Chris Heath collected memories of Prince and his life from those closest to them: band members, childhood friends, girlfriends, employees, and others who each have a great Prince story. Or many stories.

Corey Tollefson (Minneapolis-based entrepreneur and fan; attended events at Paisley Park for over 20 years): The thing that was funny was you never saw Prince [first], you smelled him. He always smelled like lavender. And you knew when he was there because you'd turn around and go, "Holy shit, I smell Prince." And then, ten seconds later, you'd see him.

Morris Hayes (keyboard player; Prince's longest-serving band member, 1992–2012): I remember taking him to the hardware store in my camping van. He wanted to go buy a lock. And we go to Ace Hardware—it's snowing and freezing—and I say, "Okay, Prince, you stay in the car." So I'm picking stuff up in the aisles, I look over, he just cruises by in a turtleneck sweater and his fuzzy boots, and people are looking like, "Oh my God, Prince is in the hardware store!" He comes and finds me and he's got a handful of crap—like, "Can we buy this?" I'm, "What did you do with the car?" He says, "It's out there—it's just running." I said, "Prince, you can't leave the car running—somebody could just steal the car." He said, "This is Chanhassen—nobody's gonna steal the car." So we get out to the car and sure enough it's out there, just running, smoke coming out of the tailpipe. And he's like, "I told you."

We also get a multi-person recap of the famous skit from Chappelle's Show, where Charlie Murphy tells of Prince beating them all in basketball while wearing heels. Yeah, it's true, and there's even more to the story then we knew. Read all the delightful Prince stories at GQ. -via Metafilter

The most despised song from my entire radio career (1982-2006) was "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." It wasn't because there was anything inherently wrong with the song, except for the dead grandmother. What ruined the song for me was the dozens of requests for it every hour, even right after I had played it. Every hour, every December, for decades. Every year, a new cohort of children decide that's the one Christmas song they want to hear. Now it's a Christmas classic, with its own history.

It begins, like all Christmas fables should, with a blizzard. It was December 1978, and a San Francisco veterinarian named Elmo Shropshire, a.k.a. Dr. Elmo, was booked at the Hyatt in Lake Tahoe with his then-wife, Patsy. The couple had a comedy-bluegrass duo called Elmo & Patsy, and just before taking the stage, they got a visit from one Randy Brooks, a Texas singer-songwriter who’d played the hotel before them and gotten stuck there by the snow.

"I was never what I’d consider to be much of a singer," Dr. Elmo tells mental_floss from his home in California. "I always sang novelty songs, so it didn’t matter if I could sing or not. At the time, we were doing a lot of funny songs. Randy saw our show and said, 'I’ve got this song I think would be perfect for you.'"

That was the very beginning. It took years for the song to really take off, but when it did, it changed everything for Dr. Elmo. Read the story from the man who made it at mental_floss. 

(Image credit: Flickr user Brian)

A group of people are role playing as Vikings. They are really into it, but Vidar just can't seem to get with the program. He gets a time out -as a dead man. And that's when things really get weird.

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The line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred when Viking deities are invoked. Odin doesn't care a bit about the boundaries between LARP groups. But is he really who he says he is? Vidar must determine what is real and what is role playing before he can achieve total awesome Viking power. This video honestly gets better as it goes along. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Combat veteran, Gemini astronaut, and Ohio senator, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth. The Mercury astronaut took off in the Friendship 7 capsule on February 20, 1962, and spent four hours and 55 minutes orbiting the earth. But that was just what he's most famous for. In World War II,

He became a successful fighter pilot who ran 59 hazardous missions, often as a volunteer or as the requested backup of assigned pilots. A war later, in Korea, he earned the nickname "MiG-Mad Marine" (or "Old Magnet A — ," which he sometimes paraphrased as "Old Magnet Tail.")

"I was the one who went in low and got them," Glenn said, explaining that he often landed with huge holes in the side of his aircraft because he didn't like to shoot from high altitudes.

Glenn's public life began when he broke the transcontinental airspeed record, bursting from Los Angeles to New York City in three hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds. With his Crusader averaging 725 mph, the 1957 flight proved the jet could endure stress when pushed to maximum speeds over long distances.

In New York, he got a hero's welcome — his first tickertape parade. He got another after his flight on Friendship 7.

That mission also introduced Glenn to politics. He addressed a joint session of Congress, and dined at the White House. He became friends with President Kennedy and ally and friend of his brother Robert. The Kennedys urged him to enter politics, and after a difficult few starts he did.

