This big boat looks like Noah's ark, and likewise it was constructed to sail only once, and not even on the ocean. Back before Russia had railroads, they developed a method of moving timber from the forests to the cities on the Volga and Kama rivers. They built these huge boats called belyanas from the timber, floated them downriver, and then disassembled them as their cargo. Oh yeah, there's plenty more timber inside.

The belyanas were constructed without any tar as waterproofing, and only in the middle of the 19th century did they even begin to use nails. The logs, beams, and planks were tied together for the trip. Once they arrived at a port city, the lumber was sold to fuel steamships and heat homes. The cabins on the deck that housed the crew were sold whole as houses. What I'd like to know was how the crew made it back up to the forests afterward. Read about the belyanas of Russia and see more pictures at Amusing Planet.

Charles Dickens gave us the classic tale of Christmas joy and generosity, along with ghosts, in his story A Christmas Carol. He also gave us a classic villain in Ebenezer Scrooge, a mean and miserly type we've all known at some time in our lives. The greatest literary characters are drawn from real life, and there has been plenty of study on who inspired the Scrooge character.

Dickens drew from more than one real person to make Scrooge. Literary scholars believe that his miserly ways came from member of parliament John Elwes, who lived in the previous century and was well-documented in a bestselling biography that Dickens would have no doubt read.  

The inspiration of the character's name came from the very real Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, who died in 1836, and was unknown to Dickens. How that happened is a bit weird. Read about Scroggie and Elwes and how they contributed to the character of Ebenezer Scrooge at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting

Here's a profession that's right up there with mattress tester. A team of expert ham sniffers are employed by the Spanish company Cinco Jotas. They specializes in very expensive premium quality acorn-fed Iberian hams. The ham sniffers are quality control workers who can appraise the quality of a ham just by smell. But they've been overworked lately due to increased demand.

Manuel Vega Domínguez has been sniffing hams since 1998, and in normal times will sniff around 200 hams a day, but this holiday season, he's up to 800 a day, which he refers to as "at the limit of human possibility." But he will soldier on. Read about the busy ham sniffers at Thrillist.

-via reddit

A Steller's sea eagle — a very-rare, muppet-ass looking bird native to Asia — has been spotted in Massachusetts! For more info, check out @TheBirdist https://t.co/bmsEziktIw pic.twitter.com/JTjEVQFMl3

— Wild City NYC (@wildcitynyc) December 21, 2021

Every year, birdwatchers all over spent time between December 14 to January 5 to take part in the Christmas Bird Count. The data they contribute helps to track the fates of thousands of bird species. What would it take for Nick Lund, blogger at The Birdist and advocacy and outreach manager for Maine Audubon, to abandon the Christmas Bird Count? A very rare bird sighting.

The Steller's sea eagle is the largest eagle on earth. Its wingspan can be as much as eight feet! But the Steeler's sea eagle is native to northeastern Asia, mainly Siberia, Japan, Korea, and occasionally coastal Alaska. They never wander into the continental US. But one eagle appears to have gone rogue. It was spotted in inland Alaska, then in Texas, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and then in Massachusetts. Lund, in Maine, heard about it on Monday, immediately ditched the Christmas Bird Count, picked up a few birder buddies, and drove another two hours to Massachusetts to see the eagle.

Bird enthusiasts were texting and alerting each other about the bird's location, and Lund caught up with it at Dighton Rock State Park. By noon, there were 200 or so birders set up with cameras to see the single specimen of the Steller's sea eagle, who was just chilling with some smaller bald eagles. For a birdwatcher this is like finding the Holy Grail. The story is delightful because the birders were so excited, and their enthusiasm for something we know nothing about is contagious. Read about the sighting and the banzai rush to see this bird at The Birdist. -via Metafilter

Christmas comes with a lot of stories, folklore, and media characters. Most of these characters have nothing to do with each other. There's baby Jesus, of course, and Santa Claus, but also Krampus, Rudolph, Belsnickel, the Grinch, Scrooge, the Little Drummer Boy, Yukon Cornelius, Zwarte Piet, Elf on the Shelf, the Yule Cat, Dominick The Donkey, and for some reason a Nutcracker, among others. Come up with a new Christmas character, and if you're lucky you can make tons of money. Janelle Shane is not looking to make tons of money, but to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Her latest project is generating new Christmas entities. She fed a few existing characters into the neural network, and out came three Christmas weasels. But that's not all. Go to Shane's site, AI Weirdness, to meet the Hostile Choir, Chrishmak, the Blop, and more brand new, uh, things we can write a Christmas story around.  

This may technically be an ad from Chevrolet, but it's a story that serves as the company's holiday greeting. It involves a 1966 Chevy Impala that hadn't been driven for quite some time. You'll figure out why pretty quickly, and then it's time to get your hankie out.

