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?

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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

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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.

Saving lives is getting to be a habit for 11-year old Drayvon Johnson. This young man from Muskogee, Oklahoma saved the lives of two people on the same day. Essense magazine shares his story.

The first time was one morning when, at school, another student used his teeth to pry open a water bottle. The cap fell into his mouth and he began to choke. The student staggered into Drayvon’s classroom, where our hero performed the Heimlich maneuver.

The second came that afternoon, while Drayvon was walking home from school. He saw an elderly woman trying to flee a burning house. She used a walker and thus could not move quickly. Drayvon rushed across the street and pulled her to safety.

And he’s just getting started. Drayvon wants to be an EMT when he grows up, so we can expect more stories like this in the future.

Drayvon has been honored by his local school board and the county sheriff’s office. In the above photo, he poses with an undersheriff while receiving the title of an honorary deputy.

-via Hadro | Photo: Muskogee County Sheriff's Office

Rémi Gaillard, a French comedian, has become famous for playing pranks in public, such as setting up a pretend railroad crossing and playing Mario Kart on a public road using a go-kart. In his most recent video, he dresses as Santa Claus and acts much like you want expect Santa if he was trying to get ready for Christmas.

I hope that some of the participants in these videos are Gaillard's collaborators, especially those of which Gaillard conducts actual crimes. Assume that they are and that the real Santa Claus isn't this desperate to be ready for the big day.

-via Laughing Squid

Uruguayan artist Bruno Baietto has a unique process for shaping his blown glass pieces: he cools the glass inside loaves of bread that have been hollowed out. The bread burns away, leaving the completed glass forms inside.

Here's a video in which Baietto demonstrates the process. 

He explains to Dezeen that bread is a symbol with multiple powerful meanings. Baietto grew up in a family of bakers, so it represents a long family history. It is also the Body of Christ in Christianity, the icon of progress in socialism, and the staple food of capitalist societies. Bread thus, if I understand him correctly, stands for hope in many dimensions.

-via Dornob

400 Betty Whites ago, there were still living Neanderthals.

Between 300 and 130 Betty Whites ago, the first humans reached North America.

100 Betty Whites ago, the last mammoths roamed the Earth.

7 Betty Whites ago, the Aztec Empire rose, only to fall 2.2 Bettys later.

— Yell in a War (@jelenawoehr) December 20, 2021

On January 17 of next year, Betty White will turn 100 years old.

I was about to write "actress Betty White", but that seems like a wholly inadequate description. Betty White is not just an actress. It is best put that Betty White is Betty White in all fullness of the term; a Platonic ideal of Betty Whiteness.

As the world prepares to celebrate, writer Jelena Woehr would like to propose using Betty White as a unit of measurement. Specifically, a Betty White is a unit of time--a lifespan of incredible magnitude. A very long-lived person expresses that events that felt a long time ago were, from a different perspective, very recent. Read Woehr's thread here.

-via Kottke

For 10 million dollars I’ll stand on your front lawn myself in a white bathrobe with a big hose, smoking a cigar and drinking a beer. This is a special discounted limited one time offer good til Christmas Day.

— Randy Quaid (@RandyRRQuaid) December 17, 2021

1989 delivered to world one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We, the audience, get to experience the horrors of a family reunion at Christmas time through the eyes of Clark Griswold. One of the most famous scenes in that film shows Eddie, a distant relative who lives in a run-down motorhome, emptying his RV's brown water tank into a storm drain.

Content warning: NSFW language.

Randy Quaid, who played Eddie, now offers his adoring fans the opportunity to live out Clark Griswold's experience themselves. There will be a small fee for this service.

I found this tweet through David Burge, one of Twitter's greatest treasures, who quips:

hell, I'll do it for $10https://t.co/Eq9ZWBJLp3

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 17, 2021

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

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.

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:

• Ring of the Ruby Dragon
• Talisman of Valdegarde
• Secret Sorceress
• Isle of Illusion

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.