Back before every home had a computer with graphics programs like Photoshop, people still went all out to produce funny yet personal Christmas cards. This was when "cut and paste" meant cut with scissors and paste with glue. Then you had to run the whole thing to the local print shop to be copied. The print shop would also supply you with envelopes, but you still had to go to the Post Office to buy stamps. Imagine the coordination of the design to get the photographs right in the card above, because you couldn't just zoom in- you had to size everything during the photo shoot and get the photographs printed while crossing your fingers. It all seems so quaint now. But if you had a good enough sense of humor, you didn't even need scissors and glue.

These folks didn't know we'd be laughing at those cards 60, 70 years later. Check out a festive collection of personalized Christmas cards from the mid-20th century designed to make the recipient laugh, at Bored Panda.

When you lose your teeth, you could have a set of dentures made with the latest space age materials, but it wasn't always that way. It used to be that artificial teeth were made from ivory, taken from elephants, walruses, or hippos, but they didn't look all that real, and didn't hold up well after being chiseled into human tooth shapes. The best artificial teeth were made from real teeth, sometimes called Waterloo teeth, as they often came from dead soldiers. But they also could have been traded by grave robbers. We've also heard that healthy teeth were sometimes extracted from live but enslaved people for this purpose, but taking them from dead bodies was altogether easier. Waterloo teeth, of course, got their name from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and the practice continued at least through the American Civil War. They were expensive and gruesome, but they worked. You can read more at the British Dental Association. -via Nag on the Lake

If you love the movie National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, imagine it as a musical. Not just a musical, but an opera, as all the dialogue is sung, and the only speaking part is a bit of description of the setting. Penn Holderness plays all the roles, from Clark Griswold to Eddie to the neighbors and peripheral characters. He can't do all the slapstick humor by himself, but if you know the movie, it's not necessary because your brain will fill it in. Whats important is that he captures the meaning of the film in his clever rhymes. However, if by any chance you haven't seen Christmas Vacation, you might get just a bit lost. Don't let that stop you from enjoying it! It starts out a bit slow, and gets better as it goes along.

The influence of Queen Victoria is still felt all along our culture. She is the reason that brides wear white at their weddings, anesthesia became popular for childbirth, and why we eat chicken for dinner. Her majesty was also instrumental in the way we celebrate Halloween. You could say that Victoria was a superstar influencer. So it's not that difficult to believe that she made family Christmas trees a thing.

As with most of the secular parts of our Christmas celebrations, bringing evergreens inside was an ancient way to celebrate midwinter, specifically the solstice. The tree was incorporated into the Christian feast early, but not universally. German Protestants took it up as a backlash against Catholicism after the Reformation, and then Christmas trees were later rejected by Puritans. But the Christmas tree only really took off as a universal symbol of the holiday after illustrations of Queen Victoria's tree were published in 1848. Read the historic journey of the Christmas tree at the Conversation.

We are used to the annual mayhem on the streets when a snowfall lands in an area that's not expecting it, and does not have adequate plans for making the streets safe. Usually it's a north-south thing in which Minnesotans and Canadians laugh at drivers in places like Georgia with no salt or snowplows at the ready. This time it's England, which doesn't usually get a lot of snow. On December 11, ten inches fell in Gloucestershire on top of a layer of ice, and people had to get out in it regardless of whether a snowplow had been through or not. The slow-motion carnage is just crying out for a soundtrack, like maybe the Blue Danube Waltz. -via Fark

The premise of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is to "compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels." As such, the sentence itself doesn't have to be bad, but is designed to set up a story that will make you dread the rest of the book. And those books don't exist. More than 5,000 entries came in for the 40th edition of the contest. This year's top prize is by John Farmer of Aurora, Colorado.

I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn't help—I was fresh out of salami.

Whew. In this case, the sentence was bad. The Grand Panjandrum's Special Award went to Brent Guernsey of Springfield, Virginia, for this horrible pun.

And so the two pachyderms with the same first name met, and they formed the jazz duo legend known as the Elephants Gerald.

