We've reached the point where Christmas season begins as soon as Halloween is over. There are three houses on my drive home with holiday lights up already. In fact, I spent Halloween evening watching a Hallmark Christmas movie (and now I feel as if I have seen them all). If you want some help getting into the Christmas spirit, you could pull up a movie from Christmases past, using a handy list from Esquire. It's a very arguable list; some of them are just horrible, others appear to be ranked by how much "Christmas" is included in the film. However, you probably will agree that the top fifteen or so deserve to be there. Otherwise, you might find a movie you've never seen and be intrigued enough to try it out- quite a few have trailers posted. Check them all out here.  -via Digg

If you're the child of a Hollywood star, or a cousin or sibling, you might get to skip casting calls and auditions and go to work on set just like that. If your parent is a director or producer, you've got a very good chance for at least a small part. But sometimes there are practical reasons, like playing the younger version of your star parent. Or even your star sibling.

Wow. You have to wonder if Laverne Cox having a twin brother inspired the sequence, or was it just luck that she came up with the perfect person to play the part. See other Hollywood relatives in roles you may not know about at Cracked.

How long does it take an amendment to become part of the the US Constitution? However long it takes to be ratified by three-fourths of the states (that's 38 as of now)  ...unless there is a deadline attached to the amendment when it comes out of Congress. There was no deadline attached to "Article Two" when it was proposed by James Madison in 1789. It simply said,

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

It makes sense to restrict politicians from giving themselves raises whenever they want, but the states didn't seem to care. After all, state politicians had hopes of someday becoming members of Congress themselves. Read how Article Two eventually became the 27th Amendment, a whopping 203 years after it was first proposed, at Damn Interesting.

Maia Surdam is a historian who runs a bakery. As such, she is delighted to bring back recipes from history. In 2016, she spurred a revival of the Election Cake, a traditional American recipe for an enormous cake shared at the polls in the early days of the United States, by selling them from her OWL Bakery in Asheville, North Carolina. The original was found in the first American cookbook, American Cookery, published in 1796.  

American Cookery’s recipe calls for 14 pounds of sugar, 12 pounds of raisins, and oodles of spices, along with both wine and brandy for flavor. These rich ingredients, expensive and rare when the book was published, speak to how Election Day used to be celebrated. Early Americans, flocking to town from their rural homesteads to cast their ballots, treated the occasion like a party, with the alcohol and food to match. Women, who at the time were denied the vote, provided refreshments to voters in the form of a dense, buttery cake, flexing political power in the only way allowed to them.

Election Cake, presumably a smaller version, was a hit during the 2016 presidential election. This year, you can make the recipe yourself, although it might be a little late for election day if you soak the fruit in booze for the recommended time. But hey, the holidays are coming! Read the history of Election Cake and get the recipe at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Anne Ewbank)  

The Ruhr Valley in Germany has been mined for coal for 170 years. Over that time, they took so much material out from underground that the surface sank, and now the valley is completely dependent on Emschergenossenschaft pumps to keep the area from flooding. The most surprising thing about the pump system is that the coal companies are paying for them! Tom Scott has the story.

Do you think you can date a photograph just by looking at it? That may be easy for famous historical pictures we see all the time, but what about all the other news images that don’t become quite as iconic? Test your skills by taking a short quiz at The Pudding. While it’s almost impossible to get them exactly right, getting close counts. And as you’ll see from the results, the point is not so much how you score, but how your score compares to others who take the quiz. -via Digg

During the Cold War, the US built a huge secret bunker under the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia where the government could function during a nuclear war. It lasted from 1958 until it was exposed in 1993, by which time the Cold War was over. Canada had a similar scheme in Ontario called the Diefenbunker, although its purpose was a secret during just a blip on the timeline of history.

