Vatican City consists of only 109 acres, but it boasts the arms of its famous Swiss Guard. Perhaps their uniforms and polearms look out of date, but they are modern, professionally trained soldiers--proper heirs to the Papal troops who fought with bloody savagery during the 1527 Sack of Rome.

The Swiss Guard is one of the long-established but tiny armed forces fielded by the microstates of Europe: Vatican City, San Marino, Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Andorra. In this video, historian Mark Felton describes them.

I find microstates fascinating and have read much about them, but still learned something that I didn't know: Andorra maintains a 12-man army equipped with weapons passed down as heirlooms within families. Gun ownership is common, so the Andorran government is prepared to call upon the entire adult male population, if necessary, to protect the nation.

Foothill Division Officers displayed heroism and quick action by saving the life of a pilot who made an emergency landing on the railroad tracks at San Fernando Rd. and Osborne St., just before an oncoming train collided with the aircraft. pic.twitter.com/DDxtGGIIMo

— LAPD HQ (@LAPDHQ) January 10, 2022

In an action scene worthy of a Michael Bay movie, Los Angeles Police Department officers rescued an injured pilot from his crashed plane just a few seconds before a train hit the plane at high speed, destroying it completely.

The pilot had the bad luck of completing the crash landing of his Cessna on train tracks. This was in the Pacoima neighborhood near Whiteman Airport, a general aviation facility, at 2:10 on Sunday afternoon. Those tracks served Metrolink, a commuter rail service in southern California. Although responding police asked Metrolink to stop trains on that stretch, they were unable to communicate the need quickly enough. It was necessarily to pull the pilot out as quickly as possible.

Frightening cell phone video of first responders pulling a pilot to safety seconds before a train slams into the plane that crashed onto the tracks near Whiteman Airport in Pacoima. @CBSLA #BreakingNow #news #crash #kcal 📸 Luis Jimenez https://t.co/NWGu2HhBUM @composerluis pic.twitter.com/D4VhNPGYID

— JASMINE VIEL (@jasmineviel) January 10, 2022

Here's a video showing the train impact from a different angle.

-via Super Punch

In the olden days, librarians would make printed guides to doing research for various topics. These were called pathfinders or research guides. Then the internet happened, and librarians adopted the practice for online environments. Then the Springshare developed LibGuides, which is basically an online content management system for libraries.

This isn't an advertisement for LibGuides. I just love their product. A professor can email me a class research assignment and I can throw a research guide for it online in as little as 15 minutes.

Now Rice University's Fondren Library has kicked up the game. Librairan Jeanette Sewell, who identifies as "the Official Golden Girls Librarian" offers her patrons (and us) a LibGuide on The Golden Girls. This is timely, given the recent departure of Betty White from among us.

I'm especially impressed with Sewell's scholarly bibliography on The Golden Girls, which would be especially helpful for both pop culture researchers and casual fans.

-via Rebecca Baumann

Tinsley is a Shiloh Shepherd and packmate of the human Cam Laundry. A few days ago, Tinsley, Laundry, and another human were driving down a snowy highway in New Hampshire. Laundry, who was driving, had an accident and crashed the car.

Other drivers saw Tinsley late that night, trying to get their attention. She led police to the scene of the crash, where Laundry and his friend were immoblized and suffering from hypothermia. EMTs rescued and treated the humans while Tinsley calmly observed.

After Laundry and his friend were released, he set about rewarding Tinsley for her work. He tells NBC 5 News that the dog has venison burger and backstrap in her future.

-via Laughing Squid

Imagine that you've spent years planning the perfect wedding for you and your spouse. You've got everything: a luxury resort destination site, elaborate bachelor and bachelorette parties, gourmet menus, an artistic cake, and a band to perform at the reception. All that you need now is a custom hashtag so that all of the influencers at your wedding can post their content on Instagram and Twitter.

That's where the problem comes up. Some other couple has already taken #FarrierWedding, so there's no obvious way to tag your wedding and only your wedding.

That's where Happily Ever #Hashtagged comes in. The founder, Marielle Wakim, started her firm in 2016 to respond to this market demand. She tells the Wall Street Journal that her carefully developed skill for inventing clever, original, and appropriate hashtags makes her $50 fees worth it. Wakim can write hashtags that incorporate specific themes, names, or ideas and create alternate versions for elements of the wedding.

Wakim isn't alone. Her business is one of at least several who are filling this #nicheweddingmarket. Read about them at the Wall Street Journal.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Marko Millivojevik

Due to the timing of their births, these twin siblings were born in completely different years. Alfredo Antonio Trujillo entered the world first at 11:45 PM at the Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California on New Year's Eve. Fifteen minutes later and seconds after midnight, his sister, Aylin Yolanda Trujillo, emerged. As a result, they have not only different birthdays, but different birth years.

A press release from the hospital says that the odds of twins being born in separate years is about 1 in 2 million births.

The twins are healthy and strong. The hospital expects for them to go home soon with their parents to meet their three older siblings.

-via My Modern Met | Photo: Natividad

I've just discovered the wonderful (and occasionally obscene) Twitter account Threatening Music Notation. It's filled with pictures of strange slices of musical notation, such as instructions to consume cocaine, mooing like a cow, slapping a fish, and producing fart-like sounds.

What's going on in the above selection? Twitter user @ONEiROSEB says that it's taken from the works of Victor Borge, a Danish-American musical comedian.

