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16 Fun Facts About the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
This Thursday, Macy’s will send its 90th Thanksgiving Day Parade down the streets of Manhattan. Before tuning in, check out these 16 festive facts about the iconic event.
Everyone has feelings about glitter. Unicorns bathe in the stuff. Six year olds dream about it. It’s essential to Pride parades, a weapon of social disruption and foremost in a pop star’s make-up arsenal. It’s also the stuff of cleaning nightmares. But where does glitter come from? Why does it exist? And how in the name of all that is good can you get it off the upholstery?
Culturally, of course, we love shiny things, perhaps because they are associated with wealth and status: flashy cars, blinged out accessories, even solid gold toilets. But the roots of our attraction to All Things Sparkly goes deeper. Anthropologists have noted that many hunter-gatherer tribes equated shiny things with spiritual powers. Prehistoric man also had a habit of polishing his bone tools. But it seems to be more than just an “ooh, pretty,” phenomenon. Babies, after all, can’t tell a diamond-coated Rolex from a Timex, but new research shows that kids favor putting shiny objects into their mouths over matte materials. And it turns out, there’s an evolutionary reason for that.
According to researchers from the University of Houston and Ghent University in Belgium, our impulse for shiny things comes from an instinct to seek out water. The theory is that our need to stay hydrated has kept mankind on the lookout for shimmering rivers and streams. And thanks to natural selection, that’s left us with an innate preference for things that sparkle.
For those who couldn’t get their mitts on gold, silver, or precious jewels, mica has been a saving grace. These naturally occurring sheets of silicate-forming minerals have been used to bedazzle objects ever since the Paleolithic era. Mayans, for example, chipped and mixed the stuff into pigments and slapped it onto 6th-century temples. Even today, you can find mica in luster paints.
But mica was hardly the only option. Pyrite was used in Paleolithic cave paintings to produce a muted shimmer. Ancient Egyptians slipped ground green malachite, a copper carbonate with an iridescent effect, into their cosmetics, and there was also galena, a silvery mineral used in early eyeliners.
By the 19th century, however, glitter was most often made from powdered or ground glass. It came in any color that glass came in and was often marketed under the name “diamantine.” As an 1896 article syndicated from The New York Sun explained, the ornamental effect was achieved by coating fabric in glue and rolling it in glass powder. Which sounds somewhat glamorous, but more dangerous.
Glitter as we know it today wasn’t invented until 1934. According to glitter lore, New Jersey machinist Henry Ruschmann accidentally invented the stuff after he took a load of scrap metals and plastics and ground it up very fine. Some reports claim that his invention took off during World War II, when American access to Germany’s glittering diamantine was cut off. While the origin story is murky, Ruschmann is a strong candidate: He did file for four separate patents for inventions related to cutting up strips of foil or film. And though he died in 1989, his company Meadowbrook Inventions is still in the glitter business today, peddling more than 20,000 different kinds of glitter.
While cosmetics and crafts seemed to be the obvious uses, inventors also dabbled with the sparkling substance. The U.S. Air Force briefly tried spraying what amounted to glitter—they called it “chaff”—from the back of warplanes. The idea was to create a cloud of false echoes to throw off enemy radar, making it virtually impossible for the enemy to determine the real target from a fake. The UK also used something similar in “Operation Window,” where planes released strips of aluminum-coated paper at timed intervals, swamping German radar screens with false signals. But the armed forces aren’t the only group to take advantage of glitter’s shimmering qualities: A significant number of glitter patents have also been filed for fishing lures. Fish, like humans, like shiny things.
The making of glitter is fairly banal. Color is applied to a copolymer sheet, then a layer of reflective material, such as aluminum foil, is placed on top of that. Then, the now-fused film is run through a rotary cutter—“a combination of a paper shredder and a wood chipper,” according to a glitter maker on a Reddit thread—resulting in precision-cut pieces of uniform size. That size varies according to the need of the customer; Meadowbrook offers a teeny, tiny, microscopic .002-inch-by-.002-inch glitter, typically used in cosmetics or aerosol sprays. And while the shapes are most often hexagonal, they can be nearly anything you want: square, butterfly, stars, hearts. How much glitter these machines can produce in an hour is dependent on size, shape, and yield.
