In 1996, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in a Christmas comedy. Twenty-three years later, would you still watch Jingle All the Way? If you have kids of a certain age, you might. Anything to keep them occupied during school vacation! Watch this Honest Trailer to be sure.

We know quite a bit about the experiences of sailors and explorers through their diaries and sketchbooks, as they documented adventure all over the world which punctuate long, boring sea voyages in the Age of Sail. Some of those diarists were women. They were rare crew members, not limited to pirates, but also found on military ships, scientific vessels, cargo ships, and even whalers. Some traveled with their husbands while others disguised themselves as men. The first documented case was Jeanne Baret, a botanist who sailed around the world in 1766.

Baret’s ally and lover was scientist Philibert Commerson. “That said, the quick-wittedness and determination needed to sustain her disguise was Baret’s alone,” says Glynis Ridley, of the University of Louisville and author of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret. After a year and a half at sea, she was reportedly revealed as a woman in Tahiti—though she had probably aroused suspicion already. She did not relieve herself with the crew and the surgeon noted that her care for Commerson “did not seem natural for a male servant.”

Both de Freycinet and Baret were seriously transgressing social norms. Merely entering the company of men was seen as morally suspect, says Ridley. And both were also involved in scientific work. “Baret’s life spans a period that was one of intense debate about women’s exposure to scientific knowledge,” says Ridley. “A female stowaway was a curiosity, a female botanist was a breach in the natural order of things.” Baret became the first woman recipient of a French government pension for her contribution to science. Ultimately, says Ridley, “Baret refused to be bound by others’ limited expectations for someone of her sex and class.”

Read the stories of several women who bucked the natural order to sail away to the far corners of the earth at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Cristoforo Dall'Acqua)

In honor of this great GQ correction, what are some of your favorite newspaper/magazine/website corrections of all-time? pic.twitter.com/AKY8X2sNHx

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) November 22, 2019

The only possible response to would be, "Thank you for your cervix." Parker Molloy was so taken with this recent correction that she shared some of her other favorite media corrections, and invited Twitter users to share theirs. That resulted in some doozies.

pic.twitter.com/jxFgWsaEdf

— Lola (@TinySodaCans) November 22, 2019

Mobius Strip of corrections.

— Vidya Heble (@purrsiflager) November 23, 2019

On July 17, 1969 -- the day after Apollo 11 launched.

— (((Eddie))) (@abracadocious) November 22, 2019

You can see the images easier in the Threadreader version, or see all the replies at Twitter.
-via Metafilter

Abraham Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 was not the first presidential inauguration to be photographed, but due to Lincoln's relative importance in US history, that photo has become an icon. Yet it is so blurry that you cannot see Lincoln standing to give his address. The lllustrated Times Weekly chose to publish a woodcut made from the image instead of the photograph in order to make the details clear. And until recently, the photo was uncredited or mis-credited.  

Alexander Gardner, then employed at Mathew Brady’s Washington gallery, is most often credited as the man behind the lens, though he never actually said that he was. Over time, it became attributed to him, which seemed reasonable. He took Lincoln’s portrait many times, he recorded some of the most lasting images of the Civil War and he photographed Lincoln’s second inauguration.

However, my recent research in the Library’s collections has shown that he did not take the historic image of the first inauguration. That photographer, instead, was the unheralded John Wood.

If you’ve never heard the name, don’t worry. He’s virtually unknown in American photography. If five of his images did not appear in “Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War,” he might not be mentioned at all.

But Wood was the government’s first official photographer.

Adrienne M. Lundgren is a senior photograph conservator at the Library of Congress. She did not deduce that Wood took the picture of Lincoln's inauguration just from his job title. That was a painstaking investigation that she explains in a post at the Library of Congress Blog. -via Damn Interesting

I can’t stop laughing at this thanksgiving cinnamon roll fail pic.twitter.com/LUf3dy01em

— pokey pup (@Whatapityonyou) November 22, 2018

What makes a Thanksgiving feast memorable? The things that go wrong! Kind of like weddings, except when it happens to Thanksgiving, there's always next year to improve. But the sad thing is that so many people don't have a clue how to prepare traditional dishes because they didn't pay attention when Grandma did it. However, most are just dumb mistakes.  

