In 1825, a baby giraffe was taken from her mother and shipped by camel, by ship, and on foot to Paris as a gift from the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt to King Charles X. She was called “la Belle Africaine” or “la girafe,” and has since been called Zarafa, which is the Arabic word from which we derive the word "giraffe." Her arrival caused a sensation across the country, and fashion turned to giraffe-mania as the French used giraffe imagery for everything from hair styles to wallpaper.

Along with inspiring some eccentric fashion, and a whole host of commemorative porcelain, accessories, combs, soap, and fans, Zarafa also made her mark on art. A rise in the popularity of animal sculpture by artists like Antoine-Louis Barye was partly inspired by observing Zarafa and the other newly arrived creatures at the Jardin des Plantes. Nicolas Hüet, the official painter for the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle at the Paris menagerie, perhaps captured Zarafa most beautifully in luminous watercolor, with a groom resting alongside her. Caricatures of Charles X, who had a rather long neck, sometimes depicted him as an awkward giraffe. One of the anthropomorphic king being wrangled by a member of the clergy read: “La plus grande bête qu’on ait jamais vue” (“The biggest beast that we’ve ever seen”). In 1827, Honoré de Balzac satirized a Paris visit by a group of Osage from North America, imagining a discourse between the indigenous people and the giraffe as a critique on Charles X. (It’s worth noting that in the 19th century, human zoos in Europe exhibited “exotic” people as well as animals.)

Read about Zarafa and see examples of the art she inspired at Hyperallergic. -via Metafilter

Abstract Expressionism was a fringe movement, until the feds stepped in.

In 1946, the U.S. State Department organized an international exhibition called Advancing American Art that showcased paintings by artists such as John Marin, Ben Shahn, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Not everyone was a fan. The paintings weren’t abstract -portraits, still lifes, nothing that would be out of place at an exhibit of mid-century work today- but they were “modern.” The tour was cut short amid criticism from the American Artists Professional League.

This news delighted top government officials. President Truman called the works “the vaporings of half-baked lazy people,” adding, “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” Other officials thought the exhibit was a ruse: House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Taber complained to the secretary of state that the paintings were made by Communists to “establish ill will” toward the United States.

Ada Blackjack was an Alaskan Inupiat woman who signed on for a year working as a seamstress for an expedition to Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean near Siberia. She was the sole woman in the 1921 expedition that included four men and a cat named Vic.

The expedition, organized by the charismatic Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, was at best an ill-conceived venture; at worst, it was a willfully negligent act of astonishing hubris. Using the pull of his celebrity as a seasoned explorer, Stefansson assembled a team of four starstruck young men—Allan Crawford, 20, Lorne Knight, 28, Fred Maurer, 28, and Milton Galle, 19—to claim Wrangel Island for the British Empire—even though Britain had never shown the slightest interest in wanting it. Though Stefansson picked the team and funded the mission, he never had any intention of joining the party himself and sent his woefully inexperienced team north with only six months of supplies and hollow assurances that “the friendly Arctic” would provide ample game to augment their stores until a ship picked them up the following year.

That's not what happened. Two years later, when a rescue ship finally arrived, Blackjack and Vic were the only survivors of the expedition. She didn't know how to shoot or trap when she went to Wrangel Island, but she taught herself because she was determined to return to her young son. And she had kept a diary of her experiences. Read the story of Ada Blackjack at Atlas Obscura.

New York photographer Brooke Goldman offered to walk her boyfriend to the train station early Sunday morning. On her way back, she was in a hurry to get some more sleep, but came across an outdoor nativity scene that had to be photographed.

And just like that, Goldman's day had been brightened by the unwitting kitty.

"I guess you can definitely say he brought me joy while I was walking home. It was mood-lifting, most definitely," she said. "Laughing that hard that early in the morning makes the rest of the day much more positive."

That still doesn't answer the most important question: What has a this cat done with the baby Jesus? -via Boing Boing

Andrew Therrien started getting threatening calls from a collection agent that went so far as to mention raping his wife if Therrien didn't pay up. The problem was that Therrien had no debts. And he was being targeted by more than one collection agency. The salesman took the harassment personally, and set out to find out who was behind it.

