When we think of tarot cards, our first thoughts range from casual fortune telling to tools of the occult. A deck of cards with medieval art showing unfamiliar symbolism that takes lots of study to understand seems just plain weird. It might surprise you to learn that the occult trappings of the tarot deck are a fairly recent phenomena. The tarot deck originated in Europe, perhaps as early as the 14th century, as a regular card game. The cards came in four suits, which were later simplified into hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades to make them easier to use. The original tarot cards were lavishly illustrated and gradually expanded to make the game more difficult.

So why did the elaborate tarot deck survive after the standard deck of cards we play with today was developed? And how did they become fortune telling cards? That has to do with the beautiful Italian Renaissance artwork on them that no one could bear to throw away, and the medieval symbolism that fewer and fewer people understood over time. Read the origins of the tarot deck and why it became what it is today at The Guardian. -via Metafilter 

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we looked at Neanderthals as hairy, ape-like cave dwellers that were clearly sub-human. We were wrong about a lot of that. They did live in caves, when there was a cave around, but those were pretty good shelters, really. We've since discovered that Neanderthals weren't at all stupid, as a group. They had sophisticated tools and social structures, and were similar enough to modern humans to interbreed with them. These discoveries are based in study and not just on the fact that most of us are part Neanderthal and want to make our ancestors look good. Neatorama readers already know a lot of the revisions in our view of Neanderthals, but do you know how they got their name? Did you know about the red light in the sky they must have witnessed? In this video, Weird History goes over some fascinating facts on what we've learned about Neanderthals.

Christmas and New Year's Day, plus the days surrounding them, are a time of festivity, of work vacations, parties, and often more alcohol than you're used to drinking the rest of the year. While many of the drawbacks of overindulging are well-known, such as falling, hangovers, weight gain, and the inability to look witnesses in the eye the next day, there are other concerns.

Your digestive system depends on about a trillion microbes to work properly. Your gut biome consists of fungi, bacteria, parasites, and viruses that not only aid in digestion, but also affect our immune systems and our personalities. Alcohol is well-known germ killer. Killing off an indiscriminate swath of your gut biome can lead to an imbalance, in which bad bacteria can begin to outnumber the good bacteria that keeps it in check. Alcohol also irritates the lining of the digestive system, which can allow bacteria to enter the rest of the body. There's also the poor, overworked liver and the byproducts of breaking down alcohol it produces. Read the details of how excessive alcohol consumption can affect your gut biome, and what you can do about it, at Inverse.

A few years ago, French TikToker Cyrilschr (who is no longer at that account) played with Orbeez, beads made of sodium polyacrylate, a superabsorbent polymer that soaks up water. The beads can expand to many times their size when exposed to water, so Cyrilschr bought enough Orbeez to fill his bathtub. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and made a fun video. But then what? How do you get rid of them? He thought it would be a simple matter of letting them go down the drain. But they aren't liquid, and they clogged the drains. The follow up TikTok videos told a horror story as he panicked over the growing problem of Orbeez in the sewer. It's both funny and horrifying.

The original videos are narrated in a combination of French and German, and this compilation has been edited down and English captions added, which are NSFW. You'll have to toggle the CC button to turn them on. Boing Boing has the full compilation of videos, but the captions are not available in English.

A 32-year-old Kelsey Hatcher, diagnosed with uterus didelphys, a rare condition characterized by having two uteri, has defied the odds by delivering a set of twins at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) hospital.#Birmingham #Alabama pic.twitter.com/lzKh1qIbQu

— Bnz English (@BnzEnglish) December 27, 2023

Last month we brought you the story of Kelsey Hatcher, who has two uteruses and became pregnant in both. Doctors were concerned about the high-risk pregnancy. The story now has a happy ending, as Hatcher gave birth to two baby girls, Roxi Layla on Tuesday, December 19th, and then Rebel Laken on Wednesday, December 20, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital. Hatcher underwent 20 hours of labor. The first girl was induced and delivered vaginally, and the second was by a cesarian section performed the next day. The infants were born only a few days short of their due date, which was on Christmas. Although the girls are technically twins, fraternal of course, they are unique in that they do not share a birthday, nor did they share a womb. Both babies are healthy. -via Damn Interesting

In 1987, a barge carrying more than 3,000 tons of garbage from New York took over the news as it floated around the Atlantic seaboard looking for a place to offload. No one wanted it. The Mobro 4000 was originally intended to take its cargo to Louisiana for burial, then to Morehead City, North Carolina, to be converted to methane, then plans were hatched to take it to Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, New Jersey, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Belize, but the garbage was rejected everywhere. The boat stayed afloat and loaded for months.

