The Nazis had plenty of side projects during World War II that got little notice compared to the genocidal system of extermination camps. One was Project Angora, Heinrich Himmler’s plan to raise angora rabbits to supply high-quality wool for the German military. At the camps.

By 1943, Project Angora had bred nearly 65,000 rabbits, producing over 10,000 pounds of wool. The photo albums shows sweaters produced for the German air force, socks produced for their navy and long underwear for ground troops. It’s hard to gauge whether or not the program was a success, but we do know that the coddled rabbits lived in close proximity to human prisoners.

The well-fed rabbits were housed in some of the Nazi regime’s most notorious concentration camps: Auschwitz, Dachau and Mauthausen, and nearly thirty more camps around central Europe. The contrast between the brutality of the camps, with their cruel disregard for human life, and the well-cared for rabbits is deeply unnerving. This jarring context makes the remnants of the program–the book found by Schultz–seem all the more sinister.

Not surprisingly, there was little evidence of the program after the war. When the SS fled the camps ahead of their liberators, evidence in the form of well-fed rabbits did not last long. Read what we know about Project Angora at Atlas Obscura. -via Digg
 
(Unrelated image credit: Ross Little)

Redditor roor1337 asked the question, “People who got fired on the first day of the job, what happened?” The 23,000 comments in the past two days contain some priceless stories. Some are sad or outrageous, but many about short-term co-workers are hilarious. Doxxboot gave us this scary story.

Used to work at a factory that made food stuff. Guy I was trained with fell into a big vat of wet ingredients that was about to be heated up. Had I not looked behind me, he would've died.

The boss went to the hospital to tell him he was fired but they were giving him some extra pay in his check.

And then Cosmic_Shipwreck supplied the punch line.

The job deftss had was so short he didn’t even go there.

They called me and told me I was let go for not showing up on my first day. Which was a surprise for me since at no point after the interview had I been told that I'd been hired.

A lesson on what not to do from stratospaly:

A guy showed up on his first day, went through orientation, then out for beers with his boss and a few others. His boss was talking about his 16 year old girl and the new guy straight face said "Is she hot?"... this was a 24+ year old dude. His first day was his last.  

PotatoLatkes had a great story.

Not me...but happened when I was working at McDonalds. New guy came in and when he saw that we were trashing patties if they had been sitting too long, he ate one...then he started just eating them from the supply...dude must have inhaled 10-12 patties over a couple hours after repeatedly being told to stop. Eventually, he started making himself a burger with the buns and eating it as well. Got fired first day on the job.

I'm still convinced he had no real plans of working and just wanted to see how many free burgers he could eat before getting canned.

That account was elevated to the top by a punch line supplied by Swastikock. There are plenty of other tales of workplace shenanigans you’ll no doubt enjoy reading. -via BroBible

How cool would it be to drive a full-size truck around an obstacle course with a remote control! It would be a great test of skill, and a blast, too. Volvo trucks set up just such an obstacle course, and rigged a Volvo FMX with Automatic Traction Control to be driven by a handheld controller.

(YouTube link)

But look who’s driving! Four-year-old Sophie is too young to control a bicycle, much less a full-size truck. The ensuing mayhem is a treat. Sure, it’s an ad, but it’s also fun to watch. -via Viral Viral Videos 

Author Edward Bulwer-Lytton said “The pen is mightier than the sword.” And he should know, as he now has an award for bad writing named in his honor. Moishe is learning the power of the pencil, to make one person laugh and the other cringe in humiliation. This is the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.

Without ever setting sail, Marie Tharp mapped the ocean floor and made a discovery that shook the foundations of geology. So why did the giants of her field dismiss her findings as "girl talk"?

(Image credit: Flickr user Fiona)

Marie Tharp spent the fall of 1952 hunched over a drafting table, surrounded by charts, graphs, and jars of India ink. Nearby, spread across several additional tables, lay her project—the largest and most detailed map ever produced of a part of the world no one had ever seen.

For centuries, scientists had believed that the ocean floor was basically flat and featureless—it was too far beyond reach to know otherwise. But the advent of sonar had changed everything. For the first time, ships could “sound out” the precise depths of the ocean below them. For five years, Tharp’s colleagues at Columbia University had been crisscrossing the Atlantic, recording its depths. Women weren’t allowed on these research trips—the lab director considered them bad luck at sea—so Tharp wasn’t on board. Instead, she stayed in the lab, meticulously checking and plotting the ships’ raw findings, a mass of data so large it was printed on a 5,000-foot scroll. As she charted the measurements by hand on sheets of white linen, the floor of the ocean slowly took shape before her.

Tharp spent weeks creating a series of six parallel profiles of the Atlantic floor stretching from east to west. Her drawings showed—for the first time—exactly where the continental shelf began to rise out of the abyssal plain and where a large mountain range jutted from the ocean floor. That range had been a shock when it was discovered in the 1870s by an expedition testing routes for transatlantic telegraph cables, and it had remained the subject of speculation since; Tharp’s charting revealed its length and detail.