You can’t. Glitter sticks to stuff because of the static electricity generated between its small particles of metal or plastic and virtually every surface known to man or beast. Getting it off is often an exercise in futility and frustration. But if moving away isn’t an option, Real Simple says all is not lost. For tiled or hardwood floors, you can aggressively vacuum up drifts with the crevice attachment. For fabric surfaces, such as couches and other upholstery, a lint roller works best. Meanwhile, you can use a rubber-gloved hand to loosen glitter stuck in carpet and then attack with the vacuum’s upholstery brush. For your keyboard, try loosening the glitter with a shot of compressed air. Just be prepared: This is a war you will not win. There will always be a bit of sparkle somewhere.
If the glitter is on your person, you can unstick it with oil on a cotton ball. Beyonce’s make-up artist, who has coated the flawless star in craft glitter at least twice, says Scotch tape is another great way to remove it (although she still spots the lingering glitter in her make-up kit).
If you’ve ever used glitter nail polish, you’re probably aware that it requires a chisel to remove. Pro-tip, via Glamour: You can use either a cotton ball soaked in acetone and secured around your fingertips with aluminum foil for as long as it takes to remove the stuff, or try a felt pad soaked in nail polish remover; evidently, the felt is rougher and more durable than just regular cotton.
No. And that’s a problem for the environment.
Remember in 2014, when microbeads, those tiny, supposedly exfoliating beads that come in face washes, came under fire? The beads, made of plastic, are too small to be filtered out by water treatment plants, so they end up in lakes and rivers where they are eaten by unsuspecting fish. Eventually, environmentalists called for bans and several companies stopped using them. Glitter is similar. When it ends up in waterways and oceanic environments, it’s often mistaken for prey by marine life and ingested.
But since people still want sparkle, companies are working on ways to satisfy that need without harming the environment. Ronald Britton, a UK-based glitter manufacturer, has come up with Bio-Glitter, a certified compostable, biodegradable glitter that won’t clog waterways or harm marine life. Manufacturers on the consumption end, such as distinctively-scented soaps company Lush, have started using biodegradable glitter made from synthetic mica in their bath products. And if you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable about all the fish your glitter habit has probably murdered, rest easy knowing that going forward, you can make your own non-toxic, animal-safe glitter using food coloring and salt.
Though eating glitter is ill-advised, most commercially available glitter is non-toxic and won’t hurt you in small amounts. Or, and this is rather more likely, it won’t hurt the small child in your care who has been gleefully shoveling orange glitter into his mouth. The major exception is glass glitter, which is used by hardcore crafters for a vintage sparkle and would be very bad if consumed; if you’ve swallowed glass glitter, go directly to the hospital.
There is glitter that you are allowed to eat, but this glitter comes with its own warnings and can be confusing. Some shops sell “edible glitter,” which is typically made from colored sugar or gum arabic. There’s also glitter that can touch food but isn’t meant to be eaten. And you can find glitter that’s only intended to be on removable decorations (think princess cake toppers). Just make sure you read the labels, or you know—sparkle poo.
Forensic pathologists love the stuff. They’ve been mounting a case for glitter’s usefulness since 1987, explaining that glitter’s steadfast adherence to persons and clothing make it “near perfect” as trace evidence. In fact, it’s been a star witness in several court cases. In 1987, for example, a Fairbanks, Alaska man, Michael Alexander, was convicted of the abduction and murder of 15-year-old Kathy Stockholm after glitter found on her body was linked to glitter found in his car and homes.
It’s difficult to say. Wikipedia claims that between 1989 and 2009, more than 10 million pounds of glitter were purchased, but at first blush, this fact seems suspicious. Since individual companies are hesitant to release sales and output figures, we’re left with anecdote and extrapolation: The Toronto Santa Claus Parade used nearly 155 pounds of glitter in 2011. If 200 cities and towns each bought that much for their celebrations, that would be around 31,000 pounds for one holiday event alone.
So given that, and coupled with the fact that, according to Vanity Fair, pop star Ke$ha spends thousands of dollars a month on glitter alone, 10 million pounds may be a fair estimate.
