Redditor Bloodlustftw is visiting Enterprise, Alabama, for the holidays. He took this picture of a statue in front of the McDonald's outlet there. That's about the strangest Ronald statue we've ever seen, and we've seen some weird ones. It may remind you of Scrat from the Ice Age movies, or maybe Gonzo from the Muppets. Commenters who know Alabama instantly recognized it as a boll weevil. But why would a fast food mascot be turned into a boll weevil? The answer lies in Enterprise's history. The town has a permanent monument to the boll weevil, and its Wikipedia entry gives us a bit of history.   

The boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis), sometimes referred to as the "Mexican cotton boll weevil"^[3] was indigenous to Mexico, but appeared in Alabama in 1915. By 1918 farmers were losing whole crops of cotton. H. M. Sessions saw this as an opportunity to convert the area to peanut farming. In 1916 he convinced C. W. Baston, an indebted farmer, to back his venture. The first crop paid off their debts and was bought by farmers seeking to change to peanut farming. Cotton was grown again, but farmers learned to diversify their crops, a practice which brought new money to Coffee County.

In 2019, Enterprise launched a community art project to honor the 100th anniversary of the conversion to peanut farming, in which fiberglass boll weevil statues would be sponsored and decorated, the way Chicago did with cows and Cincinnati did with pigs some years ago. The result is Weevil Way, with dozens of 6-foot-tall insects with long proboscises, dressed for different occupations. This particular statue is named Ronald McWeevil, and his restaurant is at 652 Boll Weevil Circle. And now you know why Ronald McDonald looks funny in Enterprise.   

Spanish band Broken Peach has impressed us with some Halloween videos to accompany their rockin' cover songs. They go all out for Christmas, too! The video above sets the stage for a Christmas challenge, as Broken Peach investigates the evil that may creep into the holiday season. To save Christmas, the band must perform the world's most perfect Christmas song. And despite the title Noche de Paz, it will not be a "Silent Night." Instead, they give us a rockin' yet festive rendition of  "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas."



This is the song you play when you want to hear some rock 'n' roll, but your family wants to listen to Christmas classics. Or vice versa. Oh, there's plenty more where that came from. The YouTube page for the top video has links to their Christmas playlist.

About ten years ago, my daughter asked to borrow my Christmas sweater. I was pleased that she liked it, until she came home from school that day with first prize in the ugly Christmas sweater contest. The phenomenon of the ugly Christmas sweater has been with us for a long time, but the trend jumped the shark when manufacturers began cranking out sweaters that were intentionally ugly. But how did it ever start?

Christmas sweaters started out as festive and fun, and only gradually became tacky as their creators ramped up the festiveness. Special sweaters for Christmas have been around at least since the 1890s. There is one event that clearly stands out in their history- the "jingle bell sweaters" of the 1930s. First, the bells were lined up down the front to resemble buttons on a cardigan, but more and more jingle bells were added until everyone could hear the wearer coming. Creative designs ramped up the holiday imagery through the 20th century. But what made the ugly Christmas sweater a thing was the utter sincerity of those who enjoyed wearing them- and the utter horror of receiving one as a gift if you were one who did not. Read about the evolution of the ugly Christmas sweater at Mental Floss.

A recent AskReddit thread had the question: "Which grammatical error annoys you the most?" It garnered two thousand comments in two days, so that's a lot of annoyance. The top answers were pretty common, and might even be spreading due to so many people reading internet communications instead of professionally-edited publications.

"Should of" instead of "should have." They sound the same when spoken, so that's likely why young writers don't know the difference.

"Loose" when one means "lose."

Apostrophe misuse. An apostrophe with an "s" at the end of a word indicates a possessive, not a plural. Or it can indicate a missing letter in a contraction like "she's," meaning "she is." These uses overlap in the word "its/it's," so English scholars created an exception as a workaround. With no apostrophe, the word is a possessive, and with an apostrophe the word is a contraction. It was difficult to write that sentence without a certain pronoun.

