Just as we saw in the Indiana Jones movies, the original Nazi party was quite interested in acquiring significant religious relics. Specifically, Heinrich Himmler, who headed the SS, wanted to procure the Holy Grail. Himmler read Otto Rahn's book in which he posited the theory that the Cathars had possession of the grail in the 13th century and managed to hide it. Rahn had been researching the grail for several years at that point. Himmler summoned the archaeologist to work for him, and even made him a member of the SS.   

A small, sensitive and bookish man, Rahn never quite fit in with the boorish, bullnecked bullies of the SS. He was also a heavy drinker, openly liberal in his political views, and gay. In a letter to a friend he wrote shortly before entering Himmler’s service, he remarked sadly that: “It is impossible for a tolerant and generous person to stay for long in this country, which used to be my wonderful homeland.”

In Otto Rahn & The Quest for the Holy Grail, author Nigel Graddon posits that Rahn never had any sympathy for the Nazis and saw them only as a source of research funding and financial support. On one occasion, when spotted by an old acquaintance in his black SS uniform, complete with ceremonial dagger and swastika armband, Rahn reportedly just shrugged and sighed: “One must eat.”

Otto Rahm is sometimes cited as one of the many inspirations for the Indiana Jones character. Read the real story at Military History Now. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Unbekannt, darf unter Nennung des obigen Links weiter verwendet werden, siehe)

In December, Inglewood Drive in Toronto becomes "Kringlewood" because almost everyone puts up a giant inflatable Santa Claus. That started in 2013, as the neighborhood embraced the absurdity of giant inflatable holiday decorations. You see them everywhere, but where do they come from?  

Most of the oversized blow-up decorations you see staked and inflated on holidays like Halloween and Christmas are from a company called Gemmy. (Last year, the company estimated they owned 90-95% of the market share.) They’re the same business behind the Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing animatronic fish that took the country by storm around the turn of the millennium — a truly viral moment before we called things “viral moments” (just be glad that caroling fish and TikTok didn’t intersect). As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2006, Gemmy had moved on to inflatable decorations after positing that regular consumers would get a kick out of owning versions of the “gorillas and dinosaurs that retailers sometimes use to announce grand openings and sales.” They were right.

Even back then, the Journal made note of the immense size (four to 12 feet tall) and relatively high price (up to $300) of the inflatable decorations, but you get the sense in the article that the popularity was among the kind of people who set their Christmas lights to music; and certainly those who take pride in their annual festive displays — I’m thinking Tim Taylor in the sitcom Home Improvement here — go through phases and trends like any hobbyist. But slowly, surely, these inflatables started spreading to more conventional households, the kind who had traditionally just pulled out the same box of string lights and garland every year.

Read about the rise of Christmas inflatables at Inside Hook. -via Digg

The McDonald's McRib, a sandwich that has 70 ingredients but no rib meat, was first introduced in 1981 and wasn't much of a hit. But in the years since, it has established a cult following, and when it returns to the menu sporadically, those fans come out of the woodwork. That scheme is both accidental and deliberate, and understanding it requires a lesson in McDonald's business model, supply-chain logistics, and marketing.  

This brings us to the McRib- a confluence of several people’s work and an accident of history. To wit, it exists because McDonald’s underestimated the demand for Chicken McNuggets and needed an additional item to offer to balance things out a bit.

The goal of a restaurant like McDonald’s, when adding a menu item, is either to bring in new customers that would not have eaten at a McDonald’s or to get existing customers to choose a higher margin item than they would have otherwise ordered. To do this, McDonald’s will test and then roll out new foods.

When a menu item is successful, like the Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets, McDonald’s needs a steady stream of ingredients to support the demand. It must also be at a price that leaves them a large enough margin to justify the work involved.

Enter the Chicken McNugget, which was a hit, but they couldn’t source enough chicken to meet demand. To the extent that new patrons were lost because they were turned away when they didn’t want a burger, McDonald’s was facing an opportunity cost. It needed to find an alternative dish that this new group liked or loved as well. To solve this, they turned to their new Executive Chef Rene’ Arend.

That explains how McRib got its start, but the story of its continuing return and disappearance is explained at Today I Found Out. Hint: it's not random; it just appears that way to customers.

