upon the snack at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, where the chief’s brother carried a batch in a deerskin bag.

2. Gum

Chewing for recreation became fashionable among colonists after they saw Native Americans chomp on the gummy resin of spruce trees. By the 19th century, Americans were chewing on paraffin wax, which today is used in candles and crayons. But gum as we know it really dates back to the Maya—who chewed dried sapodilla latex, called chicle. This came to Staten Island with the exiled Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1869. He tried peddling chicle as a replacement for rubber tires, but local businessman Thomas Adams realized it had potential to be more fun: He invented the Chiclet.

There are countless versions of Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol on film and video (and comic books, cartoons, video games, stage performances, radio, and other media). Heath Waterman combined more than 400 of them them all in a supercut to tell the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Christmas Eve in which the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future paid him a call.

(YouTube link)

Waterman worked on this project for 18 months, and the result is a masterpiece. Seeing the many faces of Scrooge is an experience. It's 53 minutes long, which is pretty much what you need to get the whole story, so you might schedule some time this holiday season to enjoy it all. Don't miss the credits, either. Bah, humbug! -via Metafilter

Watch a film noir featuring a private investigator, and he's likely to be hired to solve a murder or something really heavy. No one wants to involve the police, because they all have something to hide. But that's Hollywood. Real life private investigators stay busy trying to uncover secrets like fraud, infidelity, and hidden assets. Learn a little bit about what private investigators really do.

1. THEY WORK UNDERCOVER.

Slipping into a new job for investigative purposes isn’t limited to law enforcement. Jordan Smith, founder and chief investigator at Hyperion Investigative Consulting in Broomfield, Colorado, says his firm frequently pursues cases relating to corporate or business fraud by getting one of their PIs hired at the company to see what’s going on. “If you’re a company with a retail location that’s missing deposits, we can go in and see what’s happening for ourselves,” he says. “Right now, we have someone at a hospital to see who might be stealing prescription drugs. Sometimes we can send a certified fraud examiner to work as an accountant.” The best part? “We can get paid the employee rate as well as for the investigative work we do.”

3. THEY PEE IN BOTTLES.

A key element of surveillance work—typically done to observe behavior like infidelity, or unwarranted physical exertion in the case of worker's compensation—is remaining undetected. That means not getting out of a parked car constantly, and handling personal business during a typical 12-hour spy shift any way you can. When it comes to bathroom behavior, Smith says, “You need to go before you get there. But we’ll bring a pee bottle.”

For number twos? “We just hold it. I’ve never not held it.”

There are ten more secrets of private investigators to be uncovered at mental_floss.    

You see a list of weird things from the past and you might think, "Did people really not understand how creepy this is?" Truth be told, no we didn't. We were just used to toys looking like this, back before the world was kinder, gentler, and more realistic for children's toys. But the toy pictured here is something I've never encountered, and it's tres weird.

Kobe dolls were made in the Kobe region of Japan starting in the 1890s. They’re mechanical wooden dolls with a mechanism that often made their eyes and tongues protrude like a cartoon creature seeing a pretty lady cartoon creature, or you know, like The Devil.

Or it that just me? You'll probably find all the toys in a list of bizarre vintage toys to be creepy as all get out. -via the Presurfer

Being late for your flight gives you a panicky feeling. Jason Paul has no time at all to get on board, and the Munich airport is huge. Luckily, he is a professional freerunner.

(YouTube link)

Catch a golf cart? Too slow. Security lines? Jump past them. Waiting for an elevator? No way! He's gotta catch that plane to Ibiza before it takes off! PS: Don't try this at an American airport, you'll be shot plowing through security like that. -via Laughing Squid

A video recorded several crashes and even more cars that slid off the road in Indianapolis Tuesday when drivers crested a slight hill that obscured their view of a Comcast Xfinity repair truck parked in the right lane. The road was covered in slushy snow, falling snow further hampered visibility, and braking was difficult.

(YouTube link)

Comcast has issued a statement about the video. -via The Daily Dot

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

In the early months of 1957, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) had just had one of his biggest successes as an author. The Cat in the Hat, his previous work, was a huge seller, and now it was time for a follow-up Dr. Seuss book.

Geisel began work on How the Grinch Stole Christmas sometime early in the year. He wrote the book quickly, it was finished in a few weeks. "It was the easiest book of my career to write," he recalled, "except for its conclusion."

"I got hung up on how to get the Grinch out of the mess. I got into a situation where I sounded like a second-rate preacher or some bible thumper... Finally in desperation... without making any statement whatever, I showed the Grinch and the Whos together at the table, and made a pun on the Grinch carving "roast beast"… I had gone through thousands of religious choices, and then after three months, it came out like that."

The book now complete, Geisel sent the draft to Random House in mid-May of 1957. Seuss's wife, Helen Geisel, had been having ongoing medical problems and had suffered a small stroke in April of 1957. Nonetheless, she acted as the book's unofficial editor, as she was with previous Dr. Seuss books. How the Grinch Stole Christmas was dedicated to Theodor "Teddy" Owens, the one-year-old son of Geisel's niece, Peggy Owens.