Well, yes. Glitter bombing first became a thing in 2011, when Nick Espinosa, a gay rights activist, dumped a Cheez-Its box full of glitter all over erstwhile presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and his wife. “Feel the rainbow, Newt!” he shouted, as multicolored sparkles enveloped Gingrich’s head. From then on, it was open season on what was billed as a non-violent yet effective form of protest: Most targets were conservatives, and most bombers were gay or women’s rights activists. But while glitter-bombing is more annoying than it is threatening, authorities took a dim view of the protest: In 2012, a Denver college student who tried to nail Mitt Romney with a fistful of blue glitter pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace; he only narrowly avoided being charged with a more serious crime of throwing a missile. And naturally, the people who were glittered were fuming: Mike Huckabee demanded glitter-bombers be arrested while Gingrich called his glitter-bombing “assault.”
Though “assault” seems a bit harsh, is glitter-bombing safe? Every year around the holidays, ophthalmologists warn that glitter can get into the eye and scratch the cornea; it’s also not terribly pleasant to inhale glitter.
Clearly, there’s a market for glitter pranks. In January 2015, Matthew Carpenter, an Australian 20-something, started a website called Ship Your Enemies Glitter, which soon garnered headlines across the globe. After orders poured in and he found he couldn’t keep up with demand, Carpenter sold the business for about 85,000 Australian dollars. But glitterbugs can go overboard, too. In October of this year, an Akron, Ohio woman was found guilty of fifth-degree felony vandalism after she glitter-bombed her former supervisor’s office. When Samantha Lockhart, 25, resigned from her job at the Summit County Fiscal Office in January 2015, she spent her last day “decorating” her boss’s office with toilet paper, silly string, and fistfuls of multi-colored glitter. The glitter, which piled up in sparkly drifts about the office like evil festive snow, damaged office computers. She was recently sentenced to 18 months probation and a fine of $1000.
In recent years, prison authorities have seen an uptick in people smuggling drugs, particularly Suboxone, into prison using glitter glue and crayons. How? Suboxone, which is used to treat the symptoms of withdrawal from opiate addiction but is also a powerful drug, can be made into a paste. That paste is then applied to paper, dried, and covered with something bright and distracting like crayon scribbles or glitter glue. Inmates lick the drug right off the page. Today, any letters containing glitter glue or crayon markings are immediately pulled out and destroyed (which seems terribly sad, given that crayon and glitter are the preferred mediums of small children).
Though glitter had been around for ages, you couldn’t really get away with wearing it out in public until the late ‘60s. Mod culture, Iggy Pop—who used to coat his body with peanut butter on stage before discovering glitter was better—David Bowie’s surreal turn as Ziggy Stardust, disco, and glam-rock all helped the stuff go mainstream. Sparkle, whether on shoes or eyelids, was in.
By 1984, Clairol had noticed. The company filed for a patent for glitter hair mousse—specifically, the “process for imparting temporary high fashion ‘glitter’ to hair”—and though this wasn’t the first or only way to apply glitter to your head, the game was changed. By the 1990s, body glitter was being sold at fine tweenager emporiums everywhere. (This patent, filed in 1997, is not the first for body glitter, but it does have this fantastic drawing to accompany it.) Glitter fever died down by the end of the decade. Or, at least, teenagers were no longer bathing in it before a night out. But that doesn’t mean that our love affair with glitter in all its sparkly forms is over: after all, we’re hardwired to love a bit of shimmer.
November 21, 2016 – 12:35pm
Bad days happen to the best of us: The alarm doesn’t go off, your kids are fussy, you get stuck in traffic, and as soon as you get to work, you spill coffee down the front of your favorite shirt. And then, to add insult to injury, you log onto Facebook and are greeted by the smiling face of your old college roommate, who is just so #blessed. Lucky her.
But is her life really better than yours? It turns out that being grateful for what you have—even if some days, what you have appears to be a disaster—is mostly an exercise in self-reflection. Here are some simple things you can incorporate into your daily routine in order to better appreciate the good things you have going in your life—and doing so, studies have found, can improve your physical and emotional health.
The task is easy: Each week, take the time to write down and reflect on five things that you’re grateful for. “These can be small things, but big things are fine, too,” Jo-Ann Tsang, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, says.
A 2003 study by researchers from the University of Miami and the University of California, Davis [PDF], found that students who recorded the things they’re grateful for felt better about their lives, exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical problems, were more likely to make progress towards personal goals, and were more optimistic about their upcoming week than students who were tasked with writing down hassles or neutral life events.
For the greatest benefits, focus on people, rather than things, in your journaling, and go into detail about why you appreciate each item. Also, don’t feel compelled to journal daily: According to the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good blog, journaling once per week was found to be more beneficial than daily journaling.