Therrien had been caught up in a fraud known as phantom debt, where millions of Americans are hassled to pay back money they don’t owe. The concept is centuries old: Inmates of a New York debtors’ prison joked about it as early as 1800, in a newspaper they published called Forlorn Hope. But systematic schemes to collect on fake debts started only about five years ago. It begins when someone scoops up troves of personal information that are available cheaply online—old loan applications, long-expired obligations, data from hacked accounts—and reformats it to look like a list of debts. Then they make deals with unscrupulous collectors who will demand repayment of the fictitious bills. Their targets are often poor and likely to already be getting confusing calls about other loans. The harassment usually doesn’t work, but some marks are convinced that because the collectors know so much, the debt must be real.

The problem is as simple as it is intractable. In 2012 a call center in India was busted for making 8 million calls in eight months to collect made-up bills. The Federal Trade Commission has since broken up at least 13 similar scams. In most cases, regulators weren’t able to identify the original perpetrators because the data files had been sold and repackaged so many times. Victims have essentially no recourse to do anything but take the abuse.

Therrien did not want to take the abuse and he was after more than just the agent that was calling him. He spent two years investigating the phantom debt scheme on his own until he got to the kingpin. Read about what Therrien did and what he found at Bloomberg. -via Digg

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John Green looks back 21 years to the year 1996. If you are shocked that you recall those things, congratulations- you've achieved adulthood. You'll have moments like that to make you feel old for the rest of your life. This retrospective is from the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.  

On December 15, we'll have a chance to see Carrie Fisher in a movie for the final time in The Last Jedi. It will be hard to say goodbye to General Leia, formerly known as Princess Leia. Remix master Melodysheep put together scenes from the life of Princess Leia as a tribute to her lasting legacy.

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-via Tastefully Offensive

Paul Duane shared the written transcript of an interview his daughter Gabi conducted with her cat Coco. Any cat owner can relate to the absolute accuracy of the cat's responses, but the little girl's construction of the story is the real gem here. You can see a picture of Coco in the article at Digg.

(Image credit: Paul Duane)

 

Viewers are reveling in the Netflix original movie A Christmas Prince -because it's so deliciously bad. To be fair, I haven't seen any criticism of the actors or the production values, but it appears the plot was written by an algorithm. Every plot device of a little girl's fantasy has been thrown into the mix, no matter how implausible, or how many times it's been used before.

See, it's about a ~quirky~ woman who is worse at being a journalist than Rory Gilmore, and a guy who is literally every bland, handsome, white, quasi-tortured prince with a playboy reputation and a secret heart of gold you've ever watched. There's a Christmas tree in every scene, in case you forget it's a CHRISTMAS prince, i.e. the best kind of prince, obviously. I imagine he smells of cinnamon and wrapping paper IRL. And if you love romance clichés, guess what: THIS MOVIE HAS ALL OF THEM. Every single one.

#AChristmasPrince has everything: The Prince & Me, Princess Diaries 2, Never Been Kissed, Beauty & the Beast, finding out you're adopted /1

— Harmony Barker (@HarmonyNBee) November 30, 2017

Let me guess one of them: the lead is a plain woman until she gets to know the prince. Then he is astonished to see how beautiful she is dressed up for the ball, because she's now wearing a dress and makeup. And they live happily ever after. A true Cinderella story. Read more funny reactions to A Christmas Prince at Buzzfeed. It might even be worth borrowing a Netflix password.

Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2017 is a group. They call them the Silence Breakers- women who have come forward to call out men for sexual harassment or sexual assault by name. The cover of the Person of the Year issue features actress Ashley Judd, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, activist Adama Iwu, musician Taylor Swift, and farm laborer Isabel Pascual representing hundreds of others. 

The roots of TIME’s annual franchise—singling out the person or persons who most influenced the events of the year—lie in the so-called great man theory of history, a phrasing that sounds particularly anachronistic at this moment. But the idea that influential, inspirational individuals shape the world could not be more apt this year. “I want to show [my 11-year-old daughter] that it’s O.K. to stand up for yourself, even though you feel like the world is against you,” says Dana Lewis, a hotel hospitality coordinator who is suing her employer over the actions of a serial groper. “If you keep fighting, eventually you’ll see the sun on the other side.” Or as artist and activist Rose McGowan put it, “Why not fight back? What else are we doing?”

