Bill Watterson drew the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes from 1985 to 1995. During that time, Watterson fought tirelessly to elevate the art of the comic strip, and resisted lucrative merchandising deals. Then he retired the comic and withdrew from public life at the end of 1995. He refused to allow old Calvin and Hobbes strips to be syndicated, and forbids all licensed merchandising of the characters.

That's why the only sign you see of Calvin for sale today is the common sticker you see of the 6-year-old peeing. It is a sign of disdain, and varies according to what the sticker shows he's peeing on- a brand, a sports team mascot, a political figure, you name it. Why anyone would want to use a bootleg image of a beloved character to call attention to what one hates is a question for another day, but manufacturers have made money off Watterson's art this way since around 1995. Those under 30 are more familiar with the peeing Calvin and his evil smile than they are with the child who talked to his tiger. Read about the rise of the peeing Calvin and its continuing profitability at Mel magazine. -via Digg

In case you haven't been paying attention, the Winter Olympics are about to begin in Beijing. They officially run from February 4th to the 20th, but some events, such as curling, are already running qualification rounds. The coverage has been pretty low key because of covid restrictions and the fact that we just had Olympic Games last year. But they are the Winter Games, and every time they come around, we have to confront the fact that we mainly watch them to see people slip and slide on snow and ice, waiting for someone to fall.

So to plan your television engagement with the games, The Ringer has a list of 30 events, ranked by how terrified you would be to try them yourself. There's no doubt that curling doesn't seem too dangerous, even if it is fascinatingly silly. Singles figure skating? Well, you might fall, but rarely does someone break a leg doing it. That's not the case with downhill skiing, speed skating, and luge. How about the biathlon? That's cross-country skiing and shooting, which is only dangerous if someone shoots at you. See where your favorite winter sport lands in the ranking, and read up on what's involved in all of them at The Ringer. -via Digg

(Image credit: Martin Rulsch)

Wait. You're saying that while each and every one of us has their simple names like Linda or Matt misspelled, they actually spelled yours right, as a historical first?

— Roland Venesz (@steerio) January 8, 2022

In this modern world, people who already have the names Alexis or Siri get some grief. Having your name associated with a meme is troublesome; just ask any woman named Karen. But imagine if your name was Kovid! Just writing that sentence is difficult, because spellcheck wants to change it to covid. Kovid is a not-all-that-uncommon name in India, and has been for a long time. Kovid Kapoor has been hearing the same jokes for two years now.  

Kapoor has largely turned to humor, telling his Twitter followers he’s been “kovid positive since 1990” – when he was born – and he could only laugh with the airport employees carefully reviewing his passport on his recent trip to Sri Lanka, his first time leaving the country during the pandemic. Or at Google’s assumption his own name must be spelled wrong.

Similar stories can be told by women named Rona, Delta airlines, and of course, Corona beer. Read the stories of several Kovids, both men and women, and what they've had to put up with these last two years. -via Metafilter

In World war II, the Walt Disney Company contributed a lot of propaganda to the war effort. Well, "contributed" might not be the best word, because they were paid well. Donald Duck was the cartoon character that emerged as the most patriotic of them all. The fact that he was often angry contributed to his popularity, but there was more to it than that. Phil Edwards explains how soldiers were able to relate to Donald Duck so much more than Mickey Mouse or any other Disney character. And when you think about it, things haven't really changed much since then. -via reddit

Until recently, scientists thought that Arctic hares traveled up to 22 miles in their lifetimes. But in 2018, a young female hare was tagged near Alert, Nunavut, and named BBYY. The name comes from the colors of her tags: blue, blue, yellow, yellow. That and the tracking device around her neck -plus the white fur- make her look like she's ready for a night out on the town.

The dozens of hares tagged in this study showed that Arctic hares travel much further than other lagomorphs, but BBYY still turned out to be an outlier. She traveled more than 240 miles in one 49-day period! Small herbivores just don't do that. Wildlife biologist Sandra Lai led the study tracking the hares.

Lai had previously done research on Arctic foxes, but had come to Alert with colleagues to track, for the first time ever, the movements of individual Arctic hares. Nearly four years later, Lai still grins recalling her first meeting with BBYY. “She is very special to me,” Lai says.

While BBYY's travels may be a record for her species, the research hints at how animals are adapting to changing environmental conditions. Read about the research project that put one hare in the spotlight at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Charline Couchoux)

Today is the Lunar New Year, and in China that means we are welcoming in the year of the tiger. In honor of the occasion, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin, known as the thepieous (previously at Neatorama), baked a cherry pomegranate pie with a tiger on top! Isn't it gorgeous?