Her maps also showed something else—something no one expected. Repeating in each was “a deep notch near the crest of the ridge,” a V-shaped gap that seemed to run the entire length of the mountain range. Tharp stared at it. It had to be a mistake.

She crunched and re-crunched the numbers for weeks on end, double- and triple-checking her data. As she did, she became more convinced that the impossible was true: She was looking at evidence of a rift valley, a place where magma emerged from inside the earth, forming new crust and thrusting the land apart. If her calculations were right, the geosciences would never be the same.

How can you resist a blog post titled “The Only Christmas Carols That Are Any Good, A Definitive and Absolute List, Fight Me”? Blair Thornburgh likes her carols religious, incomprehensible, and/or threatening.

I love Christmas carols. HOWEVER: I do NOT love what most of the idiot world considers to be a Christmas carol. Songs about sleighs, Santa, sugarplums, etc., are NOT carols, they are garbage that deserves to rot on the side of the street like so much crumpled wrapping paper.

No, the truly best Christmas carols fall into at least one of the following categories:
1. Songs in Latin
2. Songs about food
3. Songs about Hell and/or avoidance thereof
4. Songs about decidedly non-canonical adventures of Jesus, Mary, and/or Joseph
5. Songs that use the word “flesh”
6. Good King Wenceslas

Bonus points are awarded if the song was clearly hastily Christianized with a few macaronic verses or if it sounds good played on the bagpipe.

There are only approximately 30 days of the unofficial Christmas carol listening season, and I would hate for you to waste one second of them letting an INFERIOR Christmas carol bleat through your earbuds. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to let you know what the good ones are. This is my final decision and I will brook no dissent.

She then goes on to review eleven “good” carols and explain why they are acceptable. Videos are included so you can listen to each one. -via Metafilter

Treaty negotiations may lead to world peace, but fighting with sticks is so much more fun! Sigh. You can read the history of the world in this simple story from John McNamee at Pie Comic, or you can just enjoy the silliness of little boys at play.

When I was a child, the term "Turkish Delight" was like "Baked Alaska" or "Crepe Suzette," in that it was some kind of fancy food you only heard of in movies and books. In this century, none of those terms are at all familiar to young Americans. For most, the only reference they have to Turkish Delight is in the first book of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the story, Edmund Pevensie declares it his favorite food, and he willingly betrays his family for some. The book was published in 1950 in England, so readers at the time didn’t need an explanation of what Turkish Delight is.

For kids who weren't already familiar with it, though, "Turkish Delight" was likely to be meaningless – which meant we could project onto it whatever confection seemed most delicious. "I imagined it was better and more sophisticated than anything I had ever tasted, considering that Edmund was willing to sacrifice his entire family for just one more piece," said Coco Langford, who described her childhood vision of Turkish Delight as "rich, but still delicate, chewy and soft, probably like some kind of vanilla or caramel fudge, with just enough nuts to add the perfect crunch."

Jess Zimmerman spoke with quite a few people who had their unique imagined versions of Turkish Delight. Most are far from the truth, as we see in an article at Atlas Obscura that also explains the history and content of the real thing.  

(Image credit: Matt Lubchansky)

Americans have only recently become familiar with the European Christmas demon known as Krampus. Where did such a terrifying goblin come from, and how did he become associated with Christmas?

(YouTube link)

Our friends at Today I Found Out have the story of how Krampus arose hundreds of years ago from the dark forests of Bavaria to invade other nations. The customs surrounding the Krampus tradition differ from country to country. Here in America, we make horror movies out of such legends. -Thanks, Daven!  

Many of us recall looking through the Guinness Book of World Records and seeing the entry for the mother with the most children. When I had the paperback version (yes, it’s a real book, and once upon a time many people owned it), it referred to a Russian woman who allegedly had 69 children. She had twins, triplets, and quadruplets in order to add up that many babies. Oh yes, there’s more to the story than was printed at the time.

Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, a Russian peasant who lived in the 1700s, holds the official Guinness World Record for the highest number of children birthed. She and her husband, Feodor, lived in Shuya, Russia. We don’t know her first name (although some sources say her name was Valentina), but we do know that she's claimed to have given birth to 16 sets of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets in her childbearing years (1725 to 1765). Only two children didn’t survive past infancy, leaving her with 67 healthy children.

What makes the Vassilyev story even weirder is that Feodor apparently had another 18 children (six sets of twins and two sets of triplets) with his second wife. Although it sounds implausible, a few primary sources and contemporaneous accounts about the Vassilyevs exist.

You are forgiven for being skeptical, but first read about the documents that led us to what we know about Mrs. Vassilyev and her family that put Mother Hubbard to shame, at mental_floss.   

