Arcangelo Ambrosi, a craftsman of smoking pipes, recently made this whimsical mushroom. It's composed of maple with an acrylic mouthpiece. I can imagine Papa Smurf or, perhaps, the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland puffing from it.

Rosemary Mosco, a naturalist, science writer, and cartoonist, proposes that Santa consider replacing his reindeer with other magical animals. I would personally go with the anglerfish and do not consider their lack of flying abilities to be a detriment: it turns out that, as I recently learned, normal reindeer cannot fly. Their flight is just part of the Santa Claus narrative.

-via Marilyn Terrell

While dressed as the impulse control-impaired character Eddie Johnson from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Timothy Browning of Ashland, Kentucky celebrated Christmas morning the traditional way. He got out his flamethrower and blasted the snow off of his driveway. He is thus the model to all men about how we should conduct ourselves during this yuletide season. Let us do likewise--assuming that we can construct a functional flamethrower in our workshops.

-via Dave Barry

Natalie Portman uses the domino run effect to suggest an active book shelf. Oh, she says, did my taking down a book cause that? How unfortunate. That's always happening. pic.twitter.com/QaafnK1hzc

— Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) December 3, 2020

Bookcase Credibility is a Twitter account that judges famous people for the books that appear in the background of their Zoom or WebEx video conferences. It's an inevitable practice, as the new ways of telework inevitably bringing the world into your home to judge you for your interior design choices. Or, more specifically, your intellectual rigor and home library organization skills.

So it's now important to not only dress well and furnish your office to look professional. Now even your bookcase has to impress people. Now you could read respected academic works that expand your mind. But that takes time and is boring. Instead, just have the service Books by the Foot send you a curated collection of books that subtly deceive people you work with into thinking that you're smart.

Books by the Foot, which is operated by a company called Wonder Book has been in business for many years, but quarantine life has given its services only greater importance. Politico reports:

The Wonder Book staff doesn’t pry too much into which objective a particular client is after. If an order were to come in for, say, 12 feet of books about politics, specifically with a progressive or liberal tilt—as one did in August—Wonder Book’s manager, Jessica Bowman, would simply send one of her more politics-savvy staffers to the enormous box labeled “Politically Incorrect” (the name of Books by the Foot’s politics package) to select about 120 books by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward. The books would then be “staged,” or arranged with the same care a florist might extend to a bouquet of flowers, on a library cart; double-checked by a second staffer; and then shipped off to the residence or commercial space where they would eventually be shelved and displayed (or shelved and taken down to read).

Only sometimes do Bowman and Wonder Book President Chuck Roberts know the real identity of the person whose home or project they’ve outfitted: “When we work with certain designers, I pretty much already know it’s going to be either an A-list movie or an A-list client. They always order under some code name,” Bowman says. “They’re very secretive.”

Visually-appealing book arrangements are important for more than just video conference calls. Books by the Foot also provides scenic backgrounds for offices on TV shows and movies:

Books by the Foot’s creations have also popped up in a variety of TV shows and movies, many of them politics-adjacent. “Madam Secretary,” “Veep,” “The Blacklist,” “House of Cards,” as well as the 2017 movie Chappaquiddick, for example, have all outfitted their sets with Books by the Foot curations. Some of the most high-profile projects the team works on, however, aren’t revealed to them until after the fact: Bowman has had the distinctly surreal experience of watching a movie for the first time and recognizing her work onscreen. (That’s how it works, she said, with “pretty much anything Marvel.”)

-via Althouse

Part of traditional martial arts training is conditioning the body to withstand hard blows by building up bone and muscular density. One kung fu tradition from China calls for the sensitive and vulnerable male genitals to be prepared to take heavy blows. Training involves ramming a steel-capped log into a student's groin.

This video from Luoyang, Henan province, China features masters of this conditioning practice, as well as "iron throat", "iron back", and "iron stomach." Those training regimens are also demanding, if somewhat less terrifying to men.

-via Geek Tyrant

It's the age old problem: how do you keep your snacks warm while keeping Agent 47 busy on his killing spree? Kentucky Fried Chicken has now solved that conundrum by designing a console with a built-in chicken warmer.