I used sweetened condensed milk, instead of evaporated, by accident, in my mashed potatoes, my first time cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Haven't had to cook since.

— Lu (@pwroflov) November 16, 2018

Read twenty Thanksgiving horror stories, some more frightening than others, at Mashable.

Smithsonian archaeologist Eric Hollinger made a cake for his office Christmas party in 2004. Hollinger is an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution. He went a little over the top and made a cake for the anthropology department's holiday party that illustrated an existing archaeological dig, complete with a blue Jell-o pond. Hollinger didn't know he had started what would become a tradition. The next year, everyone expected another work of art, so Hollinger make a Haida Native American longhouse out of chocolate. Since then, he's provided cake replicas of a Viking ship, Chinese terra cotta soldiers, King Tut's tomb, and the recreation of Al Khazneh at Petra, Jordan, that you see above. That year he brought music to accompany the cake- the theme from the Indiana Jones movies.

While sharing the cakes is what the whole enterprise is about, Hollinger keeps the subject of each year’s cake a big secret until the party. Experts from around the world and his family and colleagues who help with the creation get to be in on the secret, but the rest of his colleagues are left guessing and eagerly awaiting the big reveal. Hollinger is already working on this year's cake and, as always, it is promising to be unique, educational and eye-catching.

If you want to see what sweet treat he has produced, make sure to keep an eye on the museum's Facebook and Twitter feeds come December 18. Even without the sugar high, it is sure to wow you and might inspire you to do a little research or baking of your own.

“Eric is so meticulous and careful with the cakes — similar to his research,” Burgess says. “It's a huge gift to the department and it's the highlight of our holiday party.”

I will try to remember to post the 2019 cake here when images become available. See some of Hollinger's past archaeology cakes at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: James Di Loreto, Smithsonian Institution)

Can you see through this logical fallacy? I did, but then I also had my own ideas about Lucy, since the only math I ever excelled at was statistics and probability. That doesn't matter once you grasp the idea of the conjunction fallacy. Now that you know what it's called, you might be able to see it in the world around you, or the things people tell you. Me, I'm just tickled to find an educational video that is under ten minutes, which is rare these days.

Many Americans spent the month of November during elementary school learning about the first Thanksgiving in 1621, when the Pilgrims feasted for three days with the Wampanoag in celebration of successful harvest. But it wasn't the first such feast of thanks the Pilgrims experienced, since such holidays were held in Europe, too, to celebrate the harvest, or more often to celebrate a victory in battle. Earlier settlers in Virginia had those celebrations, too, usually after a massacre of the locals.

David Silverman lays down the reality of the Wampanoag and Pilgrim alliance in his seminal book This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. In the book, Silverman details why the Wampanoag Massasoit (a sort of diplomatic leader) named Ousamequin helped the Pilgrims even though they had spent their first year robbing graves and squatting in emptied Wampanoag houses. In short, Ousamequin vowed to protect and help the 50-odd pilgrims because his people simply needed the numbers. The Narragansetts, a rival for land and resources, had not fallen victim to the spread of European diseases and they were willing to fight for land to plant their crops to feed their people.

This all leads up to the first “rejoicing” that took place in the fall of 1621. Back then, a “rejoicing” was a party. For three days (like the fest back in Holland), people would feast, run shooting drills, compete in feats of strength, and so on — kind of like a proto county fair. The Wampanoag — who had promised military protection to the Pilgrims — heard all the shooting, assumed they were under attack, and sent over 90 of their soldiers with Ousamequin at the lead. After a tense moment and realizing the pilgrims were actually partying, the Wampanoag ended up staying the three days and partying too.

By all accounts, there were no Pilgrims holding out their hands and inviting the Wampanoag to their table in “thanks.” It was mostly a misunderstanding that led to a little comingling. Almost inexplicably, though, this one-off event that few ever thought about again until the 1890s ended up being central to our ideas of Thanksgiving today.