What was the problem? Well, there were mob ties to the garbage transportation operation. There were also questions about the safety of the exact type of waste it carried, as it was rumored to contain medical waste. But it mainly boiled down to "we don't want your garbage." Read about the Mobro 4000 and what eventually happened to it at Amusing Planet.

If you've ever watched a lineman up on a telephone pole (do we still call them that?) or an electrical tower of some sort, you first gasp at their bravery. But you may have also wondered how they learned to do it. They say you learn from your mistakes, but in this kind of work, one mistake can be fatal. Tom Scott visited the National Grid Training Centre in Yorkshire, UK, to see how that training goes, and of course the first thing he does is climb an electrical pylon. Don't look down! Being an internet star must pay well, because he keeps doing scary things even though he does have a normal sense of self-preservation that is lacking in certain stunt YouTubers. And that's why we can feel his trepidation like a normal person. But this is just tower climbing. If there were real electricity involved, Tom would have had to undergo a lot more training.        

Another thing about this video is our opportunity to look at how other countries get their power. Coal is being phased out in the UK, and natural gas has to be liquified and shipped in. The US has plenty of oil and natural gas, and plenty of room for wind and solar, while European countries have to import so much fuel of one kind or another. That's why electricity prices and heating bills are so much higher in western Europe.

Also: In America, a lineman's job can be even scarier.

The school bus is coming down the street, but it's not there to take your kids to school. This bus is specially for dogs! Denzel Morrison owns Ruff and Puff Doggy Day Camp in Calgary, Alberta. He also drives the bus, which may just be the best job in the world. The doggy bus picks up 10-14 dogs at a time and shuttles them to one of several private dog parks where the dogs can have a good time and run off energy. The dogs really enjoy their adventures. They get to ride, run, and play with familiar canine friends, so what's not to love about it? After all this activity, the dogs are delivered to their homes ready to relax with their human, who is also tired after work. Rover is ready to snuggle on the couch, since he's just been thoroughly walked.  

In this video, Morrison explains how he naturally fell into work with dogs, and came up with the idea of a bus that could transport dogs without using cages. The dogs really appreciate that. See more of Ruff and Puff's doggie adventures at Instagram and TikTok.  -via Born in Space

I've often said that the most memorable part of weddings and holiday family gatherings are the parts that go wrong. Those can become funny stories later. But when things go wrong at a funeral, it can be sad, terrifying, or really gross. After all, there's a dead body involved. There have been some really memorable funerals that go way beyond a drunk uncle or mourners showing up hoping for the deceased's possessions or a free meal. One US president's funeral was interrupted by his parrot, who swore loudly at everyone who attended. An elephant killed a woman, then showed up at her funeral to do more damage. An embarrassing mishap at Queen Victoria's funeral led to a new British royal tradition. A funeral in San Diego was interrupted by a police chase right through the church. But the worst had to be the king whose corpse exploded as he was being buried. Read about nine funerals in which something went very wrong -all different disasters- at Mental Floss. You can read the list or listen to it on a video.

In 1928, Walk Disney Studios released a cartoon called Steamboat Willie. It was the debut of a character called Mickey Mouse, and also of his girlfriend Minnie Mouse. Ever since, Mickey has been the flagship character and the symbol of Disney. The character has been close to entering the public domain several time: in 1955, 1986, and in 2003, but each time the copyright was extended by legislation. Since there has been no copyright extension laws enacted in the past twenty years, the earliest version of Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain on January 1, 2024.  

But that only applies to the original version of the mouse as he was designed for Steamboat Willie. Disney still has a copyright on later versions, and has trademarked the mouse, too. Trademark law is different, however, and is designed to protect companies from logo infringement, not the character itself. Disney will be watching us in the new year to see how the rubber-hose version of Mickey will be used. Read the details of the soon-to-be public domain Mickey at Variety. -Thanks, WTM!