Later in life, Glenn spent 24 years as a senator representing Ohio. He ran for president in 1984. On October 29, 1998, he returned to space aboard the shuttle Discovery at age 77. John Glenn died Thursday at the James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

He was 95. Godspeed, John Glenn.

-via Metafilter

Please share this around and get the newsforward to anyonethat isin https://t.co/wxlrhfJaQq usto makesurethat no-one isalonethisChristmas pic.twitter.com/OFbcO8HFmb

— Shish restaurant (@shishsidcup) November 17, 2016

A Turkish restaurant in London called Shish put up this sign last month. The Muslim-owned business is reaching out to the homeless and elderly of the Sidcup neighborhood to ensure no one is alone all day for the holiday.

Hasan Masud, who works at Shish Restaurant, told BuzzFeed News: “We’re just helping people.” He said the team at Shish also wanted to open their doors to the elderly because “lots of people stay home alone for Christmas… They don’t need to. They can come here and have some fun.”

After a great response on social media, the restaurant upgraded the sign.

A Muslim owned restaurant in London is ensuring 'no 1 eats alone on Christmas day' by offering free meals to homeless people and the elderly pic.twitter.com/M0CrKFnIj9

— Jamilla (@JamillaTweets) December 4, 2016

If the publicity gets the restaurant more business, it will only enable them to serve more free shish kebab on Christmas Day. Besides, the food looks awesome. -via Uproxx

When parents tell stories to their children, we get an image of fantasy creatures that's all our own.  Later we become more attuned to the pop culture depictions of them, like the elves from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the dwarves (or dwarfs) from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But in 2016, mentions of these characters are most likely to make us think of Lord of the Rings. The movie version, where hobbits, orcs, elves, dwarves, and men all have their distinctive accents.

Throughout The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the reams of related histories Tolkien wrote about Middle Earth, he established whole societies, histories, and languages for a handful of races that still inform how they are depicted today. Elves are ancient, beautiful, and have pointy ears; dwarves are short, tough, and love to use axes; orcs are filthy brutes who live for destruction.

Of course the original readers couldn’t hear what Tolkien’s creatures sounded like, but the intense focus he placed on developing their languages gave people a pretty good idea. “Tolkien was a philologist,” says Olsen.“This is what he did. He studied language and the history of language and the changing of language over time.”

Tolkien would create languages first, then write cultures and histories to speak them, often taking inspiration from the sound of an existing language. In the case of the ever-present Elvish languages in his works, Tolkien took inspiration from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men and hobbits got their language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.

Tolkien was only partially responsible for the accents of his creations. He did establish that they sounded different from each other, but what those languages sound like changed over time as various interpreters added their own ideas. Did you know that Tolkien imagined dwarves sounding like Israelis? Read about the evolution of fantasy characters and how they speak at Atlas Obscura.   

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

There have been many famous, legendary haircuts (for men) and hairdos (for women) in show business history. Well, we can start with the mop tops of the Beatles. Then we obviously drift over to the long hair, frizzly hair, shaved head of the respective three stooges- Moe, Larry, and Curly. (not to mention the split-in-the-middle part of Shemp). Alfalfa of the "Little Rascals" had his slicked-down cowlick, Harpo Marx had his curly blond locks, and Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas had their bald domes.

Veronica Lake had her "peek-a-boo" hairdo. The classic blonds include Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow. And let's not forget Lucille Ball's legendary carrot top.

But Elvis Presley's combed-back, ink-black, slickly-oiled, long-sideburned haircut is known all over the civilized (and uncivilized) world.

The earliest Elvis hairstyle was not the jet-black we are all so familiar with. One can watch and enjoy Elvis' earliest TV appearances from 1956 and even his first movie Love Me Tender from 1956 and notice his hair a slightly lighter, dark sandy-ish shade.

It wasn't until his second (and best) movie Loving You in 1957 (Elvis' first color film) that we see the extreme ebony hair that was to be become his trademark. Although the King's hair was actually snow-white by the end of his life, he routinely had it dyed black from '57 on out.

One small piece of plastic is all Deita Meira needs to play a little tune we all know and love. Well, except me, because it's my ringtone, and no one calls unless they want something.