Committing to a full month of reflection not only boosts your gratitude awareness, but gives you the satisfaction of completing a goal. Lisa Ryan, gratitude expert and author of Express Gratitude, Experience Good, suggests writing down three to five things that you’re grateful for each day for the next 30 days. As with gratitude journaling, this exercise works best if you’re specific. Instead of writing that you’re grateful for your husband, Ryan says, “you should write, ‘I’m so thankful that Scott cooked a great dinner last night.'”
If you choose to write your list in the morning, you’ll set a positive expectation for your day. Writing it in the evening will remind you of the good the day brought, even if it was a particularly hard day to get through. It will also help you fall asleep faster and sleep better, Ryan says.
If you’re going through a hard time, write down the names of the people who have helped you in your life. Then, plan a party in their honor. Amy Newmark, author of Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Power of Gratitude, says, “You’ll find that in planning your guest list, you’ll start noticing how many people are there for you extending a helping hand every day. This will make you more grateful, and you’ll feel less alone every day.”
Thinking about the alternatives can help you appreciate what you have, Newmark says. For example, are you stuck emptying the dishwasher again? Think about the fact that you have a warm, comfortable home filled with kitchen appliances. Are you running around in a frenzy, with no time for yourself? Think about how full your life is. “Would you rather not have these errands to do, these kids to drive around, this job that creates all this work?” Newmark asks.
The very fact that you have the ability to do something nice for someone else will make you feel more confident of your own situation, more aware of your own capabilities, and more grateful for the blessings in your own life. Keep a list of the good deeds you perform—it can be as simple as holding a door for someone or letting a mother with a crying child go ahead of you in line at the store, Newmark says.
And find the right “dosage” for you. For some people, doing five kind things on one day each week, rather than doing five good things throughout the week, showed more positive benefits. Others, however, get more of a boost from daily positive activity [PDF].
November 21, 2016 – 4:00pm
The people of Australia might not celebrate Thanksgiving, but every November, plenty of animals in the northeastern part of the continent have something to be thankful for, and they gather together for a feast.
The yearly bounty comes courtesy of the metallic starling (Aplonis metallica). These glossy looking, red-eyed birds migrate from New Guinea to northeastern Australia in mid-November, where they stay through the summer monsoons to lay their eggs and raise their chicks. When they arrive at the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, they form enormous colonies, with 1000 or more birds building dome-shaped nests in the same tree.
The activity draws plenty of attention from local wildlife. Insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and other birds all crowd around the colonized trees to feed on plants that are fertilized by the starlings’ poop, and to eat starling eggs, nestlings that fall from the nests, and even other animals that are attracted to the colonies.
You can see an example of starlings congregating in a tree (likely in Cornwall, UK) in the slo-mo video below. While the entire video is worth a watch, jump to 2:05 for their spectacular departure.
In Australia, the lure of the buffet is so great—and consistent, because starlings nest in the same trees each season, and some trees will host colonies for 15 or more years in a row—that the birds’ arrival radically alters the distribution of wildlife in Cape York’s rainforests, says ecologist Daniel Natusch. The trees they colonize become “ecological hotspots,” where different species gather in great numbers. Natusch and other researchers at the University of Sydney recently described these hotspots for the first time in a paper in PLOS One [PDF], cataloging the species that show up—42 taxa, not including insects—and measuring just how “hot” they are. The small (just 32 x 45 feet) areas under the trees, the scientists say, host some of the largest and most diverse animal congregations in the world.
Natusch’s team took regular wildlife censuses for about 18 months beneath 26 starling colonies. They hung flypaper from the trees’ branches to catch flying insects; collected and sifted through soil to find other invertebrates; and used trail cameras to collect candid shots of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds. They then compared these animal assemblies to the ones they found at nearby trees that didn’t house starlings.
The researchers documented 42 different species—from cattle and kookaburras to rats and pythons—beneath the starling colonies. Brush turkeys and pigs—both seen in the images below—showed up more often than any other species, and the largest gathering they recorded included 50 different individual animals. Overall, they found significantly more animals at trees with starlings than those without, and the densities of some species were 100 to 1000 times higher under the colonies than elsewhere in the rainforest.
“To our knowledge, this system represents one of the highest-biomass and most diverse faunal aggregations in the world,” the scientists write.
