Every year, many classical creative works enter the public domain on January 1^st under US copyright law. Most are forgotten and forgettable, but some still draw in audiences. Smithsonian magazine has a roundup of some of the more famous works that will no longer pay royalties to the estates of their creators. Among them are the original Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, who died in 1930.

Another is, appropriately, the song “The Best Things in Life are Free,” written by Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson in 1927. This song, which revived in popularity due to film performances in the 1950s, is still commanding popular attention—it was recently featured in the TV series White Lotus.

Some classic films are also entering the public domain, including Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Learn about them and more at Smithsonian.

-via Amanda Brennan | Photo: Kim Traynor

The force is strong with this one.. 😂

🎥 IG: marissa_chrzan pic.twitter.com/9JogbN1zu2

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 26, 2022

Instagram user @marisa_chrzan must have been delighted to watch her son appear in the church’s Christmas pageant. The boy, though, had only a shaky grasp on the plot and appeared to think this was an action film. Dressed as a shepherd, he advances upon another shepherd and engages in mock combat.

Some commenters are saying of the boy, “The Force is strong in this one.” Yes, and clearly someone who is skilled with video editing should find a way to replace the staffs with lightsabers and add in appropriate sound effects. The shepherds’ outfits are pretty close to Jedi uniforms as they are.

-via Buitengebieden

Redditor /u/the_colorist is an adherent of the Burning Man lifestyle. Every year, he attends that countercultural festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

One of his recurring problems is that the beers that he carries on his bicycle go flat as it bounces around. He needed to hold them steady, so the_colorist invented and printed this automatic stabilizer.

In the reddit thread at the Burning Man subreddit, many commenters urge him to patent the idea, as they think that it has great money-making potential. He refuses to do so, but freely gives the CAD files to anyone who wishes. As a true believer in the Burning Man lifestyle, he sees profiting from the joy he can bring his fellow festival-goers as morally indecent.

-via Core77

In the TV show Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the famous stage magicians invite other illusionists to trick them. After performing in front of Penn Jillette and Teller, the duo try to describe how the guest star performed the illusion. A panel of judges determine if they succeeded. If Penn and Teller are wrong, then the guest star wins a trophy for successfully fooling their famous colleagues.

In this video, Axel Adler shows how competitive stage magic can be. Somehow he appears to have three legs. Which one (or possibly two) is fake? Just when you think you've got it figured out, Adler does a trick that throws you off.

-via The Awesomer

Can you talk to your toilet? Yes, and some of us do. But toilets generally don't answer back.

Until now. The future has arrived in the form of the Kohler Numi 2.0. The Verge reports that for a mere $11,500, you can have a toilet that comes equipped with Alexa, which is Amazon's digital assistant. Command her to fire up your custom music playlist for your special event.

Additionally, the Numi 2.0 has what you'd expect from a luxury toilet: UV light sanitation, a bidet that can sweep through all of your precious areas, an automatical misting bowl, a heated seat, and an air dryer. You can control all of these features with a handheld remote control.

I don't see any indication that these advanced toilet commands can be controlled by Alexa. That's a shame because I like to keep both hands freed up, not bound to a remote control.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Kohler

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

1/ Here is how the abomination that is the AT-ST came about. Spoiler alert, it comes down to compromises & mission creep.

"Initial Requirement: We need a small dropship deliverable armored sentry tower (ST) for forward operating bases with space for 4 sentries"

An early sketch: https://t.co/T4FRTI8hd0 pic.twitter.com/3oSp7xoCQS

— Jake Chapman 🇺🇸🚀 ✨🇺🇸 (@vc) December 8, 2022

The Pentagon Wars is a comedy film made in 1998 about the long and bizarre development of the US military's Bradley Fighting Vehicle. This long scene from the film summarizes the long design process of this combat vehicle ran hugely over-budget and failed to accomplish its central purpose:

The organizational culture of the Department of the Defense during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s as the Bradley moved from the drawing board to the battlefield is not unique. Jack Chapman explains in a long Twitter thread that the Galactic Empire, in its final years, demonstrated a similar paralysis of leadership that led to the invention of the AT-ST--a combat vehicle that was so inept that even Ewoks armed with Stone Age technology could defeat them.

-via Debby Witt

最近のマクドナルド、手洗い場のみならずスマホ洗い場まであるぞ。。。 pic.twitter.com/sL6D4mZWoE

— shao as a service (@shao1555) October 26, 2022

For most of us, washing our hands after using the toilet is a reflexive act ingrained by long habit. But how often do you wash your phone? I think that I intentionally do about once a month, but that probably isn't enough.

The news website Japan Today reports that the Japanese company WOTA recently introduced the WOSH system of sanitation stations. It's a portable, stand-alone barrel-shaped hand washing sink that includes a phone washing tool that uses ultraviolet light. The company claims that in just 30 seconds (long enough for you to wash you hands), it will sterilize your phone of 99.9% of pathogens.