"Alot" instead of "a lot." Allie Brosch made this into a delightful creature that we can think of instead of the state of English education.

"Then" and "than." These are both used when the other is indicated. It could be a typo, or maybe some people don't realize they are two different words.

"I could care less." This is mostly said when someone could not care less.

There are a lot more in the reddit thread. Some are spelling mistakes you can blame on autocorrect, like "to/two/too" or "there/their/they're," but no one would believe you. Autocorrect is often wrong on the "its" and "it's."   

Personally, I've spent way too many years writing for the 'net to let grammatical errors bother me anymore. It can happen to anyone, especially if you edit something that you have already written. If I change a word from past to present tense, or from singular to plural, there's a good chance that some other necessary word change gets overlooked. I've also found that many errors come from people who are learning English as a second or third language, and that's a commendable effort. If I notice a grammatical error at Neatorama, I'll correct it, but I no longer cringe at other people's language mistakes. However, when those errors end up in permanent signs, news or business websites, or expensive advertising, I will roll my eyes a little.  -via Digg

For some reason, we had three versions of Pinocchio released in 2022. First there was Pinocchio: A True Story, a Russian cartoon released in the US in February. Pauly Shore is the voice of Pinocchio in the English dub. Few paid any attention to that one. Then there was Disney's sort-of-live-action remake Pinocchio starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto. Like their 2019 movie The Lion King, it's hard to call it a live-action movie when almost all the characters are animated. Finally, there was Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, released in November. It's a stop-motion animation that may still be playing at a theater near you. There can't be too many people who saw all three versions, but Screen Junkies did so we don't have to. Watch three short Honest Trailers in a row, and they'll tell you which version of Pinocchio you should see, if you were planning to see one.

Russian scientist and photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (previously at Neatorama) was a pioneer in color photography, and his lush, brightly-colored images of imperial Russia from more than a century ago still amaze us. Prokudin-Gorsky achieved his color images by shooting each image three times, each time with a different color filter on the camera. What the casual viewer doesn't know about these astonishing images is how much work went into producing each one. For every photograph Prokudin-Gorsky considered worth publishing, there were many more that didn't live up to expectations.

The images Prokudin-Gorsky published are often different from the ones we see today. His original negatives are still available, and photographers and color scientists recreate the stacking of the negative images with modern tools like computers to produce even richer colors than Prokudin-Gorsky did. How he ever got the images he was proud of is a testament to his own skill and patience. Read about Prokudin-Gorsky's technique at the Public Domain Review. -via Damn Interesting

The history of medical science is full of theories that might appeal to one's common sense, but didn't hold up over time, and came to be seen as downright crazy in hindsight. One of those ideas became a trend in the early 20th century. People have long been disgusted by the colon, because it contains feces, which was seen as dangerously unhealthy. Doctors and laypersons alike treated this with enemas for a long time, then laxatives. When anesthesia made surgery a lot easier, one doctor came up with the idea of cutting the whole thing out, to keep our wastes from infecting the rest of our body. Eminent London surgeon Dr. William Arbuthnot Lane developed the radical colectomy, in which the large intestine was removed, and the small intestine was connected directly to the anus.

The radical colectomy caused a sensation, with patients flocking in their hundreds to Lane’s surgery to undergo the new cutting-edge procedure. From the 1910s to the 1930s thousands of Britons and Americans had their perfectly healthy colons snipped out as a preventative measure, with Lane himself performing over a thousand such procedures over the course of his career.

You can imagine this caused problems, particularly a 30% death rate due to postoperative complications and infections. But he wasn't the only doctor to try removing a possible source of future infection. Surgeries were developed to remove healthy teeth, testicles, ovaries, spleens, stomachs, appendixes, gall bladders, and cervixes, in addition to colons. More research eventually went into these organs, and such radical surgery died out. Or did it? The removal of healthy tonsils was fairly routine for children through the end of the 20th century, and even today doctors are warning against routine but unnecessary circumcisions and wisdom tooth removal. Read about the story of the radical colectomy and the other surgeries that followed at Today I Found Out. 

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.