It’s not hard to see why the starlings draw such a crowd. Guano from thousands of birds enriches the ground beneath the colonies with nutrients, attracting soil-dwelling invertebrates and fertilizing plants. The bugs and plants attract herbivores and insectivores, which in turn draw predators higher up on the food chain. When the monsoons come and strong winds knock nests to the ground, carnivores like dingoes and snakes also feed on fallen starling eggs and chicks.
These hotspots are impressive, but Natusch thinks scientists could also put them to practical use. Since the colonies attract some of Australia’s most destructive invasive species, like feral pigs and cane toads, the researchers suggest that they could be sites for targeted control. When large numbers of problematic animals gather at the same tree, conservationists could capture or kill them in one swoop—giving Australia’s native wildlife one more reason to be thankful for the starlings.
November 21, 2016 – 3:30pm
Why do people have such a hard time staying awake after Thanksgiving dinner? Most people blame tryptophan, but that’s not really the main culprit. And what is tryptophan, anyway?
Tryptophan is an amino acid that the body uses in the processes of making vitamin B3 and serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate sleep. It can’t be produced by our bodies, so we need to get it through our diet. From which foods, exactly? Turkey, of course, but also other meats, chocolate, bananas, mangoes, dairy products, eggs, chickpeas, peanuts, and a slew of other foods. Some of these foods, like cheddar cheese, have more tryptophan per gram than turkey. Tryptophan doesn’t have much of an impact unless it’s taken on an empty stomach and in an amount larger than what we’re getting from our drumstick. So why does turkey get the rap as a one-way ticket to a nap?
A new artificial intelligence system can now lip read better than humans, according to New Scientist. Though films and pop culture usually show lip reading as some incredible tool that allows you to decode what anyone says, in practice, it’s fairly spotty: Even for experienced lip readers, one estimate puts the amount of speech you can interpret from someone’s lip movements at a mere 30 percent.
But artificial intelligence researchers from Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford’s engineering department have been working on a network that transcribes natural sentences just from visuals of people talking with no audio. It can also transcribe audio with no video. Their pre-publication paper is posted on arXIV [PDF].
The system recognizes syllables and short phrases, and has learned on a far-reaching database called “Lip Reading Sentences,” drawn from a half-dozen BBC programs and containing more than 100,000 sentences and 17,500 words. It works independently with both audio and video, helping it decode speech even if the audio stream is noisy or if the audio and video aren’t perfectly aligned.
This model was significantly more accurate than professional lip readers in a comparative test. The experimenters commissioned professional lip readers from a company that provides transcription services, each with around 10 years of experience lip reading in situations as diverse as videos for court use and national events like the British royal wedding. These lip readers could correctly decipher just 12 percent of the words they saw, while the computer model could decipher almost half of the words accurately. Aside from providing more accurate transcription services, “it is possible that research of this type could discern important discriminative cues that are beneficial for teaching lip reading to the hearing impaired,” the researchers write.
Try out your lip-reading skills with the video below:
[h/t New Scientist]
November 21, 2016 – 2:30pm
This Thursday, Macy’s will send its 90th Thanksgiving Day Parade down the streets of Manhattan—a spectacle more than 50 million people tune in to watch from the comfort of their homes. Here are a few things you might not have known about the iconic holiday event.
The “Macy’s Christmas Parade” debuted in 1924 as a way to celebrate the expansion of Macy’s flagship Manhattan store, which would now cover an entire city block and became the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Store.” According to The New York Times, “the majority of participants were employees of the stores. There were, however, many professional entertainers who kept the spectators amused as they passed by. Beautiful floats showed the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, Little Miss Muffet, and Red Riding Hood. There were also bears, elephants, donkeys and bands, making the procession resemble a circus parade.” (The animals came from the Central Park Zoo.)
The parade began at 145th Street and Convent Avenue and continued down to Macy’s huge store on 34th Street. All along the route, according to the Times, the parade “was welcomed by such crowds that a large force of policemen had its hands full maintaining the police lines.” Some 10,000 people watched Santa—who rode on a float designed to look like a sled being pulled by reindeer—be crowned “King of the Kiddies,” then enjoyed the unveiling of the store’s Christmas windows. The parade was such a success that Macy’s decided to make it an annual event; it would become the Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1927.