But notice the Instagram photo is a gallery. Click to the right and see how this crust was made. Clark-Bojin begins by making a template, then cuts the crust dough to fit, separately from the rest of the pie. She sculpts the tiger, adding layers as needed. The flowers (made with a cookie cutter) are added, then she paints the tiger with food coloring. The top crust isn't added to the pie until it is perfect, and then it is baked. And finally... she cuts a piece out of it to eat. This is always the heartbreaking part of Clark-Bojin's masterpieces, but when you are this talented, you can always make another pie. And who can resist a piece of cherry pomegranate pie? -via reddit

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: "Ten German scientists walk into a bar..." But instead, they walked into a house, and not by their own choice. In July of 1945, when Allied forces were working their way across Germany, ten of Germany's most prominent scientists were arrested and taken to Farm Hall in Godmanchester, UK. They were all suspected of working on Germany's nuclear weapons program. But instead of being interrogated or prosecuted, they were mostly left to their own devices during their six-month internment. However, the house was riddled with listening devices. The theory was that the ten would not be able to resist discussing their research, which would inform British intelligence about the progress of Germany's quest to develop nuclear bombs.

The ten included Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Karl Wirtz, and others you may be familiar with. The plan turned out to be quite beneficial, because there was little else for the men to do besides talk. While they had differing views on the war and the ethics of nuclear weapons, they couldn't help but discuss the science. A month into their incarceration, the internees heard the news that the Americans had dropped the world's first nuclear bombs on Japan. They were astonished, as they believed such weapons were years away from viability. Read about the ten German scientists locked up together and what happened to them afterward at Amusing Planet.

My father was a geologist. When Interstate 75 was being built through Kentucky, a lot of hills had to be cut through, and Dad would often stop and take a look at the layers of earth and rock those cuts exposed, including layers that aren't horizontal due to tectonic uplift. I don't know if everyone else is as familiar with rock layers and geologic time as I was as a child, but most of us understand the concept somewhat.

At Siccar Point in Scotland, the layers are completely different. In the area called Hutton's Unconformity, the older layers are on their side, while others just above are horizontal. This changed the science of geology in 1788, when James Hutton studied these layers. Tom Scott takes us there and explains.    

Sesame Street has been around for 50 years. Its success has been attributed to the fact that it was designed by researchers in early childhood education, and the fact that the main characters for that entire time have been the Muppets. It's a formula that works, but great care has to be taken to ensure that the show and the Muppet characters stay consistent for all those years. A Sesame Street employee lets us in on some of the rules of the road for Sesame Street that he's picked up on over a couple of years. To illustrate, he gives us theoretical Sesame Street scenes and then tells us why it would never happen. The rules not only pertain to the Muppets, but also the preschool audience the show is serving.

Goodbyes are always tricky. In kids’ media, it’s no different.

At Sesame Street, the rule of thumb is to never say a full “goodbye.” A goodbye could leave kids at home panicking that they’ll never see their furry on-screen friends again.

To avoid this, we use phrases like “See you next time!” or “That was so much fun today! I hope you’ll join us again soon.” This way, no kids have to freak out.

Read the various scenarios and what rules they would be breaking at Cracked.

The Star Wars universe is well known for ridiculous alien design. The idea was that different sentient creatures in a galaxy far, far away would not all look like humans... but that idea clashed with what was possible with the special effects technology of the day. In the original 1977 Star Wars, we were astonished by the aliens at the cantina. Each movie afterward introduced more weird alien types. But as there was a limit to what can be done, there was also a limit to what the audience will buy. The story of the Lightman, or the Lightbulb Man, was the limit. He was a character in Return of the Jedi tested in 1982. The Lightman was covered in light bulbs.

According to Uproxx, the character was cut because it just looked so funny and not at all believable. But according to a much earlier article at Star Wars Aficianado, the idea was to cover the light bulbs with effects from Industrial Light & Magic to make him a luminescent alien of sorts. The reason for dropping the character was because it slowed down the pacing of the scene. So which is right, and why was the Lightman cut from the movie? Let's ask Phil Tippett, who was the visual effects supervisor on Return of the Jedi. He was there.

Looked just like that.

Everyone laughed.