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You can see that the secret is that the coffee stirrer is segmented, so once he figured out what notes they played, he worked on the pattern of the tune itself. You have to wonder what kind of boring job would lead to such a hobby. -via Tastefully Offensive

The Spanish Civil War saw the death of a half-million people between 1936 and 1939, but outside of Spain, it gets little space in history books because of World War II. That's also why many war crimes and shady dealings did not get proper documentation or an adequate investigation at the time. In the decades since, these mysteries remain. For example, what really happened to Dick Sheepshanks?

Dick Sheepshanks was a 27-year-old Reuters war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, and his life was the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster. Sheepshanks headed for Spain in 1937 with several other journalists to cover Franco’s Nationalists, but he was killed in December in the Republican shelling of the village of Cudete. When news of his death reached London, Sir Roderick Jones (who headed the Reuters News Agency and unknowingly shared a love interest with Sheepshanks) paid him all the tributes as befitted a national hero.

Then things get weird. According to some who had known him – including Jeanne Stourton, the aforementioned love interest – Sheepshanks had become suspicious of one of his fellow journalists, and the only one of the group to survive: Kim Philby. If that name sounds familiar, it’s for good reason – Philby went on to gain infamy as Britain’s most notorious traitor during the Cold War.

According to Stourton, Sheepshanks had grown increasingly suspicious of Philby’s motivations, and Philby took it upon himself to take Sheepshanks out of the picture. A comparison between eyewitness reports and photographic evidence has raised a number of unanswered questions, and it’s been suggested that Philby may have had a hand in the attack. What exactly happened to the Reuters journalists remains undetermined, and the death of Ernest Richard Sheepshanks has become a compelling Spanish Civil War mystery.

Read about five other such mysteries from the Spanish Civil War at Urban Ghosts.

(Image credit: Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau)

A simple joke at work sends a guy over the edge. But it works, because the best puns, even the ones at second-grade level, only work if they make you groan. In this case, it's not the pun itself that induces the groan, but our hero's struggle with it. It's the latest from Teo, Hugh, and Corey at It's the Tie comics. Don't miss the bonus panel at the comic link.  -via reddit

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Some of the things you have heard all your life about blind people ain't necessarily true. It's possible you've never thought about those myths enough to bother checking them out, but now you can have the straight dope fed right to you, as mental_floss busts some misconceptions about being blind. Josh Sundquist (previously at Neatorama) is the guest host this week for the mental_floss List Show.

Here's a unique idea for a year-end list: the notable truck spills of 2016. Atlas Obscura has taken those news stories and plotted out an interactive map. Click on an icon (color coded for type of cargo) and pull up the story of that spill. This year saw truck spills that unloaded beer, soda, cheese, mail, pigs, potatoes, grease, animal guts, sewage, liquid dye, and more all over the highways. We've covered some of these stories; reading through them brings back memories, like that of the beer truck that collided with the Doritos truck in Florida, called "the couch potato's nightmare." Good times.

This is a Star Wars story. Or, more specifically, a story of a young Star Wars fan. Did you ever know a kid who would wear a superhero costume or a tutu to school every day? Alex is that obsessed with a galaxy far, far away. The stormtrooper helmet is a dead giveaway.

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This video is the result of a partnership between Filipino telecom Globe and Disney Southeast Asia. Maybe I should mention that you need to have a hankie ready for the rest of the story. (via reddit)

For 27 years, Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, had a temporary hotel built out of ice that lasted from December through April. But now a new design will allow the hotel to remain open year round! The new ICEHOTEL 365 has concrete outer walls with pipes running through it to bring refrigeration to the ice that covers them, sustaining it through the summer by solar power.  

With an eye toward research, ICEHOTEL founder Yngve Bergqvist knows that Sweden will have shorter winters in the future. He also has had visitors every year asking if they could visit his creation during the summer and autumn months. It was important that ICEHOTEL become sustainable year-round, so the 2,100-square meter ice experience was designed and built. It now includes 11 art suites, 9 deluxe suites with private bathrooms and saunas, an ice gallery and an ice bar. In keeping with tradition, the structure was hand carved by global artists, hand selected for the project.

Read more about ICEHOTEL 365, and see lots of pictures at Money Inc.

We heard hype about the movie Suicide Squad for what seemed like years before it actually opened. It was teased for quite some time before I figured out it was a Batman movie -or at least took part in the Batman/DC Comics universe. It did not fulfill expectations. Screen Junkies had an easy assignment with this Honest Trailer.

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In fact, Suicide Squad had plenty of problems that weren't apparent in the finished film, but they sure contributed. They threw everything but the kitchen sink into this film, and it didn't help. What they really needed was some lighting.