Another strange fact that belies what we learned in school is that it took another 200 years for the Pilgrims' feast to be pinpointed as the "first Thanksgiving." The Puritans, a completely different group of settlers, later held their own feasts of gratitude. The Founding Fathers and other presidents occasionally declared a Thanksgiving holiday for one reason or another -often as a victory celebration after a battle- but did not tie the festivities to the 1621 feast until much later. And a lot of the traditions we keep today weren't introduced until the 20th century. Read a history of Thanksgiving at Uproxx.

When someone says they enjoy watching bad movies, that could mean anything. Our ability to determine whether a movie is bad says something about our recognition of good movies, which is anything but objective. Classifying successful movies as "bad" requires that a viewer step out of the moment and become a critic of filmmaking, while deconstructing movies that have no aspiration to art (Sharknado and Hallmark films come to mind) is unsatisfying and rather pointless -you may as well just enjoy them for what they are. My favorite flavor of bad movies are those in which the creator had obvious passion for the project, but no expertise or budget to pull it off, like The Room or Plan 9 From Outer Space. Those are only one kind of bad movie, and there are many others, as Phil Christman describes in a rather highbrow essay.    

...I kept watching bad movies, wondering how the satellite and the planet interacted. I drove across town to see a revival screening of King Kong Lives (1986), a film so bad that the distributors refused to allow Siskel and Ebert to show clips of it on their television program. I stayed up late finding and downloading the bits and pieces of a torrent file of the 1982 Turkish fantasy film Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), known in Anglophone countries as “Turkish Star Wars” because of its unauthorized and awkward splicing-in of actual Star Wars footage. I lost my wallet, not inappropriately, at a showing of The Dragon Lives Again (1979), a surreal festival of copyright infringement in which an actor playing (though hardly resembling) a resurrected Bruce Lee fights characters named The Godfather, The Exorcist, Popeye, James Bond, and Dracula, among others. I came to love Twilight (2008), with its wholly original, indeed hermetic vision of human psychology and conversation, its endearingly transparent wish-fulfillment aspects, its inexplicable baseball game. After it left theaters, I marveled at Batman vs. Superman (2016), that filmic analogue of a moody teenager hilariously incapable of remembering or articulating why he’s moody.

Christman goes deeper into what makes a movie bad, by highlighting a few films such as A Wrinkle in Time and Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. A critique of the latter leads into a critique of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark and the joy of separating the good from the bad according to one's own criteria. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ed Wood) 

"Africa" became a big hit because it has a pleasant melody, fine harmonies, and great production values. It was an early example of what came to be known as the "80s power ballad." But the lyrics never made a bit of sense. Toto's David Paich, who wrote the song, admitted he knew nothing about Africa but what he'd seen on TV. So how accurate is the song? Focusing on the line "I bless the rains down in Africa," Mel magazine asked three weather experts for their opinions: Professor of Meteorology Peter Knippertz, Nigerian meteorologist and oceanographer Kenya Samson Levi, and South African TV weatherman Simon Gear. They talked about a lot more than just the weather.  

Knippertz: If you read through the lyrics, you read about drums, wild dogs and the wise man with ancient melodies — it’s like a tourist catalog of images from Africa, which of course has little to do with the day-to-day realities of the real Africa.

“The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless, longing for some solitary company”

Gear: There are no wild dogs calling to each other in the night! That doesn’t exist. I’m not only a meteorologist, I’m also a Savannah ecologist, and the concept of wild dogs calling to each other in the night irritates me immensely, because wild dogs don’t call to each other in the night at all. They don’t even really call to each other during the day! They’re thinking of hyenas, not dogs.

“As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
I seek to cure what’s deep inside, frightened of this thing that I’ve become”

Gear: It’s mildly insulting that they even mention Olympus in this song because Kilimanjaro is maybe five, even 10 times higher than Olympus. It’s a massive mountain, whereas Olympus is a pimple. Though it is indeed the Serengeti that it looks over, so that was accurate.