This video is based on a true story, according the Chevy. Everyone will be able to relate to at least one thing in the video. Anywhere this video is posted, it brings out stories of beloved cars in someone's past, or in a loved one's past. It doesn't have to be a Chevy. -via Fark 

#MikesMerryMovieChallenge

December 11: favorite song in a holiday movie

I’ll be man enough to admit that I get a little misty-eyed once I hear “Christmas Time is Here” from 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” when watching it. pic.twitter.com/J8WDEUDuoh

— filmanthropic (@filmanthropica) December 11, 2021

The song in its original version has nothing to do with Christmas. What you think may be jingle bells are brushes on a snare drum. It's a jazz tune that's quite slow and melancholy. But when we hear it, we know it's Christmas, because "Christmas Time is Here" played through a large part of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the beloved 1965 Peanuts TV special we all know and love.

The song was written and performed by Vince Guaraldi, a jazz musician who'd hit the charts with "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" a few years earlier. Lee Mendelson heard the song and got Guaraldi to do the music for A Charlie Brown Christmas. Guaraldi constructed a slow jazz instrumental, which was quite innovative for a children's television show at the time. Mendelson thought it needed lyrics, which he wrote and arranged for a children's choir to sing. Even with cheery lyrics, the song makes Christmas seem somewhat sad and disappointing, which is quite in line with the plot of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Read the story of how the song came about and why we automatically get nostalgic when we hear it, at Mel magazine.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a classic Dr. Seuss story first published in 1957. It was made into a Christmas television special in 1966 and two feature films in 2000 and 2018, among other spinoffs featuring the Grinch. This Honest Trailer is about the 2000 film version starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch. It was a huge hit, and probably the most familiar version of the story to the internet generation. As Screen Junkies reveals, this movie was less Dr. Seuss and more Ron Howard and Jim Carrey. The basic story is there, but stretched out to feature length by adding lots of violence and sexual innuendo. Is it really? I've never  seen the movie. After watching this Honest Trailer, I don't have the desire to, either.

The Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life was released in 1946, and is set on Christmas Eve of 1945. The movie follows the life of George Bailey, who was born in 1907. Bailey and the characters around him experience life in the 20th century just as the 1946 audience would have, without too much explanation. They lived through the Spanish flu epidemic, the crash of 1929, and the World War II draft as a matter of course. No one around at the time had any idea that the movie would became more popular over the next 75 years, and that many folks would have to go to school to learn about the events that shaped their lives. But here we are, with a movie that chronicles a momentous period in history and how it affected everyday people.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History's History Film Forum examines the historical accuracy and value of American films. They recently discussed It's a Wonderful Life and the historical events portrayed in it. The movie was not written as a history lesson, but due to its age and scope, it deserves a deeper look into its contemporary references. For example, the scene in which Mary and George are on the phone with Sam Wainwright is memorable to us for its extraordinary sexual tension, but there is real history behind the conversation.

To help George, who’s at a crossroads in his life, Sam offers them some illegal insider-trading tips as he reminds George of an idea they once discussed to make plastics out of soybeans. This hearkens back to an effort popularized in the 1920s through the early 1940s, most prominently by automotive titan Henry Ford, known as “chemurgy.” According to Landis, an agricultural historian, chemurgy was the “idea [of] taking farm crops and making industrial products out of them ... growing rural America out of the Depression with one foot in industry, one foot in agriculture.”

Ford set up laboratories and employed scientists to experiment on crops to determine if he could “grow a car.” After experimenting on everything from cantaloupes to dandelion seeds, the researchers had the most success with soybeans. Though the effort succeeded in creating some plastic components for cars and allowed Ford to swing an ax at the plastic trunk of his personal car for publicity, soybean plastics didn’t result in the success or riches portrayed in the film, but the research did result in a plethora of food products, which in turn pushed soybeans from a marginal crop in North America to one of the largest.

This is just one tidbit from the film forum's discussion. You can read more fascinating bits of history referenced in It's a Wonderful Life at Smithsonian, or if you have time, you can watch a feature-length video of the forum discussion plus the relevant movie clips at the same link.  

Capture the Atlas has announced their 25 winners in the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition. Each of the chosen photographs comes with a great story. The photo above is titled "Santa's Cabin," taken by Olli Sorvari in Levi, Finland. He hiked out to the cabin in a couple of feet of snow without snowshoes to get it, and then it started snowing again. At Instagram, he says, "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire... Didn’t need no water to put it out but sure felt thirsty after the hike🥸"  



The above image was capture by Marybeth Kiczenski on November 4 at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, on the shore of Lake Superior in Wisconsin. She drove eight hours to get out from under clouds to witness the effects of a geomagnetic storm. This view is definitely worth it.

See all 25 winning images with their photographers' stories at Capture the Atlas. -via Everlasting Blort


See also: the 2020 winners.

