In 1920, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote and illustrated a letter from Santa Claus for his three-year old son. This became a regular tradition for his children for the next twenty-three years. Below the fold, you can find a copy of one such letter as well as a partial transcription from Letters of Note.

You will be emancipated. Resistance is futile. Chris Krahn of Boise Tattoo made this tattoo for Michael Vellotti. Krahn's website is worth a look. He has some really interesting pieces of work there, including one of Benjamin Franklin as an Old West robber. Link | Artist's Website

There's a scene in episode 15 of The Prisoner in which the titular character drinks a glass of beer, only to discover a terrible message inscribed on the bottom: you have just been poisoned. Sean Michael Ragan decided to make one of his own, right down to the correct typeface. What a brilliant birthday or anniversary gift! You can read detailed instructions at the link. Link -via Craft | Photo: Sean Michael Ragan

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Wakestaking involves maneuvering a wakeboard over a skateboarding course. It appears that competitors are yanked along a tow line and must safely but acrobatically pass the obstacles. Here are highlights from a recent competition in Cologne, Germany. http://www.waketheline.com/blog/ -via @Christopher Jobson

Gary Gygax was, perhaps more than any other single individual, responsible for inventing the role-playing game and Dungeons & Dragons specifically. He failed his last saving throw three years ago, to the lament of the gaming community. Now there's a project to build a grand monument to his life and work. The government of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where Gygax reigned, is granting space in a public park for this purpose:

The Gygax Memorial Fund has reached a huge milestone. We have been granted land for the memorial site at Donian Park. Donian Park is a four acre open space site which encompasses a wetland and the 100 year recurrence interval floodplain along the White River in downtown Lake Geneva.

One Boing Boing commenter has put it best: "He will be critically missed. We should all observe a moment of silent (10' radius)." Link -via Boing Boing | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Robots are taking all of our jobs, what with car assembly lines and ATMs and such. Now engineers are working on building robots that will put human belly dancers out of work! There's an actual paper entitled "A control system for a flexible spine belly-dancing humanoid" from, of all places, Japan. Here's a selection from the abstract:

Inspired by the rhythmic movements commonly exhibited in lamprey locomotion as well as belly dancing, we designed a controller for a simulated belly-dancing robot using the lamprey central pattern generator. Experimental results show that the proposed lamprey central pattern generator module could potentially generate plausible output patterns, which could be used for all the possible spine motions with minimized control parameters.

Link -via Geekosystem | Image by deviantART user ChadRocco

Verdan Vidak captured this excellent image. Put your bro fist right here, man. -via reddit | Photographer's Website

Prop designer Chris Myles took a break from making Portal props to put these lemon grenades together:

Tops from some old airsoft bb loaders, random springs to make the spoons fly off when you pull the pins, some paper plus modge podge labels, and a hacked greeting card so when the spoon comes off Cave does his rant and then a big BOOOM.

Link -via Everyday, No Days Off

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The geese are on parade in Diest, Belgium. Why? I don't know. I'm not sure that I want to know. The answer could be very frightening. -via Blame It on the Voices

Beth Jackson Klosterboer of Hungry Happenings made these adorable cookies that look like fuzzy slippers. The soles are made out of Nutter Butter cookies with fudge on top molded into the uppers. The fuzz consists of pink-tinted chocolate shavings.

Link -via Craft

Well, of course Kitty White was finally caught. Why? Because she was sloppy. And if you don't listen to what I'm trying to teach you, you'll get caught, too. So pay attention. Link -via Doobybrain | Photo by Seymour Templar used with permission

This lovely engraved hard hat of unknown origin is up for sale on eBay. It's decorated with images of offshore oil drilling work:

Hello, up for auction is a vintage/antique B.F. McDonald engraved/hand hammered hard hat. Fantastic oil drilling themed hat. The hat has off-shore oil rigs all around the sides and a helicopter towards the top/front and a helicopter landing pad around the back. The metal work is stunning. Signed "Wisna" on the top center (5th photo down). The interior straps are plastic, with vinyl on the front where it touches the forehead. Hat is stamped "McDonald - T - Cap Standard - Mine Safety Appliances CO." on the interior bill (10th photo down). It looks as though someones name used to be on the front, as many of these hats do, and it got incorporated into the design - see second photo below.

Link -via Boing Boing

As a degree project, Fuchsia Macaree imagined a "hypothetical company which make products based on puns." Macaree is a student at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. You can view several other products at the link. http://cargocollective.com/fuchsiamacaree#1098568/Wingfield-Brothers-Inc -via NotCot

Previously by Fuchsia Macaree: Bermuda Triangle of Productivity

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Joshua Noble, Martin Fuchs, and Philip Whitfield built "ReceiptRacer", a game that can be played on a receipt printer. It's like a classic arcade racing game in which the player must drive down a twisty path without hitting obstacles. A light moves over the continuously printing surface, representing the player. Sensors detect if the player has collided with any obstacles and end the game. Link -via Nerdcore | Joshua Noble's Website

In 431 episodes spanning from 1959 to 1973, the Cartwrights of the Nevada Territory's Ponderosa became a fixture of American life. Let's take a look at some facts that you might not know about Bonanza.

1. The historic Virginia City was the center of the famed 1859 silver strike known as the Comstock Lode. It promptly became the very image of the Old West boom town, with fortunes won and lost, exploited Chinese laborers, glamorous and impoverished prostitutes, and violent struggles with Native Americans.

Samuel Clemens worked as a reporter in Virginia City for two years and there selected his pen name of Mark Twain. In was this varied, colorful era and place that producer David Dortort decided would be ideal for the show.

2. When Bonanza premiered in 1959, the airwaves were saturated with sitcoms that depicted fathers as idiots managed by their wives. Dortort insisted that the show be an hour long instead of a half hour in order to ensure that he had time to depict Ben Cartwright as a father figure worthy of respect. It worked, and Lorne Greene received thousands of fan letters from teenage boys who wished that he was their father.

3. Dortort envisioned Bonanza as an Old West presentation of the legend of King Arthur. Ben Cartwright was King Arthur and his sons were his knights.

4.Did you notice that the characters wear the same outfits almost every episode? This was done to make it easier to work in stock footage when necessary -- not that the show was cheap. At $100,000-150,000 per episode, it was among the most expensive shows on TV during its run.

5. Lorne Greene’s father, Daniel Greene, made orthopedic shoes and boots for a living. He named his son after his first customer, a man named Lorne MacKenzie. When Lorne Greene delivered the 1971 commencement address at his alma mater, Queen’s University in Ontario, he gave the graduates advice appropriate for his heritage. Greene said “get yourself a really comfortable bed or a really good pair of shoes, because you’re going to be in one or the other for the rest of your life.”

6. Greene started out as a radio announcer. He was the chief broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and during the Battle of Britain, he was known as "the voice of doom." To time his speaking better, Greene invented a stopwatch that ran backwards.