What really floored me was an image of the single's picture disc. It is a map of Africa, with countries like Rhodesia, South West Africa, and Zaire. Those are now Zimbabwe, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That speaks to how very long ago 1982 really was. Read the rest of the critique at Mel magazine. -via Digg

A set of lighthouses off the Florida Keys is up for grabs now that the government no longer needs them. They spent 100 years warning sea traffic away from the coral reef several miles from shore, and they had to be hurricane-resistant, which required a design different from the brick and stone lighthouses you see elsewhere. One has already been given to a non-profit organization. Sand Key lighthouse, pictured above, has been on the auction block for most of this year. The other four will be given away, if the right owners can be found.  

Between 1852 and 1880, the U.S. government built six offshore reef lights. Also known as screw-pile lighthouses—because they stand on piles that are screwed into the sea bottom—these haunting towers look more like metal spiderwebs than buildings (a design that likely influenced a more famous tower across the Atlantic, built by an architect named A.G. Eiffel).

These outposts stand in just five feet of water, but they’re four to seven miles offshore, so the lives of their keepers came with distinct isolation. These lonely souls sometimes went weeks without human interaction. In some cases, the extreme solitude led to mental derangements. But on serene days, sharks swam by in crystal-clear waters, and nights were passed watching waves wash over the reef, illuminated by moonlight and burning whale oil.

While these lighthouses may seem like a bargain, ownership comes with the responsibility to maintain them as historic sites. Historian and president of the Florida Keys Reef Lights Foundation Eric Martin hopes to acquire Sand Key lighthouse and the others. He knows more about them than almost anyone, and tells the history of these lighthouses at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: State Library and Archives of Florida)

CGP Grey has been doing research for this video for five years. Well, to be honest, that five years of research is most likely going into the series of videos that will be called Reservations, of which this one is the first. Before diving into what he's going to tell us, Grey first wants to established the language used. Therefore, here are 1300 words to explain one word. -via reddit

In October, Steve Braithwaite was pulled over by a Michigan State Police trooper while driving his banana car. The probable cause was probably the fact that he was driving a banana car. Braithwaite did not peel out and give him the slip, yet the incident was still bananas. He was not ticketed, but rather rewarded. From the Facebook post:

Trooper Strouse was patrolling near Adrian when he saw Steve Braithwaite driving his banana car down the highway. Braithwaite was anticipating a citation, but after Trooper Strouse checked out the headlights, brake lights and taillights, he returned the driver's license, along with a $20 bill for his travels.

"Trooper Strouse is an awesome and humble person. I have no doubt he has done things like this his whole career," said F/Lt. Morenko, commander of the MSP Monroe Post.

Read more on this story at the Detroit Free Press. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Michigan State Police)

Was this guy born with it, or does the physical punishment of a professional rugby career make you a comedic genius? Joe Marler of the Harlequins spoke to reporters about their upcoming game with Bath. The simple adage about getting back on the horse led to a trip down the rabbit hole. Marler's Wikipedia entry has been updated since this video came about. -via Laughing Squid

Scientists are studying the language of numbers and their effect on learning math. For most numbers, English does pretty well in describing, say, sixty-five. But the numbers eleven and twelve don't inherently mean anything in base ten, and the rest of the words for teens don't quite mesh with the system for numbers twenty and above. In contrast, in Mandarin Chinese, all numbers between ten and 100 are spoken with the same convention: the words for 92 translates to "nine ten two."

In other languages, the tens and units of numbers are inverted. For example, in Dutch, 94 is written vierennegentig (or “four and ninety”), and other research suggests this may make it harder to do certain mathematical processes.

For example, Dutch kindergarten children performed worse than English children on a task that required them to roughly add together two-digit numbers. This was despite the fact they were slightly older and had better working memory, because Dutch kindergarten starts later than in the UK. But on nearly every other metric, including counting ability, roughly adding and comparing quantities of dots, and simple addition of single-digit numbers, the two groups performed at the same level.

"The fact that they were the same in every other aspect, apart from the condition where two digits showed up, shows you that it's the language that is making the difference,” says Iro Xenidou-Dervou, lead author on the study and lecturer in mathematical cognition at Loughborough University.

Read more on the research into the way we say numbers and what that means for education at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Flickr user chia ying Yang)