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.

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.

https://t.co/bOWQhHnSV7 pic.twitter.com/hmXKstZbJ0

— Gianni Matragrano (@GetGianni) November 24, 2021

Death Note is a manga and anime series about a young man who encounters a notebook dropped by a shinigami--a Grim Reaper-like death spirit in Japanese folklore. If he writes a person's name in the notebook, that person dies.

The young man, who is named Light, decides to use the death note. This leads to him being hunted by a formidable detective--but one not as unstoppable as Lt. Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department.

An internet meme started by, I think, Lia Treppé imagines an ingenious alternate version of Death Note. The seemingly bumbling detective who looks barely competent to serve as a police officer, let alone a homicide detective, would certainly corner Light.

Devon Tatton is a librarian at the Greater Victoria Public Library in British Columbia. One day, while weeding print books in the travel section of her library's stacks, she found and pulled a copy of Handpicked Tours of North America: A Motorist’s Guide to Scenic Routes and Fascinating Places in Canada and the USA. When she picked it up, a tiny zine--a handmade magazine--fell out.

Tatton discovered that the book was a hallow shell filled with a wide variety of zines. Although it had a spine label and was shelved in the correct location by the Dewey Decimal System, it was a fake. Inside was a message saying that the book was the "central branch" of an underground zine trading library.

Tatton had discovered a guerilla library operating secretly inside her own library. This began her quest to find the person responsible for creating and managing this secret library. Tatton was successful. Read the whole story at Capital Daily.

-via Jessamyn West

Are you a world-class gaming champion? Do you have the perfect erogonomic setup to maximize your dexterity? Do you have thousands of followers on Twitch? Then perhaps you can play against the best who were present at the Financial Modeling World Cup.

PC World reports that 128 top-ranked players met online yesterday to see who is the undisputable master of Microsoft Excel. In each round, the contestants are delivered a 1-5 page case study that must be modeled and resolved in the spreadsheet software.

The winner was Andrew "NGOAT" Ngai, who prevailed over Michael "Jarman's Army" Jarman, who was unable to discover the source of an error in his spreadsheet in the final problem. Ngai claimed the $10,000 prize money. 

You can watch a complete recording of the event on YouTube.

-via Dave Barry | Image: Financial Modeling World Cup

Why are reindeer associated with Santa Claus? In History Today, Alexander Lee traces the history of the Santa Claus legend. He begins with the historical Saint Nicholas, who was a Fourth Century A.D. Christian bishop in what is now Turkey. He was famous for sneaking into a poor man's house to leave money as a present.

When the Protestant Reformation came to Germany, Martin Luther decided to keep the Catholic feast day of Saint Nicholas, which continued to thrive in German-speaking areas of Europe, as well as spread outside of it to England and other nations.

German immigration to the United States led to the proliferation of Santa Claus imagery in America, emphasizing his gift giving to children. Perhaps heavy winters in the early Ninteenth Century encouraged artists to depict him in a sleigh.

In 1821, a New York City publishing house produced the anonymously written poem titled The Children's Friend: A New-Year's Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve. One of the illustrations showed a reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh. The Santa legend rapidly assimilated this image and added the number of reindeer. Read about this change at History Today.

-via Debby Witt | Photo: Pixabay

TikToker TeeCee has two great talents: combining foods and video editing. She has the soul of a Cordon Bleu chef and the skills of a Hollywood storyboard artist.

I had orginally planned to post her video of dipping a cinnamon roll in a bowl of chili, but as I explored her Instagram channel, I found only more and more imaginative food videos. Yes, we should get around to trying this combination, but a more imperative recipe is dipping sticks of butter into Ragu sauce and eating them whole.

To adapt a phrase from Robin Williams's character in Dead Poets Society, foods like this are what we stay alive for.

-via First We Feast

Well, maybe he's pretending. Maybe he actually has the power to manipulate the intersection at the baggage carousel.

Some people will claim that this man, who is the comedian Andres Ini, recorded at an airport in Barcelona in 2018, is standing in front of one of those smart baggage mergers that prevent clogs from forming. But I still believe in magic and I hope that the people standing next to him do, too. May Ini use his powers for good.

-via Laughing Squid

Assuming that this photo is real, Dr. Kenyon Wilson, professor of music at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, would like for his students to carefully read his course syllabus. He left a fifty dollar bill inside a locker and included the combination in the document. No student took the money.

I will withhold judgment on Wilson's students' attentiveness until I see the syllabus itself. In the past few years, I've sat in on discussions by rhetoric professors about the literary genre of the syllabus and the ways in which they can be written to discourage students from actually reading them. Maybe his is as short at W.H. Auden's famous one-page syllabus from 1941. Maybe it's a twenty-page document written by lawyers that reads like (and essentially is) a terms of service agreement. Maybe Wilson would be out of money if he had left a Franklin instead of a Grant in the locker.

-via Josh Hadro

There's no swimsuit component at this beauty pageant, but contestants are expected to be perfect specimens of physical beauty (sorry, but inner beauty doesn't count). Every year, Saudi Arabia holds the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in Riyadh. This is the world's most prestigious beauty pageant for camels. Now, tragically, this contest has been wracked with scandal.

The Associated Press reports that pageant authorities have expelled more than 40 participants due to artificial enhancements, including hormones to increase muscle mass, botox to increase lip volume, and fillers to shape the camels' faces into relaxed expressions. These camels will be unable to compete and secure the $66 million in prize money.

Photo: AboutHer