Santa Claus keeps his office in Santa Claus Village near Rovaniemi, Finland (a part of Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle). He welcomes visitors year round, but if you can’t go, you can watch via webcam! There are two office webcams, inside and outside. Santa doesn’t work 24 hours a day, so mind the time difference in Finland. You cannot judge when it’s night by the outside webcam, since the sun will not rise in the Arctic Circle for weeks. Link
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Santa Claus keeps his office in Santa Claus Village near Rovaniemi, Finland (a part of Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle). He welcomes visitors year round, but if you can’t go, you can watch via webcam! There are two office webcams, inside and outside. Santa doesn’t work 24 hours a day, so mind the time difference in Finland. You cannot judge when it’s night by the outside webcam, since the sun will not rise in the Arctic Circle for weeks. Link
New Christmas Cards from Cara Scissoria this year include Fred and Ginger, as well as seven other designs that made me giggle! Be sure to check out "Poe Ho Ho". http://www.carascissoria.com/sept07/index.htm -via Everlasting Blort
(Live Leak link)
Psychologist Mitchell Spero trained his pet turtle to do dog tricks! Florida can sit, stay, and roll over (turtles in the wild do their best to avoid the rollover). Spero uses his turtle as an example of overcoming obstacles, to encourage the children he works with. Link -via Arbroath
The Movida nightclub in London has launched a new cocktail that will sell for £35,000. That’s roughly equivalent to $71,000 US dollars. They call this drink the Flawless, and it will be mixed and served under the supervision of security guards.
The nightclub has already taken several orders. Link -via Fark
The cocktail consists of a large measure of Louis XII cognac, half a bottle of Cristal Rose champagne, some brown sugar, angostura bitters and a few flakes of 24-carat edible gold leaf. The drink is described as warming and refreshing, but that is not the main reason for the exorbitant cost: at the bottom of the crystal glass is an 11-carat white diamond ring.
The nightclub has already taken several orders. Link -via Fark
Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel Aviv University has a gallery of art made from the patterns bacteria form with they grow in petri dishes. This one reminds me of a Yes album cover! Link -via Dump Trumpet
Skarabej is an “online museum of old family photographs” from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Croatia. Many were found in anonymous collections at flea markets or in attics, although some are contributed.
Although we collect we are not collectors. We would like to create an archive of memmories of unknown people and events and make them available to everyone. No doubt, we are all going to be in forgotten, old family photographs.
The wedding photo above is from the Marenãiç family of Croatia. Link -via Metafilter
(YouTube link)
December 7, 1941 is “a date which will live in infamy.” The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii led to the United States entering World War II. Wired has the short course on what happened that day. Link
Over 16 years of performing, stuntman Evel Knievel was injured numerous times and had the scars to prove it. Various accounts chronicle a range from 37 broken bones over his career to 431 breaks in one season! Steve Mandich has a look back at the different reports on Knievel's various injuries. Link -via Reddit
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Wilford left a comment under the Show Off Your Smarts contest for today that said:
The very first Christmas movie was "The Night Before Christmas" released in 1906. It was a silent adaptation of the poem of the same name by Clement C. Moore .
Of course, I immediately looked that up. It’s an Edison film! IMDb Link. -Thanks, Wilford!
Get out your thinking cap and get ready to win free stuff because this week Neatorama and mental_floss are teaming up to challenge you to SHOW OFF YOUR SMARTS!
Each day we'll throw out a topic and all you have to do is come up with the smartest, funniest, most interesting fact related to it. Simply enter your fact in the comment below and if yours get chosen, you'll win a brand new prize from the mental_floss store (along with endless bragging rights!). One fact per comment, but you can enter as many facts as you'd like.
Today's topic: Holiday movie and music-related facts. Dazzle us with your knowledge of obscure trivia about holiday entertainment!
Here are two examples to get your mojo working:
When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was first shown on TV in 1965, Coca-Cola sponsored the broadcast. A few animated sequences with the Coke logo were edited out of future airings of the special.
The 1984 charity all-star single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid continued to sell after the holiday ended. The record peaked at #13 on the Billboard chart the week of January 19, 1985.
Today's prize: The awesome There's no right way to eat a rhesus T-shirt.
And even if you don't have a winning fact, mental_floss is giving Neatorama readers a special discount in the mental_floss store. This week only, visit mentalfloss.com/store and get 15% off anything in the store by entering "neatorama" into the coupon code.
Good luck, guys!
And congrats to yesterday's winner, Mandie on her Debbie Downer fact. After working our way through a heap of terrific entries, her submission: "A 'downer' is a farm animal that is too sick or injured to stand and walk" left us positively, well, negative. We'll be sending her a mental_floss tee, and using that comment to spur awkward pauses in plenty of conversations this holiday season.Joel Veitch {wiki} of Rathergood is a big supporter of Tommy's Charity, a UK-based foundation funding research into miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births. Last year he created the ultra-silly animation Tommy's 12 Days of Christmas to help raise awareness and funds for the organization. Link -Thanks, Bill!
I don’t know what this is, or how to adequately describe it. It's pretty and interactive. It’s from Adobe Japan, and I don’t read Japanese. If you do, maybe you can find out something about it. Go take a look. Link -via Grow-A-Brain
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