Tom Scott did a video on London's 18th century fire brigades a few years ago. Now he's retracted it completely because it was based on a premise that was just plain wrong. The story of how that happened illustrates how narratives can arise based on assumptions from random observers, and then the facts assumed become urban legends, and if repeated enough, they eventually transform into history. Tom got his information from reputable sources, which in turn got their facts from what they thought were reputable sources, but you have to go back even further to find out that "the way it was" just ain't so. He not only owns up to it, but explains how it all happened and gives us the real story as he learned it after exhaustive research by a professional researcher. Sometimes you have to go much further down the rabbit hole than you think necessary to uncover the truth.

Back before every home had a computer with graphics programs like Photoshop, people still went all out to produce funny yet personal Christmas cards. This was when "cut and paste" meant cut with scissors and paste with glue. Then you had to run the whole thing to the local print shop to be copied. The print shop would also supply you with envelopes, but you still had to go to the Post Office to buy stamps. Imagine the coordination of the design to get the photographs right in the card above, because you couldn't just zoom in- you had to size everything during the photo shoot and get the photographs printed while crossing your fingers. It all seems so quaint now. But if you had a good enough sense of humor, you didn't even need scissors and glue.

These folks didn't know we'd be laughing at those cards 60, 70 years later. Check out a festive collection of personalized Christmas cards from the mid-20th century designed to make the recipient laugh, at Bored Panda.

When you lose your teeth, you could have a set of dentures made with the latest space age materials, but it wasn't always that way. It used to be that artificial teeth were made from ivory, taken from elephants, walruses, or hippos, but they didn't look all that real, and didn't hold up well after being chiseled into human tooth shapes. The best artificial teeth were made from real teeth, sometimes called Waterloo teeth, as they often came from dead soldiers. But they also could have been traded by grave robbers. We've also heard that healthy teeth were sometimes extracted from live but enslaved people for this purpose, but taking them from dead bodies was altogether easier. Waterloo teeth, of course, got their name from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and the practice continued at least through the American Civil War. They were expensive and gruesome, but they worked. You can read more at the British Dental Association. -via Nag on the Lake

If you love the movie National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, imagine it as a musical. Not just a musical, but an opera, as all the dialogue is sung, and the only speaking part is a bit of description of the setting. Penn Holderness plays all the roles, from Clark Griswold to Eddie to the neighbors and peripheral characters. He can't do all the slapstick humor by himself, but if you know the movie, it's not necessary because your brain will fill it in. Whats important is that he captures the meaning of the film in his clever rhymes. However, if by any chance you haven't seen Christmas Vacation, you might get just a bit lost. Don't let that stop you from enjoying it! It starts out a bit slow, and gets better as it goes along.

The influence of Queen Victoria is still felt all along our culture. She is the reason that brides wear white at their weddings, anesthesia became popular for childbirth, and why we eat chicken for dinner. Her majesty was also instrumental in the way we celebrate Halloween. You could say that Victoria was a superstar influencer. So it's not that difficult to believe that she made family Christmas trees a thing.

As with most of the secular parts of our Christmas celebrations, bringing evergreens inside was an ancient way to celebrate midwinter, specifically the solstice. The tree was incorporated into the Christian feast early, but not universally. German Protestants took it up as a backlash against Catholicism after the Reformation, and then Christmas trees were later rejected by Puritans. But the Christmas tree only really took off as a universal symbol of the holiday after illustrations of Queen Victoria's tree were published in 1848. Read the historic journey of the Christmas tree at the Conversation.

We are used to the annual mayhem on the streets when a snowfall lands in an area that's not expecting it, and does not have adequate plans for making the streets safe. Usually it's a north-south thing in which Minnesotans and Canadians laugh at drivers in places like Georgia with no salt or snowplows at the ready. This time it's England, which doesn't usually get a lot of snow. On December 11, ten inches fell in Gloucestershire on top of a layer of ice, and people had to get out in it regardless of whether a snowplow had been through or not. The slow-motion carnage is just crying out for a soundtrack, like maybe the Blue Danube Waltz. -via Fark

The premise of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is to "compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels." As such, the sentence itself doesn't have to be bad, but is designed to set up a story that will make you dread the rest of the book. And those books don't exist. More than 5,000 entries came in for the 40th edition of the contest. This year's top prize is by John Farmer of Aurora, Colorado.