You have to wonder what could possibly come after that, but the sentence deserves an award just for beginning an entire book with the word "and." There are plenty of other entries recognized as winners and dishonorable mentions in various categories (Adventure, Children's & Young Adult Literature, Crime & Detective, Dark & Stormy, Fantasy & Horror, Historical Fiction, Purple Prose, Romance, Science Fiction, Vile Puns, Western, and Odious Outliers) that you can read here. -via Metafilter

See also: Winners from previous years.

Grocery stores are usually organized and created with the customer’s convenience in mind. After all, the more satisfied customers are, the more sales an establishment can get. Companies usually spend time, effort, and money, to comprehend the psychology and habits of their clients so they can create the best environment where everything can be made easy for them. 

Today’s grocery stores utilize a counter-clockwise design, where you enter the store on the right and exit on the left. In the middle of these doors is the entire store where products are placed, with the essentials towards the back of the store. We think this placement is because you’ll end up picking non-essentials along the way, which adds more sales. 

Another new addition to modern stores is those self-checkout lines. Essentially, these are cashiers, where customers can check out their own items using the machine provided. These devices were installed to save the cost of labor. However, it seems to not be geared toward customers.

In a 2021 survey, almost 67% of shoppers had failed during the checkout process at a self-checkout counter. Aside from that, there could also be health risks in opting for purchasing your goods in these places. 

Research done by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine discovered that self-checkout stations contained five types of disease-causing bacteria, with one of them commonly present in human waste (Enterococcus). Make sure to wash your hands properly after using one if you need to!

Image credit: Wikimedia commons

Art Basel is a privately owned international art fair staged in different parts of the world. These include Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach, Hong Kong, and Paris. For its 2022 exhibition in Miami Beach, the organization hosted some… interesting individuals. 

While the Miami Beach fair had its fair share of memorable, thought-provoking, and unique art pieces, we think nothing beats both the shock value and making people actually think than a live breast-milking display.

Heads up though, because we’re not talking about artisans milking a cow live for the sake of art, no. It’s an actual woman getting milked for the show. 

Contemporary artist OONA performed “MILKING THE ARTIST” with Lori Baldwin in front of a huge crowd. Some of the visitors actually joined the live auction, where the winner could get the milk extracted live at the exhibition. The bidding actually reached up to $200,000 for the milk. 

Without getting too explicit here, allow us to say that there was milking, yes. After the show, the artists were forcefully removed from the premises of the fair. We aren’t sure if that’s part of the show though, as they were allowed to perform “MILKING THE ARTIST.” 

Well, one thing’s for sure, the visitors Miami Beach show certainly got a sight to remember! 

Image credit: Pixabay/Pexels

There’s a lot of conversation surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence, especially when it made big waves in 2022 by dipping its toes into generating artwork. Programmers and tech companies created various AI models that can give their users any artwork with just a simple set of words or prompts. 

This accessibility and how easy it can create artwork without spending hours slaving away with paper, pen, or any digital drawing software opened the doors to multiple “AI artists,” much to the dismay of traditional artists.

But why are they mad at this entire AI issue? Well, it’s because of one simple thing: original traditional artwork is being used so that these machines and models can generate artwork. 

Essentially, an AI is trained by feeding them (or inputting) various existing art pieces so, in turn, it can create its “own.” So it begs the question: who gets the credit? There’s a big open field that concerns ownership, copyright, and even the definition of art itself. 

My Modern Met takes a deep dive into the conversation about AI art and ownership. Check their full piece on the topic here.

Image credit: WW/Pexels

When opportunities arise, you need to nab them by the hand! 

This is what exactly Quinn Miller has done during the lockdown in March 2020. Before his venture into his current money-making business, Miller worked at an ad-tech startup in California. But when the 2020 lockdown happened, he struggled to succeed in work. 

He then turned to start a business with his savings. After reading on Twitter how people can make passive income via vending machines, his interest was piqued. Deciding to take the plunge, he bought and installed his first two machines in June and July for around $5,000 just as a side hustle. 

He quit his ad-tech job to focus his time and energy on his new business a few months after. Somehow, this risky move actually paid a lot. As in, he gets $30,000 per month and he only needs to work for six hours a week on vending machine operations. Talk about a good bargain! 

Quin Miller shares his five-step process on how to get your own vending machine business started here, for those who are interested!