Bonus: I also found out that the founder of the Guinness Brewery that later gave rise to the records book, Arthur Guinness, and his wife Olivia had 21 children.

(Image credit: Flickr user Dave Herholz)

Sleepy Skunk has completed his annual movie mashup, with scenes from the trailers of all the different movies that came out (or are scheduled to come out) in 2015.

(YouTube link)

That’s a lot of movies! You’ll find a list of them times to their first appearance in this video at his Tumblr. Contains NSFW language.

It’s only been in the past ten years or so that an ordinary person can wake up and find himself globally famous due to a viral video. That experience can be pretty shocking, and for some, even life-changing. For some, it’s led to greater things while others are still dealing with the scars of notoriety. Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson were surprised by the sudden fame of their wedding dance video, but they weathered it well.

We rode it for a few days. But then we sort of hit this point where we had to make a decision — we either need to get on this internet-sensation train, or turn off our cell phones and hide in the basement. So that’s what we ended up doing. We really turned off our phones and sent an email to family and friends, who were getting hounded also, that said “We’re going to try to shut this down collectively.” Like “One, two, three, don’t answer the phone.” For the most part I think we’re happy with that decision.

We used the Chris Brown song, which we were uncomfortable with after it went viral. It was a few months after the Rihanna incident. Because we used his song without permission, all of the money from the video goes to Sony Records — and him, basically. They put a copyright infringement on us, but decided to leave the video up, which shot that song up into the top ten even though it was like two years old. So not only did we use a Chris Brown song, but we were making him money. There’s a TED Talk on it, weirdly—an executive at YouTube talks about the whole process and their relationship with Sony.

Read the rest of that story, plus those of Chris Crocker, Tay Zonday, Miss South Carolina Teen, David After Dentist, Evolution of Dance, and more at New York magazine. -via Digg

In this ad for the German supermarket EDEKA, an elderly man spends Christmas after Christmas alone because his children are leading busy, far-flung lives. And he does seem to have quite a few offspring. How many years must he keep this up?

(YouTube link)

You might want to have a hanky ready for this one. Sometimes it’s worth rearranging your life for someone else. -via Buzzfeed

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

They were the greatest "officially undeclared" comedy team in the history of comedy. Together, they combined to make the most successful and beloved series of "buddy pictures" ever.

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby first met on October 14, 1932, outside the Friars Club on Forty-Eighth Street in New York City. The two first performed onstage together at the Capitol Theater in New York later in 1932.

In December of '32, Bob was asked to emcee a two-week engagement headlined by Bing, a young singer who was quickly becoming a national sensation. For their joint appearance, Bob and Bing dug up a few Vaudeville routines and were a huge hit with the crowds. Hope later recalled, “The gags weren't very funny, I guess, but the audience laughed because Bing and I were having such a good time- and I guess it was clear that we liked each other.” The groundwork of seven legendary Hollywood movies was laid.

In 1940, Paramount studios dusted off an old script they had fashioned for Jack Oakie and Fred MacMurray. The script was originally called Follow the Sun, but the title had been changed to Road to Mandalay. When both Oakie and MacMurray bowed out, the project was retooled for two of Paramount's most popular contract players- Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. To round out the team, and provide a romantic interest for Bing and Bob, Paramount cast one of its female stars, Dorothy Lamour.

The title of this first "road" picture was changed to the more exotic Road to Singapore. Interestingly, the billing for Road to Singapore, in both the film's posters and credits, was Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, and Bob hope, in that order. This was simply because both Crosby and Lamour were the bigger stars at the time.

During the shooting of Road to Singapore, Bob and Bing kept ad-libbing new dialogue. Their improvised jokes seemed to make up almost half of the movie's lines- and laughs. The exact percentage of Hope and Crosby's improvised gags in the "road" pictures is not exactly documented, but suffice to say, the "road" pictures are easily some of the loosest, most freely improvised films ever made- comedy or otherwise.

Back in 1977, the writers of the TV series Happy Days got an assignment to include an alien from outer space. They were sure the episode would be a disaster, but when Robin Williams took the part, everything changed. The script fell into place around William’s treatment of the character. And everyone wanted more.

Robin Williams took a one-off joke character on Happy Days, the alien Mork from Ork, and created something unforgettable. His insane routines spawned a spinoff, which became one of the most popular science fiction shows of all time. But in season two, network execs at ABC and the show’s producers made a series of famously terrible decisions that squandered Mork and Mindy’s popularity. Every attempt to restore the sitcom to its former glory only made its fatal flaw more obvious: You can’t build an entire show around one virtuoso performance.

The show shone so brightly that it burned out quickly. For the story of Mork and Mindy, io9 talked to six writers and producers and the show’s director Howard Storm. Read about the lengths the network went to in order to prolong the phenomenon that was Mork and Mindy. -via Metafilter