I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn't help—I was fresh out of salami.

Whew. In this case, the sentence was bad. The Grand Panjandrum's Special Award went to Brent Guernsey of Springfield, Virginia, for this horrible pun.

And so the two pachyderms with the same first name met, and they formed the jazz duo legend known as the Elephants Gerald.

You have to wonder what could possibly come after that, but the sentence deserves an award just for beginning an entire book with the word "and." There are plenty of other entries recognized as winners and dishonorable mentions in various categories (Adventure, Children's & Young Adult Literature, Crime & Detective, Dark & Stormy, Fantasy & Horror, Historical Fiction, Purple Prose, Romance, Science Fiction, Vile Puns, Western, and Odious Outliers) that you can read here. -via Metafilter

See also: Winners from previous years.

Erwin Perzy wasn't out to make a Christmas decoration or a paperweight when he developed the snow globe around the turn of the 20th century. He was looking for a way to make the overhead light brighter in a surgical suite. But one of his attempts, magnifying light with a globe of water containing metal flakes, looked really pretty, like snow falling in his city of Vienna. From there, he turned the idea into an object containing small landscapes where snow fell when you shook the globe. After World War II, Perzy's son started making Christmas scenes inside the globes to appeal to Americans, and soon the Original Snow Globe Factory was the premiere provider of snow globes worldwide. The company is now headed by Erwin Perzy III, who stills makes snow globes by hand in Vienna.   

All that leaves the question about the most famous snow globe of all- the one that figured prominently in the movie Citizen Kane. There are no records of where the snow globe in the 1941 movie came from, but it has long been assumed that it was made by the Original Snow Globe Factory. Either way, Citizen Kane left its mark on the company. Read the story of the snow globe at Atlas Obscura.

Beginning in the late 18th century, it became the fashion among New Jersey residents those would could afford it to commission a painting of their pet cat in a style that highlighted their reputation for supernatural powers, and the "Jersey Witching Cat" tradition was born. Local artists hated the work. After all, cats are not usually cooperative in sitting for a portrait, and it also clashed with religious ideals. Later on, commissioned portraits were replaced by artists who painted collections of cats in colors that were common in the area, namely tuxedo cats, and sold those to New Jersey residents.

The trend died out around the Civil War, but then re-emerged with the rise of photography. Getting a cat to sit still for a photograph is hard enough, but doubly so in a witch's costume. These photos were sometimes blurred, making them look even more sinister, or else were the product of some photo manipulation which seemed like witchcraft in itself. Many of these witching cat images are collected at the Germantown College Archives in New Germantown, New Jersey. Historian and artist Kazys Varneli has been working with artificial intelligence algorithms to generate more of these witching cat images. A post about the artworks at his website has both originals from the Germantown archives and AI-generated images of witching cats. See if you can tell the difference. (Hint: check out the attribution captions, or lack thereof.) -via Metafilter

Whether glass breaking or a speeding bullet is faster may seem like a silly question, because it's kind of like comparing apples to oranges. They are both fast, like the others are both fruit, but that's about it. How would you measure these things? And how much force does each require to match up with the other? Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys (previously at Neatorama), set up the experiment for our entertainment. What they plan to do is measure the speed at which a .45 caliber bullet fired from a gun compares to the speed a crack in a glass pane will travel in their first six feet. That required the use of their super slow motion cameras, and that's the entire rationale for performing this stunt. You might be surprised by the result, which you'll see in the first three minutes. The rest of the video is Gav and Dan having fun breaking the rest of the glass they bought. -via Digg

Most folks had never heard of a dire wolf until they were featured in the TV series Game of Thrones, in which they looked suspiciously like modern dogs. But there really was a dire wolf in prehistoric North America, an extinct canid species that left skeletons behind at the La Brea tar pits. It was a formidable predator that hunted and ate prehistoric horses and camels, even though it wasn't any bigger than modern wolves. Scientists assumed the dire wolf was an ancestor to the gray wolf.