You can read the cover story of the Person of the Year issue here. -via reddit

You saw that video of the sea lion blocking the way of the crew filming the BBC series Blue Planet II. The world's wildlife may be trying to make a statement that they don't really appreciate people invading their territory, even to make a beautiful television documentary. A pelican in the Galapagos Islands made his opinion known when he checked out the film crew's campsite, especially the tent of director Rachel Butler.    

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Maybe the pelican is saying,"This is my island, and I'll go where I want to." Or maybe he's just plain curious, and isn't afraid of a mere TV producer. -via Tastefully Offensive

He almost had you there, right? No matter how down or lonely you are feeling, there's always some homeless dog or cat whose life may depend on your love and support. A new pet can go a long way toward fighting loneliness, and research shows that volunteering your time goes a long way to reduce stress and anxiety. Maybe the best thing to do for your mental health is to reach out to others before it gets really bad. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.

On December 6, Finland celebrates 100 years of independence from the Russian Republic. In honor of the occasion, photographer Hannu Pakarinen documented 100 Finns in 100 Years, meaning a Finnish citizen who was born in each year all the way back to 1917. The Finn for 2017 has not yet been born, but he/she is evident in a picture of his/her mother. Shown here is the Finn born in 2016. There's nothing that says "Finland" more than a baby sleeping outside, unless it's a baby sleeping in a box. Or would that classic picture of a Finn be someone in a sauna? In case you might need a warning, the man born in 1918 is nude, although technically SFW. See all the images here.  -via Metafilter 

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

Who doesn't love the Marx Brothers? These four (and later, three) masters of mirth gave us 13 classic comedies, each one hilarious- to varying degrees.

Although their fourth film Horse Feathers (1932) is unbelievably hilarious on the funny meter, other Marx Brothers outings are usually cited by critics and film aficionados as either their best or superior. Interestingly and oddly, each of the three main Marx Brothers had their own particular favorite of their films, and none chose Horse Feathers.

The film has certainly held up well and stood the test of time. In 2000, the American Film Institute chose Horse Feathers as number 65 on their prestigious list of the 100 Funniest American Comedy Films of all-time ("100 years... 100 laughs"). Whatever.

Norman Z. McLeod, a rare directing survivor of two Marx Brothers movies (he had also directed the boys' previous effort, 1931's Monkey Business), was at the helm.

Basic scenario: Groucho plays Quincey Adams Wagstaff, the president of Huxley College (Thomas Henry Huxley had been an ardent and well-known advocate of Darwin's theory of evolution). Harpo is Pinky, the local dog catcher, and Chico is Baravelli, a resident deliverer of bootleg liquor. Zeppo plays Frank Wagstaff, Groucho's son.

Blonde bombshell Thelma Todd, playing Connie Bailey, the "college widow," is the ostensible love interest of all four Marxes. Although "college widow" is now, these eighty-odd years later, an archaic descriptive expression, at the time it was a slightly derogatory term, meaning a woman of loose morals who lived near a college so she could be close to the male students (ahem).

About eight years ago, Joe Sikorra was facing the worst thing you can imagine: his son John had a terminal illness. He had already lost his sight and was having trouble with his short-term memory. John  had a wish to meet Luke Skywalker- the real Luke Skywalker, not the actor who plays him. The family turned to the only friend they knew in the film industry, screenwriter Ed Solomon. Solomon tells the story from there.  

You can read the original Twitter thread as Solomon shared the story yesterday. In the replies, there was one Tweet that stood out.

There's no sweeter sound than a child laughing-I've been so lucky-feel it's my duty 2 give back in any way I can-Much prefer visits 2 hospitals than talk-shows
Heartbreaking but inspirational-makes my career seem trivial in comparison-Wish I could do more https://t.co/nXXutNfYsa

— @HamillHimself (@HamillHimself) December 5, 2017

Read the complete story of the encounter at The Hollywood Reporter. -via Mashable