(Image credit: Evan-Amos)

David's father is a fan of the movie The Terminator. He even has a poster up in his home office. But David isn't allowed to watch The Terminator, because it might scare him. In this webcomic story from Doogie Horner, David finally sees the movie.

But it doesn't end there. When parents pre-screen a movie, they try to determine whether it's appropriate for their particular children because it may contain disturbing violence or sexual scenes beyond their understanding. We also need to pay attention to the message a particular movie sends and how we ourselves react to it. That said, David's story is pretty heartwarming.  -via Metafilter

Most folks (outside of Switzerland) say that Bern is the capital of Switzerland. But it's not, really, it's just the place where federal offices are, because they have to go somewhere. Switzerland actually has no capital city, and that's okay, as there's no global rule that nations must have one. This video is only five minutes long; the rest is an ad.  -via Laughing Squid

Something is rotten in Denmark. Earlier this month, a mutated strain of coronavirus was detected in the mink population, Danish authorities decided to cull the nation's 15 million farmed mink, to avoid the mutant strain becoming established in humans, which might make a vaccine less effective. So far, 10 million mink have been slaughtered, killed in a hurry and buried in shallow pits. But they aren't staying buried.

“As the bodies decay, gases can be formed,” Thomas Kristensen, a national police spokesman, told the state broadcaster DR. “This causes the whole thing to expand a little. In this way, in the worst cases, the mink get pushed out of the ground.”

The sight of mink bodies re-emerging from the ground created concern, especially in areas where the burials are close to water supplies.

“the year of the zombie mutant killer mink” yep that just about sums 2020 up 😬

— Alan Wylie (@wylie_alan) November 26, 2020

Somewhere, someone just got five in a row on their 2020 bingo card. Read more on the story at The Guardian. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Peter Trimming)

Made-for-TV Christmas movies have filled the schedule at the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime for a couple months now, but it's time for the premieres of the 2020 crop. Get ready for 82 new ways to wallow in Christmas and eat up the hours spent at home. Yes, they are formulaic, but 2020 is the year to indulge in safe guilty pleasures. 

You know that thing people say about Taco Bell? That the whole menu is just five ingredients (tortillas, cheese, meat, beans, sauce) remixed and rearranged in infinite combinations? Made-for-TV Christmas is the Taco Bell of entertainment genres. Take the same haggard tropes — the struggling inns, the small towns, the career women who must be cured of their unladylike ambitions by falling in love with boring men — and just switch the names and actors around, and it’s a tradition that works year after year.

The list of synopses (and trailers) at Vulture is divided into themes, since several movies share the same setup, plots, or attempts to stand out. There are three movies centered on blogging (as if that's interesting), nine with a land developer as the villain (because how else will you save the school/wilderness/historic landmark?), six with "scavenger hunt" as a plot device, and four (count 'em, FOUR) movies with LGBTQ themes. And a partridge in a pear tree somewhere, I'm sure. Happy wallowing!

(Image credit: zannaland)

"Video Games" is a nostalgic and bittersweet song from the album Mixtape for the Milky Way by jeremy messersmith. The papercraft video was animated by fellow video game fan Eric Power.

Working on this video was a true joy. I've been playing video games since the mid 80's when I first got a hold of an Atari. Since then, they have been a part of many cherished memories with friends as well as solo adventures. When we were talking about the making of this video, I asked jeremy if we should make up our own games or straight up feature the ones we grew up with. We decided to just go for it and each made lists of some of our favorites. This proved to be a very difficult curation, as my intention was not just to show a random selection of games, but to also choose moments within those games that had a particular significance to us while also going hand in hand with the song. I hope you all enjoy!

-via Metafilter

In the late 1700s, a lack of effective sewers and waste control collided with the rise of industrial factories and their resulting emissions to cause a pollution crisis. The air in cities looked disgusting and smelled awful. At the time, it was thought that "miasma" spread diseases, so if you cleaned up the smell, the risk of illness would abate. There were also great strides in science during this period, but chemistry appeared to outstrip biology at a critical point.   