It was only recently that dire wolf DNA has been sequenced, and the results are surprising. The dire wolf is not an ancestor to the gray wolf. In fact, its closest relative is the African jackal! The most recent common ancestor of dire wolves and gray wolves existed 5.7 million years ago. The resemblance between the two species is a coincidence, or rather an example of convergent evolution. Read more about the real dire wolf at Discover magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Charles R. Knight)

Warning: if by any chance you haven't seen the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz or read the 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this post and the linked article contains spoilers.

When the producers of The Wizard of Oz adapted the story for the big screen, they changed a lot of details and plot points to make them manageable for the production crew, or make them look better in color. The complex and sometimes overly scary story had to be simplified to fit into a feature film format and allow time for the songs. The one big change that was totally unnecessary and confounds today's filmmakers was the decision to make it all a dream. They supposedly did this to make the fantasy more believable to audiences. But that also cut off the possibility of the more modern practice of making sequel after sequel, which would have been easy considering L. Frank Baum had written a slew of books about Oz.

There were many changes made between the book and the film, ten of which you can read about at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: MGM)

The German Nazi Party is best known for the Holocaust and for causing World War II. Those are such enormous things, other Third Reich programs often fly under the radar. While they were busy killing Jewish people and other racial "undesirables," they were also trying to raise the birth rate of pure Aryan children. It was a multi-pronged effort.

German women who bore lots of children would be honored with swastikas in various precious metals, up to a diamond-encrusted swastika earned by one woman who bore 16 babies. These patriotic mothers were also showered with accommodations that made their lives easier. Free maternal care was offered to pregnant women regardless of marital status to dissuade them from having abortions. And young women were recruited to procreate with anonymous SS officers and give their resulting infants to the state. Of course, to take advantage of any of these programs, the parents involved would have to prove that they were of pure Aryan racial stock, going back several generations.

But the worst was the Nazi plan to just take children from territories they occupied. The children were kidnapped before their racial "purity" was determined, and those who didn't pass were not sent back home. Those who did pass the racial test were given to German families, and only a few were ever reunited with their parents after the war. Read about the horrific Lebensborn program and the children affected at Today I Found Out. 

(Image credot: Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway))

New original Damn Interesting article/episode by @erikanesvold: In 1933, British WWI vet Maurice Wilson hatched an unorthodox plan to reach the still-untouched summit of Everest https://t.co/qnc7BShczf pic.twitter.com/WP8ALPKxdi

— Damn Interesting (@DamnInteresting) December 14, 2022

As far as we know, no human ever reached the peak of Mount Everest until 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary scaled the summit and returned alive. The 1924 British Mount Everest expedition was the most notable attempt, when three teams of two men each attempted the last leg up. Two of the teams returned unsuccessfully, and two men died in the attempt. Maurice Wilson read of the expedition, and thought that it couldn't be that difficult; it's just a mountain. Years later, he was inspired to do something important, a grand gesture of faith, if you will. He remembered Everest and decided he would climb to the summit. The fact that he wasn't a mountain climber did not deter him.

But how would he get to Nepal? Wilson's plan was to fly. He bought a small biplane and got his pilot's license. His plan was to fly to the base of Mount Everest and then climb to the summit. He didn't think he'd really need oxygen bottles, and didn't even know what a crampon was. He never considered altitude acclimation. He didn't have proper maps or flight clearances to even get to the area. And his plane only held enough fuel to travel 740 miles between stops. In 1933, he took off on his big adventure. As you might have guessed by now, it didn't go according to plan. But Wilson managed to get to Everest anyway. Read the story of Maurice Wilson's Everest expedition at Damn Interesting. Or listen to it in podcast form.

Shiloh is an Australian shepherd and Abu is a border collie. They are both very good dogs. Or at least very patient as they get wrapped for Christmas. You can see in their eyes that they consider this a very stupid game, but they love their human so they endure it quite stoically. Why do humans put dogs through such nonsense? As far as dogs know, most of what we do is nonsense and they deal with it because they are good dogs. They don't know whether this Christmas wrapping has a bigger meaning for us or not, but it makes about as much sense to them as when humans go off to work or use a porcelain fixture to do their business. Or bring a tree in the house and put lights on it.

Both Shiloh and Abu were rescued from a neglectful owner, and were adopted by their foster mom in Nebraska. Despite the Christmas wrap, she is not parting with either of them. -via Laughing Squid