Every year since 1966, the residents of Gävle, Sweden, erect a giant goat made of straw for Christmas. Why a goat? Why not? The Gävle Goat (previously at Neatorama) is a beloved tradition, which comes with a not-so-beloved custom of burning it down before it can be dismantled in the new year. Despite security measures such as cameras and guards, arsonists have burned down the goat in at least 35 of those years. However, the last time the goat was torched was in 2016. That's enough to make one think that the would-be arsonists may have had a change of heart. But no. On Friday, the 42-foot-tall Gävle Goat was destroyed by fire.
Police say they have arrested a man in his 40s who was observed acting suspiciously before the fire started. Here's where we would normally say "This is why we can't have nice things," but in the case of the Gävle Goat, you can be assured that the people of Gävle will try again next year. Read more on the 2021 Gävle Goat at Reuters.
BTW: The comments under the YouTube video are 99% happy that the goat was burned. They say it signals a return to normalcy.
What kind of saint would you assign to be the patron saint of nuclear weapons? What could possibly be in such a person's life that would make sense of such a designation?
Russian mystic and visionary Prokhor Moshnin was born in 1754. He joined a Russian Orthodox monastery and quickly rose through the ranks to become a leader. By then he was known as Seraphim of Sarov. Then while still a young man, he became a hermit and lived a mostly secluded life for the next thirty years. Eventually, he opened his doors to those who would come to find his wisdom. Seraphim died in 1833, leaving evidence of his mystic powers like unopened letters that he had already answered. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Seraphim of Sarov, making him St. Seraphim, in 1903 in a ceremony attended by Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra.
However, the rise of the Soviet Union meant the Church was subsumed by the power of the state. The USSR developed a nuclear weapons program following World War II. With the fall of the Soviets in the 1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church came out of the shadows, and nuclear warheads (as well as nuclear submarines, tanks, and other nuclear devices) were blessed by a sprinkling of holy water in the name of Saint Seraphim of Sarov. Of course, Seraphim knew nothing of these weapons in his life. How in the world did he become associated with these things? Read the story of the patron saint of nuclear weapons at Esoterix. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Violette79)
We see videos of dogs having a hard time trying to figure out how to carry a stick through a gate, but here this one is doing calculations in his head. We believe this dog, first seen at reddit, is a Belgian Malinois, a rather intelligent breed. Watch this good boy figure out how to carry all the tires at once! Yeah, sure he was trained, but you can see him working out the problem on the spot. Still, if this dog was a real genius, he would spend his time figuring out how to get someone else to do the work for him. -via Laughing Squid
just witnessed an ice cream man’s funeral and all the ice cream vans came and followed in solidarity I AM SOBBING pic.twitter.com/bJhyJj4JoK
— Louisa Davies (@LouisaD__) December 17, 2021
Today, residents of some parts of southern London were able to see and hear a parade of ice cream trucks through the streets. According to various people on Twitter, this was a funeral procession for an ice cream truck driver. In solidarity for their fallen friend, these other drivers joined the procession through the neighborhoods of Lewisham, Peckham, and Brockley with their music playing.
You can see additional videos of the procession from different locations by Dave Bull and Rich Will.
May we all be as fortunate as this was man to have such friends.
-via Rusty Blazenhoff
Prince Edward Island, only referred to as P.E.I. in the linked article, is Canada's smallest province. Life there seems pretty calm and uncontroversial, rather nice, actually, as glimpsed at through the CBC's annual list of top news items from the island. For example, in August of 2021, Breadcrumbs the duck became newsworthy because she was lonely. She was a sole duck survivor of a predator attack on her farm.
"The owner was like, 'Well, ducks are social creatures. They need some friends.' And so they put out a call on Facebook," Atkinson said.
"Facebook [came] to the rescue, including a former farmer on the North Shore who had some spare ducks. Suddenly, Breadcrumbs has some friends and it's in the news."
The other seven news stories include a local man who became a professional competitive eater, a little girl who met a lamb, a cop who chased a suspect in a kayak, and a weasel found in a toilet. Read them all in this year's list of top news stories from P.E.I. -via Fark
(Image credit: Kelsey Langille)
The history of automobiles is somewhat murky, not because we don't have records, but because we can't quite settle on a consistent definition of an automobile. You may have read that the world's first production automobile was patented in 1885, yet there were many pioneers in the field before that. Getting a machine to push a load that wasn't attached to anything else goes back much further.
French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built a steam-powered wagon for the French Army to haul cannons in 1770. His fardier à vapeur, as he named it, was self-contained, steerable, and ridable. That pretty much fills the bill for an automobile, yet Cugnot's design had drawbacks that meant it would never go into production. It was not practical or useful enough to replace horse-drawn wagons.
Cugnot deserves a page in history for his invention, but he also has the title of the first driver in an automobile accident as he drove his fardier à vapeur into a wall. There's even a woodcut illustrating the momentous event. Read about Cugnot's steam-powered wagon at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Joe deSousa)
Feuerzangenbowle is a flaming punch that is now associated with Christmas in Germany. Its roots can be traced back at least as far as the 1700s, when students documented the party trick of burning rum-soaked sugar and letting the aromatic syrup that resulted drip into some kind of drink. Over time, that drink became the now-customary wine with fruit and spices. It was the subject of a 1944 German film titled Die Feuerzangenbowle (pictured above).
Today you can find Feuerzangenbowle (which translate to fire tongs punch) at Christmas markets and festivals in Germany. Well, not exactly today, because such events have been canceled due to the global pandemic. But the punch was there in 2019, and maybe next Christmas. Meanwhile, you can make your own Feuerzangenbowle, or the single serving Feuerzangentasse, at home with recipes from Atlas Obscura. Keep in mind that you shouldn't serve or drink the warm punch until all the sugar has melted and the flame has completely extinguished.