The decisive turning point in Europe emerged from the chemical studies of Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau. When Dijon’s local authorities implored him in 1773 to disinfect one of the vaults in the city’s cathedrals, Guyton tested out hydrochloric acid vapors. He reused this method a few months later in a prison.

These experiments were regarded as major victories against the hazards of infection and had an immense impact. For Alain Corbin, this disinfection constituted a decisive step in the cultural transformation of olfactory smells: Up to this point, the battle against miasma and pestilence was fought with vinegar-based and other aromatic compositions used against putrefaction; or fire to cleanse.

By the following year, the physician Félix Vicq-d’Azyr prescribed these kinds of fumigations to treat epizootic diseases in the south of France, while Étienne Mignot de Montigny and Philibert Trudaine de Montigny — both members of the French Academy — recommended similar practices to arrest the spread of contagious livestock diseases. In his two “Dissertations” on the waters of the Seine (1775 and 1787), Antoine Parmentier, scientific counsel to the lieutenant-general of police for Paris, asserted that acid and alkaline vapors contributed to clean air by neutralizing the miasmas dispersed in the atmosphere.

The rush was on to flood industrial plants with hydrochloric acid, chlorine, and caustic soda. And then to the hinterlands, where these chemicals could make swamps and garbage dumps smell better. What could possibly go wrong? Read about the era of better living through chemistry at the MIT Press Reader.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: D.O.Hill)

Gerald the turkey is not practicing social distancing.

He's been aggressively approaching visitors, disrupting their picnics and frightening children at a public park in the Grand Lake neighborhood of Oakland. https://t.co/smaGqjpD0G pic.twitter.com/14X1xkIeJ0

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) May 22, 2020

Who knows what goes on in the mind of a turkey that makes them turn violent? In the previous post When Turkeys Attack, we linked to a list of six notorious turkey incidents, but the story of Gerald the turkey terror of Oakland was not included. Gerald menaced visitors to a city park for the better part of a year!   

In the Before Times, Gerald was a beloved figure in the neighborhood. On weekday mornings, he would start his day by strutting across the Morcom Rose Garden to go and wait on the sidewalk with commuters in the sunlight. But late last year, per the news outlet Oaklandside, locals like Molly Flanagan, who were familiar and friendly with Gerald, noticed that the bird they knew was no longer acting like himself. “Flanagan said she first noticed the change when she was in the rose garden with a friend and Gerald wouldn’t leave them alone,” Oaklandside reported. “The bird ‘fixated’ on her friend, sending what Flanagan described as ‘a lot of energy’ their way.”

Another local, Alexis Morgan, recounted to Oaklandside a tale of Gerald relentlessly pursuing an older woman around the rose garden “until she was forced to climb a tree to escape.” Morgan acted to save the older woman, but Gerald had something for her, too, “landing a ‘kangaroo kick’ on her, leaving the imprint of a turkey foot on her thigh.”

Gerald continued his crimes, first because experts thought it was a phase, and then because local ordinances prevented officials from doing anything to him. He also gained a fan club, which meant Oakland residents who wanted to do something about him were at war with those who wanted to protect the bird. Find out what ultimately happened to Gerald at Mel magazine.

If you're joining relatives by Zoom for Thanksgiving this year, you'll want to show off your cooking in the only way you can -by the way it looks. I was completely taken with this glowing dessert, and I'm sure your kinfolk would be too.

This isn’t a cheat, and it’s not an optical illusion — these are simply gin and tonic jellos made by adding gelatin to G&T and leaving them to set. So why are they glowing that fantastic ghostly color? The answer is that quinine (the bitter flavoring in tonic water) glows under UV fluorescent light. If you want to serve this to kids or teetotallers, it works just as well without the gin.

You'll find the recipe for Fluorescent Jello at The Splendid Table. And you'll find links to eight other recipes that will add visual flourish to your table, like cranberry lime pie, green deviled eggs, and ombré apple pie at Fast Company. -via Digg

Although not native to the new World, sugarcane had a big hand in its history, from the slave trade to the rise in diabetes. It is grown mostly in Brazil and the Caribbean, but also in parts of America's Deep South, where sugar is a deeply-rooted part of the culture, despite the misery of the crop's development.