Officially called the Emergency Government Headquarters, the Diefenbunker took its nickname from Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who authorized its construction in 1959. A truly massive structure, the Diefenbunker stands four storeys deep, covers an area of 9000 square meters, and was poured from 32,000 tons of reinforced concrete. Designed to shelter the Prime Minister and 564 Cabinet members, staff, and military personnel for up to a month without resupply, the facility is equipped with its own Diesel generators, air filtering equipment, decontamination facilities, a three-bed hospital with surgical suite, a dentist’s office, a TV broadcast studio for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or CBC, a jail, and even a vault to store the Bank of Canada’s gold reserves. The whole structure is suspended on massive springs to damp out shock waves while the 1-meter-thick steel entrance doors are built into the wall of a long tunnel running through a hill, allowing the blast wave from a nuclear explosion to blow harmlessly past. As-designed, the Diefenbunker was intended to withstand a nuclear blast of up to 5 Megatons 2 kilometres away.

As you can tell from the headline, toilets gave away the secret. Read how that happened, and what has become of the Diefenbunker since then, at Today I Found Out.
(Image credit: Z22)

Looking at a map of the Unites States, you can see that state borders are quite irregular in the east, where mountains, rivers, and early settlers decided where they would be. However, the country does love straight lines, as every state has at least one- except Hawaii. In the west, Colorado and Wyoming stand out as rectangles. As you might assume, that’s because we already had a federal government when they were settled. But a lot happened between the time that Colorado’s borders were defined by Congress in 1876 and when surveyors marked the actual borders. While Colorado may look as if it is composed of four straight sides, there are actually 697 sides!

Only in 1879 did the first boundary survey team get around to translating Congress's abstract into actual boundary markers. The official border would not be the delimited one, but the demarcated one. Unfortunately, 19th-century surveyors lacked satellites and other high-precision measurement tools.

Let's not be too harsh: considering the size of the task and the limitation of their tools — magnetic compasses and metal chains — they did an incredible job. They had to stake straight lines irrespective of terrain, often through inhospitable land.  

Even the famous Four Corners marker is 560 feet from where it was originally supposed to be! These aberrations became the legal border over time. Read how it all happened at Big Think.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: Cwolfsheep)

Fountain pens were in use for hundreds of years, but they had frustrating drawbacks- mainly they were messy. The ballpoint pen changed all that. The invention of the ballpoint pen is usually attributed to László Bíró, but he wasn't the first to stop up an ink pen with a rolling ball bearing. The development of the modern ballpoint pen took decades, with each step adding necessary improvements.    

An American, John J Loud, received the first patent for a ballpoint pen back in 1888. Loud, a lawyer and occasional inventor, wanted an ink pen which would be able to write on rougher materials such as wood and leather as well as paper. His masterstroke was the revolving steel ball, which was held in place by a socket. In his 1888 patent filing, he wrote:

“My invention consists of an improved reservoir or fountain pen, especially useful, among other purposes, for marking on rough surfaces-such as wood, coarse wrapping-paper, and other articles where an ordinary pen could not be used.”

Loud’s pen was indeed able to write on leather and wood, but it was too rough for paper. The device was deemed to have no commercial value and the patent eventually lapsed.

Much later, Bíró made the ballpoint pen useful, and others after him made it affordable. Read the history of the ballpoint pen at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Samsara)

The Hobbit is a fantasy film and Mad Max: Fury Road is an apocalyptic chase scene, but they have a lot more in common than you might think. This trailer mashup only drives that idea home. -via reddit

In colonial America, people who didn't fit into the the male/female binary were pretty much ignored as long as they kept any anomalies to themselves and dressed and lived as one consistent gender. In other words, if you were intersex, you were expected to "choose a side" and stick with it. To mark Intersex Awareness Day (which was October 26), Colonial Williamsburg looked at the case of Thomas/ine Hall, an indentured servant in the Virginia settlement of Warrosquyoacke who was reported to dress as a man on some occasions, and as a woman on others. When asked, Hall replied they were both male and female. When examined, conclusions varied, so the case was sent to the General Court in Jamestown.

The clerk of the court documented the attempts by the members of the Warrosquyoacke community to gender Hall by examining their body. He also recorded Hall’s own narrative history and description of their body, which Hall described as ambiguous and having both male and female anatomy. Statements recorded by the clerk document that Hall was born and christened as a girl going by the name Thomasine in England. At the age of 22 they “cut of his heire and Changed his apparel into the fashion of man” to join the military and serve under the name Thomas after their brother was pressed into service. Hall fought with or for their brother as an English soldier at the Isle of Rhe, considered to be the opening conflict of the Anglo-French War of 1627-1629. When they returned from their military service, they resumed feminine life as Thomasine before immigrating to Virginia and entering into an indenture contract as a man under the name Thomas again. While living in Virginia, they were noted for alternatively dressing in men’s and women’s clothing, something that went directly against English social norms.