Image credit: Erik Mclean

Have you ever wondered what those balls on power lines are for? Actually, have you seen those colorful spheres on electrical lines? If you have, then we’re here to tell you what they are and what they are for! 

These objects are called marker balls. They are mostly there for visibility and to indicate where power lines are so that low-flying aircraft can avoid them. These balls can be seen on cables on major highways, deep gorges, and valleys. 

Also, there’s an organization that dictates where these spheres should appear! The  Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) makes sure that these aerial marker balls will show up in the places we’ve mentioned earlier to avoid any accidents. 

These balls are made of plastic, a good electric insulator, which is perfect as it sits on power lines. They also come in orange, white, and yellow as the FAA found that they have the best visibility. What’s interesting about these markers is that they are actually bigger than they seem. These markers range from 20 to 36 inches, which is about the circumference of a basketball.

Image credit: Karolina/Pexels

Erwin Perzy wasn't out to make a Christmas decoration or a paperweight when he developed the snow globe around the turn of the 20th century. He was looking for a way to make the overhead light brighter in a surgical suite. But one of his attempts, magnifying light with a globe of water containing metal flakes, looked really pretty, like snow falling in his city of Vienna. From there, he turned the idea into an object containing small landscapes where snow fell when you shook the globe. After World War II, Perzy's son started making Christmas scenes inside the globes to appeal to Americans, and soon the Original Snow Globe Factory was the premiere provider of snow globes worldwide. The company is now headed by Erwin Perzy III, who stills makes snow globes by hand in Vienna.   

All that leaves the question about the most famous snow globe of all- the one that figured prominently in the movie Citizen Kane. There are no records of where the snow globe in the 1941 movie came from, but it has long been assumed that it was made by the Original Snow Globe Factory. Either way, Citizen Kane left its mark on the company. Read the story of the snow globe at Atlas Obscura.

Beginning in the late 18th century, it became the fashion among New Jersey residents those would could afford it to commission a painting of their pet cat in a style that highlighted their reputation for supernatural powers, and the "Jersey Witching Cat" tradition was born. Local artists hated the work. After all, cats are not usually cooperative in sitting for a portrait, and it also clashed with religious ideals. Later on, commissioned portraits were replaced by artists who painted collections of cats in colors that were common in the area, namely tuxedo cats, and sold those to New Jersey residents.

The trend died out around the Civil War, but then re-emerged with the rise of photography. Getting a cat to sit still for a photograph is hard enough, but doubly so in a witch's costume. These photos were sometimes blurred, making them look even more sinister, or else were the product of some photo manipulation which seemed like witchcraft in itself. Many of these witching cat images are collected at the Germantown College Archives in New Germantown, New Jersey. Historian and artist Kazys Varneli has been working with artificial intelligence algorithms to generate more of these witching cat images. A post about the artworks at his website has both originals from the Germantown archives and AI-generated images of witching cats. See if you can tell the difference. (Hint: check out the attribution captions, or lack thereof.) -via Metafilter

The old joke goes that the only reason why people actually watch hockey is for the fights. So why not cut out the boring passing and scoring and focus on just the fights? 

This is the combat sport of ice fighting. It's a lot like mixed martial arts bouts, but takes place on ice rinks by combatants wearing full hockey gear, including skates.

Ice Wars International, which is the athletic league that organizes these fights, has been conducting events this year to growing crowds of spectators. Cowboy State Daily reports that beach bout consists of two one-minute rounds. Most of that limited time is spent in sheer, brutal combat.

Embedded above is a recent ice fight in Canada. The action starts at the 3:20 mark.

-via Dave Barry

Whether glass breaking or a speeding bullet is faster may seem like a silly question, because it's kind of like comparing apples to oranges. They are both fast, like the others are both fruit, but that's about it. How would you measure these things? And how much force does each require to match up with the other? Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys (previously at Neatorama), set up the experiment for our entertainment. What they plan to do is measure the speed at which a .45 caliber bullet fired from a gun compares to the speed a crack in a glass pane will travel in their first six feet. That required the use of their super slow motion cameras, and that's the entire rationale for performing this stunt. You might be surprised by the result, which you'll see in the first three minutes. The rest of the video is Gav and Dan having fun breaking the rest of the glass they bought. -via Digg