Sugarcane and its derivatives would become foundational for Southern culture. It’s in the pecan pie and the gâteau de sirop and the corn pone. Poured on biscuits. Some fools — what the hell are they thinking — even put sugar in their grits. Women are expected to be sweet. So is the tea. William Faulkner praised drinking whiskey “cold as molasses” in Light in August and dissolved a teaspoon of sugar in rainwater from a cistern for his own toddy. Otherwise, he wrote, it “lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass.” A Southern-born conspiracy theorist named Robert Henry Winborne Welch, Jr. invented Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. (He also founded the John Birch Society.) Fullback Bobby Grier first broke the collegiate football color barrier during the Southeastern Conference’s Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2, 1956, when he took to the field for the University of Pittsburgh Panthers against Georgia Tech’s Yellow Jackets. Ella Fitzgerald sang “Sugar Blues” in 1939; Bob Wills of The Texas Playboys wrote “Sugar Moon” in 1947. Over three long days in 1969, the same year my great-aunt demanded filial kisses from me, The Rolling Stones holed up at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in Sheffield, Alabama, where they recorded “Brown Sugar.” Those stark lyrics by Mick Jagger played on tight rotation last month as I snaked beside the Mississippi on River Road, heading west from New Orleans as the annual sugarcane harvest got underway.

In lovely prose, Shane Mitchell tells us about sugarcane: its history, how it's harvested and processed, the state of the industry, and its legacy at The Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Sheila1988)

When pandemic restrictions limited visitors to the nursing home, the staff at Wikwemikong Nursing Home in Ontario went into high gear to relieve the boredom. Recreation manager Emily Barnes tells us about their recent deer hunt, in which workers became deer roaming through the trees.

Each week, Barnes and her team strives to have a full calendar of activities for residents, who are primarily First Nations from Manitoulin Island. This past week included a deer hunting activity after one of the residents said he was experiencing hunting fever. That meant setting up a mini-forest of Christmas trees, staff dressing up in deer costumes, and residents wielding nerf guns.

"He was saying how much he missed being an avid hunter every year, and this year was kind of hard because he felt like he was truly missing out on something important," said Barnes.

"It was so much fun. I'm sure a few might have enjoyed shooting me a little more than they should have. But, it was a really great time."

While it was all tongue-in-cheek, the hunt brought laughter and a bit of competitiveness to the residents. You can see more pictures here.  -via reddit

(Image credit: Wikwemikong Nursing Home at Facebook)

Meet Georgia Tann. She was a social worker who arranged adoptions in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. She was very successful in placing Memphis orphans with wealthy couples in California and elsewhere, where she could charge 100 times the previous going rate for her services. Tann grew rather rich and made friends among the powerful movers and shakers of Memphis, and so was a respected member of the city's elite. Meanwhile,

From 1924 all the way until 1950, terror stalked the streets of Memphis. Children vanished from porches and playgrounds. Babies were taken right from their cribs. Kids went to the hospital for a routine checkup and all that came back was a death certificate. The city had the highest infant mortality rate in the country, for no reason anyone seemed able to explain. In a horror movie, this would end with a band of plucky kids defeating a guy with a crow mask and a chainsaw for a hand. In reality, the mayhem was all the work of an eminently respectable society lady named Georgia Tann, who ran the Tennessee Children's Home Society.

Tann made a profit from most of the children in her care, but those who were judged less adoptable were neglected, mistreated, and abused. Many of them died. Read the story of Georgia Tann and her long reign of terror at Cracked.

(Image credit: The Commercial Appeal)

Fifty-four years before Marilyn Monroe starred in The Seven Year Itch, the same scene of a white dress being blown by an updraft from a sidewalk vent was shown to theater patrons. The 1901 movie was called What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City, and it was all of 77 seconds long. The film was presented as a slice of life, but it was scripted, and starred Florence Georgie and A.C. Abadie. The surviving film was in pretty bad condition. This copy has been restored and modernized by artificial intelligence.

1. Removed noise artifacts and stabilized original print.
2. Increased frame interpolation from 15 fps to 60 fps, using AI neural networks.
3. Increased to 4K resolution using AI upscaling.
4. Added color using Deoldify, a deep learning AI process.

Oh yeah, they added a bit of sound, too. The result is altogether charming. -via Nag on the Lake