While it is unclear exactly what the charges were, the court handed down a punishment, which may have been regarded as benevolent at the time, but still restricted Hall's freedom. Read about the case and what the conclusion was at Colonial Williamsburg. -via Metafilter

Dakota is a rescue coyote living at Save a Fox Rescue. He is so excited about his gift of a pumpkin! It's a ball to play with AND food! If only he had opposable thumbs! -via reddit

In the late 1680s, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens wrote the book Cosmotheoros, which speculated on the existence and nature of life on other planets. It was the first such book written by a scientist based on observations of outer space. Huygens had established a reputation by discovering Titan, the first moon of Saturn observed, and figuring out that planet's rings. He was also an inventor and mathematician. While he wrote the book in Latin for an educated audience, it was quickly translated and became quite popular.

Huygens' ideas about plants and animals were based on reasonable projections of what was then known to exist on the Earth, recently expanded by news of exotic species brought back to Europe by explorers' ships. Marvelling at the richness and fitness of species “so exactly adapted”12 to life on Earth, he argued that if we were to deny this abundance to other planets, then “we should sink them below the Earth in Beauty and Dignity; a Thing very unreasonable.”13

What form might this life take? Based on new information that American species are different, but enough like those of the Old World, Huygens presumed a general similarity with terrestrial species. But he did give some consideration to the different physical conditions that may prevail on other planets. The atmosphere might be thicker, for example, which would suit a greater variety of flying creatures. Gravity might be different, too, although he did not provide estimates of the comparative gravitational force on each of the planets, and in any case he rejected the notion of a simple correlation between the size of a planet and the scale of its flora and fauna. “We may have a Race of Pygmies about the bigness of Frogs and Mice, possess'd of the Planets,”14 he wrote, although he thought it unlikely.

For Huygens, though, “the main and most diverting Point of the Enquiry is . . . placing some Spectators in these new discoveries, to enjoy these Creatures we have planted them with, and to admire their Beauty and Variety”. Remarkably, he suggested that these intelligent observers might not be men, but other kinds of “Creatures endued with Reason”.15 Some planets, indeed, might be capable of accommodating several species of “rational Creatures possess'd of different degrees of Reason and Sense”.16

If Huygens had been born a century earlier, he might have been burned at the stake for such ideas that went against the teachings of the Church. But Cosmotheoros was only published after his death, and he leaned into the scientific principle of uncertainty. As it was, the book gave 17th-century readers something to think about. Read more about the life and writings of  Christiaan Huygens at the Public Domain Review. -via Damn Interesting

Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously) constructed five different Rube Goldberg contraptions in order to make a sandwich. That in itself is not so surprising, but the mechanisms he uses along the way are astonishing. How did he know precisely how that hand mixer would act? Surely he isn't going to eat jelly out of a toy truck! He doesn't, but how its used is genius. Be sure to stay for the credits, because they get a little messy. -via Digg

Davy Crockett was more than king of the wild frontier. Between becoming a famous bear killer and fighting to save the Alamo, Crockett was a politician in Tennessee. While he didn't win all his election campaigns, he sure participated in a lot of them, which left him quite experienced. He shared some tips on how to win those campaigns.  

When the day of election approaches, visit your constituents far and wide. Treat liberally, and drink freely, in order to rise in their estimation, though you fall in your own. True, you may be called a drunken dog by some of the clean shirt and silk stocking gentry, but the real rough necks will style you a jovial fellow, – their votes are certain, and frequently count double. Do all you can to appear to advantage in the eyes of the women. That’s easily done – you have but to kiss and slabber their children, wipe their noses, and pat them on the head; this cannot fall to please their mothers, and you may rely on your business being done in that quarter.

Drinking and kissing babies, got it. There's a lot more advice, though, which you can read at Shannon Selin's blog. -via Strange Company

(Image source: Library of Congress)