Dogs are busy preparing for Christmas just in case they are adopted in time for the holiday. A video by Best Friends Animal Society. Link -via Everlasting Blort
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Eli Lenno's Hasidic Orthodox Jewish wedding was jumping with a "Gangnam Style" parody featuring alternate English and Hebrew Yiddish lyrics, which are available at the YouTube page if you can read them. The lyrics for "Lenno Style" were written by Avrumy Kalisch and Tuli Brull. -via Viral Viral Videos
Mia Gentile http://www.miagentile.com/home.html is both talented and versatile, as she shows in this Stanley Steemer jingle video. The product comes in all genres -at least one of them will make you want to get your carpet cleaned! They gotta hire her. -via Daily of the Day
His name is Christian Bottger, but the Tampa Bay Buccaneers call him "Little Fear." The 10-year-old performed with the cheerleaders in front of a packed crowd and did the Dougie flawlessly. Little Fear has no fear! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Tattoos have long been associated with sailors, for good reason. Travelers from way back in history got tattoos to identify who they were and where they had been, as a portable and indestructible record. Sailors who explored the world picked up tattoos from all over.
Body art was particularly well-suited to the transient and dangerous nature of life at sea. “These sailors were traveling the world, and wanted to bring back souvenirs from places they had visited,” explains Eldridge. “Aboard a ship, you don’t have much room to carry fancy souvenirs, so you end up getting tattoos as travel marks.” By the late 18th century, navy records show that around a third of British and a fifth of American sailors had at least one tattoo, while other accounts reveal that French, German, and Scandinavian navies were also fond of getting inked.
But beyond mere records of their travels, tattoos also served a superstitious purpose among those living an unpredictable, and often risky, lifestyle. “Sailors are extremely superstitious,” says Eldridge, “so they would get specific tattoos to relieve this anxiety over their beliefs. There are stories of guys in the old, wooden-ship days who would get Christ’s head tattooed on their backs so if they got into trouble and had to take lashes, the person wielding the lash would be more sympathetic.”
Sailors had other tattoos for various reasons, like hinges on their elbows to ward off arthritis, and later, evidence of war campaigns they participated in. Collector's Weekly has much more in their history of sailors and their tattoos. Link
In December, we are inundated with lists that look back at the past year. My favorites are those that celebrate scientific discoveries, like the biggest breakthroughs in different disciplines. Geeks Are Sexy rounded up the top discoveries in archaeology, stories that will all add to the body of knowledge about our history. The latest one, announced just last week, is pretty fascinating.
Entombed together like Russian nesting boxes, a series of four sarcophagi from the Valley of the Kings have been under reconstruction for a number of years. But as the team moved outward to the largest Egyptian sarcophagus ever discovered — a full 13 feet long and more than 8 feet tall — archaeologists have uncovered the identity of its resident mummy. Merneptah was a warrior king in Egypt around 3200 years ago, known for his numerous military assaults on neighboring areas, including Libya, a group called “Sea People,” and the first recorded mention of Israelis. His nested sarcophagi are highly unusual, and the reason for Merneptah’s (seemingly overzealous) entombment has yet to be determined.
Read all nine stories at Geeks Are Sexy. Link
Music is a big part of Christmas, which makes the season sort of strange among holidays. Other holidays don't have so many songs that radio stations can play them 24/7 for a month! Christmas began to have its own music in the fourth century, but those songs were ordained by the church, sung in Latin, and no one much liked them as they were more doctrinal than festive.
The man who freed the Christmas carol from this prison of poor taste was St. Francis of Assisi, one of the church’s gentlest but most crucial reformers. In the 13th century, Francis tried to break the Christmas celebration from its tedious husk, mostly by making the birth of Christ into a live theatrical event. He organized nativity pageants featuring real hay, real animals, and, for the first time, real music: Deviating from tradition, he allowed for narrative songs in audiences’ native languages, turning Christmas music into an opportunity for mainstream creativity. Drinking songs were given Yuletide lyrics (greatly to the church’s horror) and disseminated by traveling entertainers. Christmas began to take on a life of its own, beyond the exigencies of the sacred feast.
But things took a dim turn with the Puritans in the 1600s. Read the rest of the evolution of the Christmas carol at Slate. Link
(Image credit: Robert Neubecker)
The following is an srticle from the Annals of Improbable Research.
by Jym Mohler
Barnard College, Columbia University, New York City
This study reports the isolation of the wewish gene (encoding the WEWISH Christmas carol) and a description of the evolution of this carol from its earliest origins.
(Image credit: Flickr user Joe Lewis)
Basic Molecular Genetics of WEWISH
The WEWISH carol is a short, simple Christmas carol that can be easily analyzed and manipulated. Tonal sequence analysis of the WEWISH carol by the Barnard Microbiology/Biochemistry Core Facility identified the 30-note sequence used in this carol (Key of C: GCCDCBAAADDEDCBGGEEFEDCAGGADBC). Degenerate oligonucleotide probes encoding portions of this sequence were used to screen cDNA libraries. The recovered cDNAs were all derivatives of a single common cDNA sequence, corresponding to the WEWISH mRNA, shown in Figure 1. This sequence contains a single 52-amino acid open reading frame, which includes an N-terminal signal sequence (a short charged domain followed by a stretch of 14 hydrophobic amino acids) that allows the external expression of the WEWISH carol. The predicted processed peptide is initiated with three degenerate repeats of a short XMAS motif. The XMAS motifs are followed by a NewYear domain. This NewYear domain is encoded in a separate exon and appears to be added to the coding sequence almost as an afterthought.
Early Genetic Forms of the Carol
A below-ground public toilet built in the Victorian era in Manchester, England, could have been abandoned or filled in, as so many others have been. But this one found new life in modern times as a bar! It first opened as "The Temple of Convenience," harking back to its original purpose. Now called simply The Temple, it is one of the city's most popular night spots. See more pictures at Urban Ghosts. Link
(Image credit: Thomas Nugent)
What a high-tech world we live in! Back in my day, we just tied the sled to the dog and let him drag the baby around the icy pond. Link
Do you recall the biggest moneymaking films of the past year? Mental_floss challenges you in today's Lunchtime Quiz. Can you name the top-grossing movies of 2012, according to Box Office Mojo’s leaderboard in 5 minutes? The picture here is a gimme, but the rest may be difficult! Link
Mark Anderson made this Santa Claus Mech of LEGO components! You can see Santa inside, driving. Now he's really able to let kids know who's been naughty this year! See more pictures of the details at Andertoons. Link
The little dog Laika, the first living being launched into space from earth, died during her moment in the sun and became a sad story which will be told forever. Avgousta Zourelidi produced a much better fictional version of the story of Laika as a student project at the National Film and Television School. -via Nag on the Lake
This graphic hits home for me. I recently moved my office into a room with heat, and relocated the modem to a centralized room, hoping the kids could get a reliable signal. Their desk is only about fifteen feet away, but the signal is still horribly unreliable. They huddle around the modem to use their iPods. I don't know who created the graphic. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Scientists knew something was funny about the Brontosaurus fossil reconstruction as far back as 1903, and have been telling us there's no such thing since the 1970s. So how did the popular image of the dinosaur Brontosaurus ever come about?
It dates back 130 years, to a period of early U.S. paleontology known as the Bone Wars, says Matt Lamanna, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
The Bone Wars was the name given to a bitter competition between two paleontologists, Yale's O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia. Lamanna says their mutual dislike, paired with their scientific ambition, led them to race dinosaur names into publication, each trying to outdo the other.
Cutting corners led to a "hybrid" fossil that contained the body of an Apatosaurus and the head of a completely different dinosaur. When the correct head was found, it was thought to be a new species, which was named Brontosaurus. Read the complete story at NPR. Still, the Brontosaurus lives on in vintage Sinclair memorabilia and reruns of The Flintstones. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Carnegie Museum of Natural History)
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