Borge was famous for his physical comedy while playing the piano on stage. In this recording, he plays Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2 with the help of Şahan Arzruni, classical pianist. At the 2:00 mark, Borge stands up, sits on the keyboard, then sits back down to continue playing with his fingers.

-via Rebecca Baumann

CS Lewis describes his new book to JRR Tolkien pic.twitter.com/agaxO9TBqW

— Eleanor Morton (@EleanorMorton) December 17, 2021

Comedian Eleanor Morton has a lot to say about the writing quality of The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.

To be fair, this matchup is drastically uneven. J.R.R. Tolkein was so committed to the task for his novels that he invented languages and composed lengthy histories to provide a narrative backdrop for The Lord of the Rings. Lewis grabbed a scattering mythological and folkloric elements like was he wandering through a narrative version of the Golden Corral while still tipsy from a late night meeting of the Inklings.

In his defense, Lewis was attempting to compose an allegory akin to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress rather than an epic fantasy series like The Lord of the Rings. These are very different writing tasks.

Content warning: foul language.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anokhi Mehndi by Kiran (@anokhimehndi)

I keep my Instagram follows pared down to a short list so that I make best use of my social media browsing time. @AnokhiMehndi in the West Midlands of the UK is definitely worth following. She's one of the stars of Henna Instagram and this video is an example of why.

Her post doesn't explain exactly why this piece sparkles, but I gather that incorporating glitter into henna dye is a thriving practice. Here are the sparkly arms of @Bharathi Sanghani_Mendhi, who is an accomplished bridal henna artist in her own right.

New Year's Day is sometimes called Public Domain Day. We librarians make special note of it because certain works lose copyright protection and thus become easier to share with patrons. Starting this year, many famous works of literature are now in the public domain, including A.A. Milne's classic work of children's literature Winnie-the-Pooh.

What else is now in the public domain? Book Riot lists many famous works, including The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway, My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Lawrence of Arabia.

Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain mentions these books and also sound recordings, including classic jazz recordings, as well as movies, such as Moana (the 1926 Samoan documentary) and Rudolph Valentino's The Son of the Sheik.

Take a look and see what you'd like to add to your personal collections.

Photo: Sheila Sund

Redditor /u/minecolas1 brings this interesting photo to our attention. Why does this grocery store offer standard sliced bread loaves sliced horizontally instead of vertically?

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Isa Bou (@feedingmyfriendkim)

Redditor /u/Phantom_Wapiti offers an answer. A popular Quebecois dish at Christmastime is a pain sandwich. That makes a little more sense when you learn that "pain" is the French word for bread. This food consists of various deli mixes, such as egg salad, chopped ham, or chicken salad, layered between slices of bread arranged like a layer cake. Cream cheese is the most common "frosting". Chop off a slice and serve it with a fork.

A sufficiently large family gathered around one table makes dining difficult. It can get frustrating to spend too much time passing dishes back and forth instead of shoveling goodies in one's mouth.

Matty Action writes that his father-in-law built this replica Thomas the Tank Engine train set to facilitate the process. Watch it slowly circle the table like conveyor belt sushi, repeatedly offering each dish to each diner.

There's at least one potential drawback: it becomes increasingly difficult to decline your aunt's disgusting green bean and mushroom casserole when she mentions it every time it passes by your position.

-via First We Feast

Many pasta shapes developed organically over the centuries as cooks modified preexisting designs to fit new needs. But that's not the approach that Dan Pashman took. He decided to start from scratch after studying the best qualities of pasta. The result of his research is cascatelli.

Cascatelli is, appropriate for its shape, the Italian word for waterfall. Core77 describes how this design simultaneously fulfills several pasta objectives.

The ruffled half-tube on one surface creates a lot of surface area for sauce to adhere to. The elongated edge allows the user to easily stab it with a fork. The right angles on the underside create maximum resistance to teeth, establishing what Pashman calls the ideal "toothsinkability." And the overall variations in textures and thicknesses provide a high contrast in textures.

What I haven't been able to learn from Pashman is the ideal sauce for cascatelli. What would you use?

Every Christmas Eve, local school Dutch children come to Holten & Groesbeek Canadian Military Cemeteries in the Netherlands to light a candle in the honour of every Canadian soldier laid to rest. pic.twitter.com/WwAlpGgIqe

— Arry Pottah🇨🇦 (@13murphy66) December 24, 2021

Canada paid a heavy price to liberate the Netherlands from the Nazis during World War II. Many never returned home. Over two thousand of them remain at the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery and Memorial. The Dutch, who suffered horribly during the war, remain grateful to this day. That's why, every year, Dutch children and their parents gather on Christmas Eve to light candles for each grave.

This tradition, Canadian Military Family magazine informs us, began twenty-five years ago when a Finnish visitor introduced the custom from her homeland. A few years ago at one of these ceremonies, local organizer Gerard Hendriks explained that the candles serve to "bring the light and the warmth to them as we do with our loved ones at Christmas time."

Here's a video from the lighting last night.

-via Nag on the Lake

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Adam Hillman (@witenry)

Adam Hillman is best known for artistic arrangements of everyday objects, often ordered by slightly differing color tones. He finds and creates patterns in the daily stuff of life. Hillman is, as he explains in an interview with Stir World, especially fascinated with food, which serves as his primary creative material.

His most recent creation is this pixelated image of Mario. If I understand Hillman correctly, he began by arranging M&M chocolate candies on double sided tape to match the colors of our 16-bit hero. Then he sprayed water on the surface. Over time, the colors melted off the candies, creating an integrated image.