It's not exactly an original idea. Gamers have been heating food on overly-hot consoles for years. But what the KFConsole does is conveniently and intentionally conduct the machine's heat to the food. CNN reports:

Your chicken will be kept hot thanks to a custom-built cooling system that keeps the console hardware at a regular temperature while using heat produced by its components to warm the chicken chamber. [...]

The console can handle virtual reality games and offers smooth gameplay thanks to 240 frames per second frame rate and 4K display compatibility, according to details published by Cooler Master.

-via Dave Barry | Photos: KFConsole

The Veal family of Indianapolis has bushes growing near the pond on their property. For every winter since 1961, they have sprayed pond water with food coloring onto the bushes (now an artificial scaffold), encasing them in layers of colored ice. They carve steps into the back so that family members can climb it to trim the ice into the vivid sculpture you see above. You can see photos from this ongoing project on their Instagram page or learn how to visit it in person here.

How does the Veal family manage to create this sculpture? This 2018 local news video illustrates the process after one daring reporter climbs the ice tree to inspect it.

-via Design You Trust

Every year, the small Scottish town of Newburgh turns a local child's drawing into a Christmas light on public display. For nearly two decades, the town has added a new light to a particular lamppost. BBC News describes the mysterious origins of this project:

The tradition is now in its 19th year, but no-one remembers who started it.

Shona Gray, head of Newburgh Action Group, who organise the lights, told BBC Scotland: "It might have been that there was a teacher from the local school on the committee that year, but no-one remembers.

"All we know is it became an annual competition and all the schoolchildren entered their drawings, with one being chosen to turn into a light." [...]

Shona said: "Lamppost 15 is always the new light. It's opposite St Katherine's Court where we gather for the light switch-on.

You can see more photos at Design Boom.

Photo: Newburgh Action Group

For several years, Ruby Silvious, an artist in New York, has enchanted the world with her delicate, precise paintings on tea bags. She has refined and expanded her art with every work, making use of her skills during quarantine lockdown to transform what we might think of as trash into aesthetic wonders.

Lân Nguyen, a photographer in the Netherlands, experiments with laying silhouettes over the sky and mixing the forms with the shapes suggested by the clouds and moon. The results are often amusing and heartwarming. His source material includes romantic images, as well as scenes from classic Disney films. You can see more on his Instagram page.

Tim Smith of Williamsburg, Kentucky, may have agreed to make his route, despite rain, snow, heat, or gloom of night. But he never agreed to face down dogs with axes. Fox 19 News quotes him:

There’s a lot of reasons why your mailman might not deliver your packages, and this is one of them. I can handle a dog, but not a dog with an axe.

Yup. Keep driving. The customer can pick up his mail at the post office, if necessary.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Tim Smith

Like chocolate syrup and pickled pigs' feet, some foods just naturally belong together. McDonald's China division recently discovered that Oreo cookies and Spam are complementary ingredients. Kotaku reports that the Oreo Spam burger will go on sale on December 21. It will be limited to a run of 400,000. Perhaps, like the McRib, it will be occasionally returned to the menu for hungry fans.

Image: McDonald's of China

Dodging my responsibilities like....#hockey 🪑 pic.twitter.com/Itk1NuqmaN

— Pavel Barber (@HeyBarber) December 17, 2020

Pavel Barber is a Canadian hockey coach who describes himself as "a stickhandling specialist." That means he's an expert in the precise and consistent use of the hockey stick. In this video, he's at The Skating Lab, a hockey training facility in Toronto. That facility's website is fascinating to browse, as it's filled with photos of many specialized machines designed to optimize hockey performance.

In this video, he's using a treadmill to maintain control of a puck while maneuvering it around increasingly difficult obstacles.

-via The Awesomer

A friend of redditor appuhlatchuhn recently brought an adorable dissertation into the world. She got this beautiful maternity photo taken with it. Mama looks so proud. I hope the little tyke grows up and gets published as a monograph some day.

Rommy De Bommy, an artist in the Netherlands, makes fashion accessories that look just like (and I'm going to guess tastes like) food products. She says that they're made of clay and "and little bit of magic." She can make custom orders, so if there's some special food that speaks to your soul, De Bommy can make a purse that looks like it.