Never got shot. https://t.co/4LkxvbWCDO

— Phil Tippett (@PhilTippett) January 25, 2022

I guess that's the real answer. Star Wars fans will accept some ridiculous alien designs, but with the Lightman, the production found an uncrossable line. Too bad they didn't have LEDs at the time. -via Mental Floss

Franz Josef Land is a cluster of 192 islands in the Arctic Ocean. Despite the name, it was never a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first sighting of Franz Josef Land is thought to have been in 1865 when Norwegian sealers found the archipelago, but they kept that discovery to themselves to keep competition from other seal hunters away. That wasn't the case when a 24-man Austro-Hungarian crew set out on a science and exploration expedition on the ship the Tegetthoff. They were looking for a route to the North Pole.

The Tegetthoff left Norway in July of 1872. Before the end of August, the ship was encased in sea ice. The ice didn't break up the next summer. Nor the next. But it drifted, and carried the Tegetthoff into unknown waters. The ice carrying the ship reached a land mass in August of 1873, and scientists from the Tegetthoff duly trudged over to see and document it. They named the land mass after the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, who was most notable for later sparking World War I when he was assasinated. But the crew was no closer to navigable sea or rescue. In May of 1874, after nearly two years on the ice, the crew decided to walk out, dragging their lifeboats to open water. That journey took an additional three months. Read about the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition and what they found instead at the Dawlish Chronicles. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Oona Räisänen)

As you might guess, the Invisible College of Experimental Flatology is a website about farts. ICEF was founded in 2020 as "a distraction during an otherwise bleak period in human history." Or at least according to the About Us page, that's a hypothesis about its founding. It could have been for scientific collaboration or just for kicks.

The posts include a lot of scientific inquiry into farts, such as their speed, power, and longevity. For example, experiments have determined that farts travel much slower than sneezes. Check out their many "tootorials" on the subject. There is also a fart generator in which you can set the parameters for a customized audio fart, and another in which you can turn text into Morse Code farts. You'll also want to see (and hear) the beautiful Fartworks. Whether the title is a play on "artworks" or "fireworks" is up to you. It's still all about farts. There's enough here to keep any 12-year-old busy all weekend. Somebody alert Alex. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user greg johnson)

For most of the 20th century, movies and TV were completely useless for deaf people. We take captioned entertainment on TV, streaming services, and video sites for granted these days- not only can you read what's being said, you can select a different language. It wasn't always so. You might be surprised to learn that television didn't use captions at all until 1980! And even then, the rollout was quite bumpy.

The scheme that the networks ABC, NBC, and PBS agreed to was for television caption decoders to be sold by Sears, with royalties going to the National Captioning Institute to be used to pay for adding closed captions to shows. It was an expensive proposition, as captioners had to be hired and trained, and it took 24 hours or more to caption a one-hour program. The devices were expensive, too. This created a Catch-22 situation. Deaf people didn't want to invest in the decoders for just a few hours of captioned TV, which might not even be something they wanted to watch. But captioning more hours was impossible without funds from device sales. What's more, CBS wouldn't get on board with the plan because they had already contracted to use an alternate system.

The ultimate goal was to not only caption all TV shows, but live events, too. The first captioned news broadcast didn't happen until 1984, and the first captioned Super Bowl was in 1985. Read how that happened in a condensed history of closed captioning at Engadget.  -via Digg

Since we are animals ourselves, we understand the seasonal movements of animals, as well as the refugee species that move into new territories for food or safety. Plants do the same, but on a different time scale and by a different method. Trees cannot just walk to a new place (ents notwithstanding), but instead disperse massive numbers of seeds. Those that fall into a better-suited area will take hold and thrive, while their parents may succumb to declining conditions. In this way, forests themselves move. We have records of tree species that have moved thousands of miles, whether they came from the fossil record or eyewitness testimony.

Trees die out in places where the soil is dry or depleted, the climate changes, or invasive species attack. In the last few decades, climate change has accelerated so much that the natural rhythm of forest movement itself is stressed. Logging has contributed to poor forest conditions, as well as the encroachment of farmland and human settlement. Global trade has fueled invasive species.

Emergence magazine has a multimedia article explaining natural forest movement, and how human activity and climate change have affected various trees' ability to find new homes. After the intro, scroll down to find text, videos, links, and charts explaining what's happening to our forests. The example of the black ash tree (also called the basket tree) is explored in depth, and there are links to the migration stories of sugar maple, paper birch, and red spruce trees, too. -via Damn Interesting

"When tweedle beetles fight, it's called a tweedle beetle battle..." *

Watching two massive insects fighting each other is interesting, but it's much better when set to the soundtrack of the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The two beetles are obviously mismatched from the beginning, both in size and in fighting skill. You'll be glad to know that in this version, neither combatant is left limbless and bleeding. It's just funny. Redditor moistobviously made this a long time ago, but only today posted it on the forum.

* This line is from Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks.