The 1983 film A Christmas Story didn't make much of a splash when it was first released, but with television repeats over the years, it became a beloved classic for Gen X. Is it because the dysfunctional family makes the viewer feel better about their miserable childhoods by comparison? Or is it because the stories of a miserable childhood become funnier the more you tell them? As Screen Junkies shows us in this Honest Trailer, it's more likely the latter, as two kinds of memories collide to make A Christmas Story a holiday classic: Jean Shepherd's recollections of his childhood that grew into the semi-fictional sequences of the movie, and the shared cinema experience of a generation of movie fans.

In 2019, 4,000 cars were loaded into a cargo ship, but were not properly balanced. The ship capsized off the coast of Georgia, and the salvage operations have been going on ever since. Last month, they got to the big job- cutting the ship into sections and hauling them away. That involves some serious equipment.

The main player in the complex slicing operation is called the Versabar VB-10000 lift vessel, a gigantic yellow dual-barge crane used for the first time in 2010 and developed in response to hurricanes damaging oil platforms. The company that builds the enormous contraption says capacity of the tall twin-gantries is 7,500 tons, though each of the two trusses is structurally capable of handling over 5,000 — it’s apparently the buoyancy of the barges that limits capacity to 7,500. Speaking of the two barges, each has four 1,000 horsepower thrusters to keep the vessel precisely positioned overtop of the wreckage.

See pictures of this huge undertaking and an explanation of how it's done at Jalopnik. -via Damn Interesting

Santa Claus feels like society has progressed to the point where he's a has-been. No one wants to sit in his lap, people no longer welcome late night intruders, and they like to track their packages with apps. In this video, the jolly old elf confides his anxieties to his psychotherapist. This ad for the Norwegian Postal Service was produced by the agency Matias & Mathias. -via Laughing Squid

Saturn's moon Titan is bigger than Mercury, and so far as we know, it's the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has surface liquid. Near Titan's north pole, there's an entire system of lakes filled with liquid methane. These lakes show tributaries that hint of a weather system in which methane evaporates and then rains over the land. We know this because the Cassini probe scanned Titan with radar, which bounces off land but is absorbed by liquid. The rate of absorption indicates depth.

Kraken Mare (literally, Kraken Sea) is a huge lake near the north pole of Titan. Cassini pinged it with radar many times. On one such pass, the track of the radar went over land, then the main part of Kraken Mare, and then a bay called Moray Sinus (no, not the nose of the eel; sinus means bay, and the name comes from the Scottish firth). As the radar pulses pass through the liquid they get attenuated, fainter, before reflecting back up to Cassini. By measuring the attenuation the depth can be measured.

The scientists found that Moray Sinus has a depth of about 85 meters, which is impressive. But over the main body of Kraken Mare they got no reflected pulse at all. Local conditions can make it hard to know exactly how much radar is absorbed by the liquid (for example, if the surface is rough with waves, which is actually likely) but the lower limit for their measurements is 100 meters. If conditions were actually good, then it means the depth is at least 300 meters.

For reference, the average depth of Lake Superior is around 150 meters. While impressed the otherworldliness of a moon with liquid methane lakes, I am also intrigued by the naming of such lakes, and wish I could've been a fly on the wall when those were proposed. Read more about Kraken Mare and the other lakes of Titan at Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/USGS)

A group of friends in Ventura, California, decided to participate in No Shave November together back in 2013, and they ended it with a themed photoshoot to show off their facial hair. And they did the next year, and every year after.

For 2020, the same guys ended the month as Vikings, which seems only fitting for such a barbaric year. See an enlarged image of all the pictures here.  -via reddit 

If you watch this video and are on the edge of your seat waiting for the glass to break, I can tell you it isn't going to -at least not when we can see it. It really is glass. Glass artist Matt Eskuche makes a lot of beautiful glass objects, but the most astonishing is the "impossible goblet." The incredibly thin stem shows off just how much play borosilicate glass can have!



While your first thought may be "When is it going to break?" the second thought is "How can you ever wash this glass?" I can relate. -via Boing Boing

The publishers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary have announced that their Word of the Year for 2020 is "pandemic." The word of the year is often determined by how many people look up the word in the online dictionary compared to previous years, which reveals what is significant about the year. They noticed the first big spike for "pandemic" on February 3rd, although lookups had increased earlier in 2020.  

On March 11th, the World Health Organization officially declared “that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic,” and this is the day that pandemic saw the single largest spike in dictionary traffic in 2020, showing an increase of 115,806% over lookups on that day in 2019. What is most striking about this word is that it has remained high in our lookups ever since, staying near the top of our word list for the past ten months—even as searches for other related terms, such as coronavirus and COVID-19, have waned.

The dictionary site also reveals to us the eleven next most-looked-up words of 2020, with context for each, and none of them will surprise you.

Every once in a while, you hear that a ridiculous percentage of internet users are merely algorithms. We design tests to exclude bots from making new accounts, leaving comments, or even consuming content. The bots are then taught to pass the tests. So more complicated tests are designed. It has come to the point that  a human not only has be human to pass these tests, but superhuman! Comedian Stevie Martin illustrates how we all feel competing against algorithms that have more patience, faster reflexes, and better eyesight than we do. In this version, the tests are not only difficult, but judgmental as well. -via reddit

A 36-year-old elephant named Kavaan was the only Asian elephant in Pakistan until this past weekend. At only a year old, he was given to Pakistan as a gift from Sri Lanka. Kavaan hasn't always been alone, but since his mate died in 2012, he's been the sole elephant at the Marghazar Zoo. Now, after years of work and planning (most notably by Cher), Kavaan boarded a plane bound for a 25,000-acre sanctuary in Cambodia.

And I use the word “boarded” liberally here. It took hours for a team of experts to cajole Kaavan into a custom-built metal crate for the journey, and that was with the help of months of training, some light sedatives (for an elephant, at least), and sturdy chains. His crate was then loaded onto a truck and driven to Islamabad airport on Sunday, where a Russian cargo plane will take him to the 25,000-acre wildlife sanctuary, per the Guardian.

Cher was in Pakistan to see him off, and also in Cambodia to welcome Kavaan after his journey, which went smoothly once the elephant was loaded. Officials hope Kavaan will breed with the Cambodian elephants, bringing some needed genetic diversity to their group.

The Broomway is the notorious footpath to Foulness Island in Britain. It's narrow, unmarked, surrounded by sea, sticky mud, and quicksand, and sinks under the tide twice a day. Oh yeah, and there may be explosives. So of course, Tom Scott had to walk it to show us what we are missing.

You know the movie It's a Wonderful Life well, but there's always more to learn. A bit of movie trivia will make watching it again this Christmas even more interesting. Some of the trivia is about the production or references that you might not know 74 years later, like the Zuzu Gingersnaps. Others are about its legacy and longevity.  

It'a a Wonderful Life was a flop when it played in theaters, but has become a beloved classic since then. Read more trivia about It's a Wonderful Life at Cracked.

'Is anybody in there?' Life on the inside as a locked-in patient https://t.co/M1QoPEBt1X

— The Guardian (@guardian) November 26, 2020

Jake Haendel came close to dying in 2017. He was diagnosed with toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy, caused by the use of adulterated heroin. Haendel did not die, but spent a year unable to move or communicate, while still being painfully aware of bodily sensations, the passage of time, and what was going on around him.  

To outside observers, Jake exhibited no signs of awareness or cognition. “Is he in there?” his wife and father would ask the doctors. No one knew for sure. An electroencephalogram (EEG) of his brain showed disrupted patterns of neural activity, indicating severe cerebral dysfunction. “Jake was pretty much like a houseplant,” his father told me.

They had no way of knowing Jake was conscious. In medical terms, he was “locked in”: his senses were intact, but he had no way of communicating.

“I could do nothing except listen and I could only see the direct area in front of me, based on how the staff would position me in bed,” Jake later wrote. The disease had attacked the cables carrying information through his brain and into his muscles, but had spared the areas that enable conscious processing, so he was fully alert to the horror of his situation. He struggled to make sense of this new reality, unable to communicate, and terrified at the prospect of this isolation being permanent.

Haendel tells of the despair and boredom of those months, and the joy of gradually regaining his abilities at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

Have you ever seen inside a pregnant elephant? Asha is a third of the way through her pregnancy; that's eight months of 22, so the calf isn't due until 2022! Veterinarians at the Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Gardens took a look with an ultrasound and saw the head, trunk, and legs as the little fellow seems to have plenty of room to move around. Read more about Asha and the zoo's other Asian elephants at Bored Panda.

The 1988 film Die Hard was planned as a summer blockbuster, and indeed was released in July. However, because it begins with a Christmas party, it has become known as a Christmas movie, explosions and all. How much do you know about Die Hard? It's time for some movie trivia!

You'll know a lot more about Die Hard after reading a list of pictofacts at Cracked.

A couple of months ago, the Coca-Cola company announced it was dropping quite a few of its niche products, including Tab. You may have reacted the way I did, with surprise that Tab was still being produced in 2020. Introduced in 1963, it was not the first diet soda, but became the best-known. Earlier diet sodas were developed for diabetics, but exposed a market for low-calorie soda for dieters. Coca-Cola decided to dip into that pool, albeit gingerly.

For the name, Coke executives had one directive: Even though its taste was engineered to mimic Coke’s, it couldn’t be called Diet Coke. Because most early diet sodas didn’t taste that great, strategists warned against associating their brands with drinks that might taint their tremendous value.

So an early IBM mainframe computer generated more than 600 candidates with the parameters that the name be three or four letters and not offensive in any foreign language.

Tabb, which was eventually shortened to Tab, eventually won the battle of market testing. Stylized as “TaB,” it was introduced to the world in a series of ads with the tagline “How can just one calorie taste so good?”

Tab became the best-selling diet soda of the 1970s and '80s. Read the story of the diet soda that held on for 57 years, and what killed it, at The Conversation. -via Digg

(Image credit: Jerry "Woody")