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Sky Elements Drone Shows launched almost 1500 drones to present the story of The Nutcracker in a series of 3D vignettes over North Richland Hills, Texas, a week ago Sunday. Unlike the ballet, the drone show took only seven minutes. It included 700-foot-tall images, the biggest ever created with flying drones. They included Santa Claus, who does not appear in the story of The Nutcracker, but it's hard to have a Christmas show of any kind in Texas without St. Nick. The drone show set two Guinness World records, for the largest aerial display of a fictional character and the largest aerial image. A good time was had by all.

There are people in this world who are as nice and friendly as can be most of the year, but who get so tired of the hype around Christmas that they become Scrooges, and dismiss Christmas with a "Bah! Humbug!" There are also people who love Christmas, but know the only parts worth telling someone about are the disasters. Thank to the fading art of sending letters, we have a glimpse into Christmases past from some well-known people who didn't always have a merry Christmas. Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1964 letter:

Do not expect wit or sense in this letter, only the affection of a drugged and torpid mind. Oh an English Christmas! We are not Christians; we are not social; we have no part in the fabric of the world, but all the same, Christmas flattens us out like a steam roller; turkey, pudding, tips, waits, holly, good ·wishes, presents, sweets; so here we sit, on Boxing day, at Rodmell, over a wood fire, and I can only rouse myself by thinking of you.

Letters of Note has a collection of excerpts from 13 such letters, many of them filled with vinegar. But the very last one from 1940 is a reminder that no matter how bad your Christmas turns out to be, it could be much worse.  -via Nag on the Lake

Experience should tell us that just because someone works in a bakery, that doesn't mean they know how to create a reindeer in icing. Especially when that someone worked in the women's lingerie department yesterday. Or maybe in the butcher shop, because these cakes are certainly butchered. They were told it doesn't have to look exactly like a reindeer; it's a symbol, so you just have to convey the idea of a reindeer. Some of these cakes fall short of even that. Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks gave all these reindeer their own names:

Now, Droopy! Now, Poopy! Now, Boner! ...and Pancake!
On, Slappy! On, Psycho! On, Peanut! And Lunch Break!
To the top of the shelf! To the stores at the mall!
Now wreck away, wreck away, WRECK AWAY, ALL!

See eight not-so-tiny reindeer and Santa Claus, too, ready to wreck the halls at Cake Wrecks. And if that's not enough Christmas chaos, see more Christmas wrecks and even more here.

The image above shows us a star cluster officially designated NGC 2264, which is informally called the Christmas Tree Cluster. It's about 2,500 light years away, and features young stars between one and five million years old -give or take the 2,500 years it took the light to reach earth. The stars range from a tenth the size of our sun to seven times its size.

This is a composite picture, taken by three kinds of telescope cameras. The green is the gas among the nebula, taken by an optical camera from the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope. Foreground and background stars in white were revealed by infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey. The blue and white blinking lights are from X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Did I say they blinked? They do, like twinkling tree lights, shown in an animation in the NASA article about the image. The twinkling effect was added for the video, but the stars really do twinkle, just not in sync with each other. That, and the choice to render the gas image in green, is NASA's Christmas gift to all of us. -via Bored Panda

(Image credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: T.A. Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA) and B.A. Wolpa (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA); Infrared: NASA/NSF/IPAC/CalTech/Univ. of Massachusetts; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & J.Major)

Christmas cards have only been around since 1843, and they didn't start out with cozy pictures of Christmas trees or wise men following a star. The greetings were nice, but the illustrations were designed to make you say, "Whaaaat?" and then maybe laugh at their sheer absurdity. A recurring theme was food taking revenge on people who cooked and ate it. Above, we have two turkeys wishing the cook a Merry Christmas as they shove him into the fire on a spit. Below, A piece of meat and a Christmas pudding do the same to a cook, with the help of some geese.

The gallery includes animals behaving badly, too. A flock of songbirds marches in single file (more or less) carrying torches. They look less festive and more like they are coming to burn your house down. Roaches drink your coffee, or maybe your hot cocoa. A monkey pulls a cat's tail. You get the idea. But what's this one all about?

Maybe they are on their way to terrorize another chef. See a gallery of 27 baffling vintage Christmas cards at Flashbak. -via Damn Interesting