Krampus is a European Christmas demon that serves as the opposite of Santa Claus. For children, Santa Claus, or Father Christmas or St. Nicholas, was the carrot and Krampus was the stick. But why should kids have all the fun? Krampus was never really much of a thing in the United States, as if we let the legend drop in the ocean as Europeans immigrated to the States. Or maybe the Protestants who didn't celebrate St. Nicholas Day left Krampus behind when they moved the St. Nicholas traditions to Christmas. But most likely, it's just that Krampus wasn't all that well known outside of the Alpine region until relatively recent times. Of course, once we had the internet, the Krampus legend spread and grew exponentially, as anything as weird and fun as a Christmas monster is bound to do.  -via Boing Boing

Read more about Krampus in many previous Neatorama posts.

The documentary series The Beatles: Get Back took a look at the recording of the Beatles' 1970 album Let It Be. Over about eight hours, we got an in-depth look at how the band wrote and recorded the entire album in three weeks. That feat would not have been possible if the band members didn't know each other thoroughly or hadn't been working together for years. The collaborative process of writing songs worked because of unwritten rules that John, Paul, George, and Ringo, as well as their producers and crew followed. Sure, there was conflict, but not nearly as much as could have been for such a project. Tom Whitwell identified some of those rules from watching The Beatles: Get Back, and explains them for us. The most important is how to get your two cents in without alienating your collaborators.

1. The ‘yes… and’ rule

The first rule of improvisation (and brainstorming) is “yes… and”. When someone suggests an idea, plays a note, says a line, you accept it completely, then build on it. That’s how improvisational comedy or music flows. The moment someone says ‘no’, the flow is broken. It’s part of deferring judgement, where you strictly separate idea generation from idea selection.

As they slog through Don’t Let Me Down, George breaks the spell. Instead of building and accepting he leaps to judgement, saying “I think it’s awful.” Immediately, John and Paul lay down the rules: “Well, have you got anything?” “you’ve gotta come up with something better”.

Don’t judge, build.  

Read all ten rules for productivity and brainstorming in a group at Medium. -via Kottke

The longest place name in the world is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, which is a hill in New Zealand. I would guess the sign painter charged an arm and a leg to label it. TikTok member tehamua says he can't pronounce it, but he will try for us, and give us some background, too. According to Wikipedia, the name means "The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one". Most folks just call it Taumata. If you want to hear someone who knows how to pronounce it, weather reporter Oriini Tipene-Leach rattles off the 85-character name of the hill easily. But then she is challenged to pronounce that place in Wales, which trips her up.

That place is Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch, which, at 58 characters, is the second longest place name we know of. It has several shorter versions. And tehamua tries that one, too.

-via Metafilter 

Back in the day, those who made a living hauling goods from the Great Lakes to New York City spent their summers working and the cold winters living on their barges tied to the city's docks. They couldn't afford to rent a house on land, and they formed a community of sorts on the water. It was a life they were used to. In the winter of 1926, around 80 men, women, and children lived in 30-40 barges lashed together at the dock end of 96th street. On Christmas night, a storm blew in while the residents were sleeping and somehow caused the moorings that kept the barges in place to came loose. They silently began to drift down the East River, toward what seamen called "Hell Gate," where currents and tides were particularly dangerous. Two dogs on the barges, named Fanny and Sandy, started barking frantically.

Three blocks away, the city fireboat George B. McClellan was tied up at the foot of 99th Street. Fire Lieutenant John Hughes and his crew of 16 men were below deck. All cuddled up on an old coat on a bench in the McClellan’s cabin was Peggy, a fluffy white spitz dog who served as mascot–not watchdog–of the fireboat.

Hearing Fanny’s barks for help, Peggy awoke from her snooze and sprang from her comfy bed. She leaped through a partly open hatch and landed on the boat’s icy deck.

Peggy responded to Fanny's barks with her own barks, waking the fire crew. She kept barking, pointing her face in the direction of the drifting barges, until Hughes figured out what was happening. The rescue of the barge fleet was complicated, but could have been a huge disaster for the people on them if it weren't for the three dogs that were on alert that night. Read about the rescue and about the culture of the barge colony at The Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company

What do animals do when their home is falling apart? They have to go somewhere else. When their Arctic ice shelf collapses, a mother polar bear and her cub, wearing lovely knitted sweaters, take a chance and end up as refugees in a world totally foreign to them. While they just want to get on with their lives, the current residents look at them as an invasive species. It turns out they are not alone in their calamity, but that doesn't make the natives any more welcoming.

The award-winning short Migrants was directed by Hugo Caby, Antoine Dupriez, Aubin Kubiak, Lucas Lermytte, and Zoé Devise of the PÔLE 3D Digital & Creative School in France. It wordlessly addresses many subjects: climate change, refugees, xenophobia, deportation, and even littering. -via Laughing Squid