-via Massimo

The theme music to this classic television series, which aired between 1966 and 1973 is compelling and immediately recognizable. When Argentinian composer Lalo Schifrin wrote it for the series, NPR reports, it was an instant hit. That is endured into the modern film series, which has reworked the theme but found it irreplaceable.

In this remix, musician Jamie Dupuis uses a guitar and a banjo to perform the theme.

Although the banjo is traditionally associated with bluegrass music, it's appropriate for so many other pieces, such as "Sweet Child O' Mine," "Eine Kleine Natchmusik" and "Flight of the Bumblebee."

-via Born in Space

There’s a whole subreddit called Why Women Live Longer which is all about this phenomenon: men doing stupid, dangerous stunts because it would be cool to try. An example is this real-life Beavis & Butthead incident from Britain.

The Daily Mail reports that firefighters in Epping, Essex, UK responded to a hilarious emergency: three men who were building a DIY skatepark in an industrial facility found a huge dryer and decided it would be fun to go for a spin. They were trapped inside for two hours. The intervention of firefighters was necessary because of the men got his ankle trapped in the door and was unable to extricate himself.

-via Dave Barry | Unrelated photo: Alex Borland

The magazine Inverse reports that David Ancalle, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, is leading a team of researchers that is studying the sounds of excretion in precise, scientifically measured detail.

The Synthetic Human Acoustic Reproduction Testing (S.H.A.R.T.) machine, which is pictured above, simulates sounds of human excretion. Ancalle hopes that his team will be able to create an artificial intelligence that will use the S.H.A.R.T. to detect health problems by the sounds that people make while excreting urine and feces. The program that they have so far can correctly identify a particular excretory event 98% of the time.

Ancalle is especially interested in diarrhea. He envisions a future in which the sound of this experience would be recorded by a smart toilet and provide an early alert about a potential disease outbreak. The device pictured above a prototype for a sound detector that could be installed in bathrooms.

This is our future.

-via Dave Barry | Photos: Georgia Tech Research Institute

I recently watched The Grinch for the first time this holiday season and this caught my attention. As a student of history, it naturally piqued my interest. So I did some research and you won’t believe what I found out. /1 pic.twitter.com/xksowmJBa9

— Trevor Williams (@MeLlamoTrevor) November 22, 2022

This is going to blow your mind.

In a brief scene in the 2000 film How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch dresses Max the dog as a reindeer and explains to him his motivation as an actor. He does so while wearing a US Navy cap. This odd scene has long been described by fans as a reference to Rob Reiner's headgear in the documentary This Is Spinal Tap or to the mannerisms of Ron Howard, who directed the Grinch film--or both.

It's neither.

Trevor Williams researched the tragic life of the Grinch prior to his Christmas adventures. There's a huge clue in the scene: the name of the ship Whoville, which was a Gleaves-class destroyer that served in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

I had no idea that the Grinch was a very highly decorated war hero who decided, upon the end of his service, to move to the town for which his ship was named--a town that rejected him, despite his courage and sacrifice on their behalf.

You'll never look at the Grinch the same after reading this thread.

-via Debby Witt

The turducken, which is a chicken baked inside a duck, which is baked inside a turkey, is only one of many expressions of humanity’s desire to cook foods within other foods. The Inuit once prepared birds inside a walrus carcass. The Bedouin used to cook chickens and a sheep inside a roasted camel. The Americans, back in the before times, would cook five pies within one.

The need for foods within foods is transcultural. Jung might say that it is a call from our collective unconscious.

But that is not a scientific way to look at the phenomenon. Vi Hart, a mathematician, is a person of science and breaks down the possibilities of the turducken concept at great length. She prepares quail eggs inside hens inside ducks inside a turkey, but also considers the consequences of expanding the practice on a staggeringly complicated scale.

Content warning: math.

-via Nag on the Lake

VCHS TV reports that it all began in 1948 in the town of Dunbar, West Virginia. Two neighborhoods represented by two amateur football teams, the Riverside Rats and the Hillside Rams, wanted to prove which was the tougher of the two. On Thanksgiving Day, they squared off in a pads-free tackle game.

These days, the rivalry is more friendly and the event is far more than just a game. The Commode Bowl, as the game is called, is preceded by a parade with floats and vehicles decorated with toilets, toilet paper, and toilet plungers.

This year, the Rams prevailed and carried off the trophy after a final score of 28 to 6.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: WCHS

One of my Myth students calculated the minimum number of times Odysseus cheated on Penelope: 6,573

— Dr. Jeremy Swist 🤘🏛️🐈 (@MetalClassicist) November 17, 2022

In Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, spent 20 years away from home while on many adventures. His loving wife, Penelope, was suspected of infidelity but never gave in to her hundred suitors.

Let us set aside the revolting rumors about her alleged romp with Apollo that produced Pan. That is not canonical.

What is canonical, according to Homer, is that Odysseus was relentlessly pursuing other women to almost Wilt Chamberlain levels of promiscuity.

But precisely how many times did Odysseus cheat on Penelope during his two decades away from home? A student of classicist Dr. Jeremy Swist at Brandeis University crunched the numbers. His calculations concluded at 6,573.