I'm summarize: you get fired.
Born in Space shares with us two videos of fast food workers performing precise scientific experiments. They carefully transfer ice from the ice machine into the deep frying basket, which they then carefully lower into the fryer. Then all hell breaks loose.
Foodsguy explains the science at work here. There's a huge temperature gap between the ice and the hot oil--so much so that the ice begins to boil immediately after it comes into contact with the oil, converting the ice to steam almost instantly. The steam pours out of the fryer.
This is dangerous. Don't try this at home. Or work.
John Overholt, a rare books curator at the Houghton Library of Harvard University, passes along this enticing image. He recently visited the Bruce McKittrick Rare Books shop in Narberth, Pennsylvania, where he found the marvel photographed above.
I am struggling to find information about this alleged duel fought between 17th Century grammarians Pietro Marverti and Pietro Tesei over the correct way to prounounce certain Latin diphthongs, which is a cominbation of two vowels. But, as the notes indicate, this book is extremely rare.
Though I have no love for bloodshed, I can appreciate such steadfast devotion to a cause that would inspire a man to take up a saber on behalf of it.
OMG. Must-read obit for Renay Mandel Corren: “Renay is also survived by…her favorite son, the gay one who writes catty obituaries in his spare time, Andy Corren, of - obviously - New York City.” https://t.co/cGOp6Nwarw
— Paul Seamus Ryan (he/him) (@ThePaulSRyan) December 16, 2021
Renay Mandel Corren of El Paso, Texas, died on Saturday. She was 84. She led a unique life, which we get to know about thanks to the obituary composed by her son, writer Andy Corren. Corren pulls no punches in describing his mother and her antics in life, but the love and esteem her family held for her comes through in the story.
A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found. Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled 'em in Japan, rolled 'em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent.
That's just a small snippet of Renay's life story, any sentence of which would make a good pull quote. Renay Corren led a full life of losing money, throwing caution to the wind, traveling, swearing, lying, and producing a large number of descendants. Her adventures include a rumored affair with broadcaster Larry King in the 1960s. Readers are encouraged to remember Renay by pulling on a slot machine or playing blackjack. You can read this amazing obituary in its entirety at the Fayetteville Observer. -via Fark
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is not a Christmas song, but like "Jingle Bells" and "Winter Wonderland," we only hear it at Christmastime because of the snow mentioned in the lyrics. And speaking of lyrics, those are what make people argue about the song. In its first few decades, it was just a flirty song that echoed the way romance was done at the time. Eventually it started to become clear how problematic those lyrics are.
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 by Broadway songsmith Frank Loesser, and he and his wife performed it as a novelty song at parties, where other guests loved it. You can see why no one back then would think twice about a married couple singing the song to get a laugh. But then it went to the movies. By the 21st century it was known as the date rape song, with the man coercing the woman to stay all night with him and her wondering what was in her drink.
But while we've come a long way in "how romance is done" since the 1940s, some of the lyrics in the 77-year-old song didn't mean what modern audiences think they did. Get an explanation of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" at Mental Floss.
It's been almost ten years since we were treated to the delightful insights of Kirby Ferguson (previously at Neatorama) and his series Everything is a Remix. We're glad to see he's resurrecting that series for 2021. Episode one was an introduction to the idea that everything is remix. It's quite long, but very interesting.
This video, which is part two, is about movies, but it's also about memes and how they eventually become remixes themselves. To do that, Ferguson explains what memes have in common with the rest of our pop culture. They are all copied from copies, because we like what's familiar, and we like to know what to expect. That's just human nature. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, because copying and remixing what we find good will eventually produce something truly creative, whether it's a meme, a movie, a TV show, or some other form of art.
-via Laughing Squid
It was 1983--the first Golden Age for Dungeons & Dragons, when this cultural phenomenon was sweeping across the land. TSR, the publishing company behind this new type of game, was capitalizing on the success of its primary product. Already it was selling licensed fantasy novels. Now it tried something new: romance novels set in Dungeons & Dragons worlds.
These novels are:
Librarian Rebecca Baumann has photos of all four novels in a Twitter thread. That thread caught the attention of Winston E. Black, who replied that his mother wrote Ring of the Ruby Dragon and hated that TSR required her to change her nom de plume.
I'm a librarian, too, so you can imagine how I responded: I immediately filed an interlibrary loan request for one of these books. Specifically, I requested the title in the photo above. A couple weeks later, Secret Sorceress by Linda Lowery arrived.
I won’t speak about Brazilian politics in general, but that nation has recently produced a political reform that we can all get behind: dispute resolution by combat. Sure, it’s not the grand old practice of dueling, but it is a start.
The Guardian reports that Simão Peixoto, the mayor of the town of Borba, fought a former city councilor named Erineu da Silva. It was da Silva who issued the challenge, angry at what he perceived of as the mayor’s refusal to preserve a local waterpark. Mayor Peixoto accepted the challenge and the two fought in a ring set up in a school gym.
Da Silva lost based on points, but the mayor took a savage beating despite his victory.
-via Dave Barry | Image: REFEITOSIMAOPEIXOTO
Having potty trained two children, I know that this part is especially difficult. Actually using the toilet is fairly straightforward. But the manual dexterity to wipe effectively after defecating is tricky, especially when the child can't see what he or she is trying to do.
Redditor /u/Sakgeres introduces us to this clever technique used by an unknown preschool teacher. The balloons are an adequate simulation for buttocks and might help the child visualize what the hand behind the back is trying to accomplish.
But, as some commenters point out, it would be best to teach kids to use a wad of toilet paper only once.