Two years after the first parade, the Allied Patriotic Societies protested, telling Macy’s that it shouldn’t hold the event on Thanksgiving because “it would interfere with Thanksgiving Day worship,” according to The New York Times, and because it wasn’t appropriate for a commercial company to hold a parade on the holiday. If the company didn’t acknowledge its protest, the association declared that it would go to the police commissioner and ask him to revoke the parade permit.
Percy Straus, who worked for Macy’s, attended the association’s meeting. He pointed out that there was no blatant advertising in the parade, and that the word Macy was used just once. “He also said that Thanksgiving morning was the only time when children would be free to watch and traffic would be light enough to permit the parade’s passing,” the Times wrote. “It would be over, he thought, in ample time to permit churchgoing.” Straus’s justifications didn’t make a difference; the association voted to protest the parade, but its efforts to get the event canceled were unsuccessful—the parade went on as usual.
The Balloonatics float—which, as the name would suggest, was festooned with balloons—inspired the creation of the character balloons. These days, the people who design the balloons are called “Balloonatics.”
Three years after the first annual parade, balloons made their debut. According to The New York Times, the parade included “a ‘human behemoth’ 21 feet tall … [that] had to crawl under the elevated structure at 66th and Broadway,” “a ‘dinosaur’ 60 feet long attended by a bodyguard of prehistoric cavemen,” and “a 25-foot dachshund [that] swayed along in the company of gigantic turkeys and chickens and ducks of heroic size.” Also in the parade that year, but not mentioned in the Times, was the first character balloon, Felix the Cat.
The first year, Macy’s had no plans for deflating its balloons, so they were released into the air, where they quickly popped. But that all changed in the 1928 parade.
That year, Macy’s released five huge figures—an elephant, a 60-foot tiger, a plumed bird, an “early bird” trailing worms, and a 25-foot-high ghost—into the sky. While the majority of the balloons in the parade used regular air to stay afloat, these figures were built around helium balloon bodies, which were designed to slowly leak the gas. As The New York Times explained, “The figures are expected to rise to 2000 to 3000 feet and are timed by a slow leak to stay aloft for a week to 10 days. By then it is expected they will have alighted in various parts of the country.” Whoever returned the balloons would receive a $100 reward.
The first balloon to land was the Tiger, which the Times reported landed on the roof of a Long Island home: “A tug of war ensued for its possession … neighbors and motorists rushed up from all directions. The rubberized silk skin burst into dozens of fragments.”
By December 1, four of the balloons had landed (one in the East River, where it broke in two and was pursued by tugboats). The ghost, however, was “reported as having been sighted moving out to sea over the Rockaways with a flock of gulls in pursuit,” according to the Times. The parade held its last balloon race in 1932 after two incidents involving airplanes. In 1931, aviator Colonel Clarence Duncan Chamberlin snagged a balloon in mid-air and towed it back to his home and received $25 as a reward. In 1932, according to some sources, a 22-year-old woman taking flying lessons purposefully flew the plane she was piloting into one of the released balloons. It was only the quick action of her instructor that kept the plane from crashing.
Macy’s designers collaborated with Walt Disney to create the 40-foot-high, 23-foot-wide balloon, which was “held down to Earth by twenty-five husky attendants,” according to The New York Times. The parade that year also featured the first balloon based on a real person—comedian and vaudeville star Eddie Cantor.
There were rubber and helium shortages, so Macy’s canceled the parade from 1942 to 1944. The company deflated its rubber balloons—which weighed 650 pounds total—and donated them to the government. (These days, the balloons are made of not rubber, but polyurethane fabric.) The parade returned in 1945, and in 1946 got a new route, which started at 77th Street and Central Park West and ended at 34th Street—half the length of the previous route.
Initially, it looked like a helium shortage would keep Macy’s parade balloons from flying in 1958. But the company collaborated with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and the rigging specialists Traynor & Hansen Corporation to come up with a creative solution: According to The New York Times, the balloons were filled with air and dangled from “large, mobile construction derricks.” The paper also described a test of the method:
“A motorized derrick with a 70-foot boom had a specially built wood-and-steel hanger attached to the end of the wire hoisting cable. The Toy Soldier, weighing more than 200 pounds deflated, was stretched full-length on a canvas carpet. Limp and sickly looking, it was not the robust figure children and adults are used to seeing. Lines from the body of the balloon were attached to the hanger while two vacuum cleaners, working in reverse, blew in air. An hour of blowing filled the figure out nicely and the boom hoisted it into the air.”
The balloons have only been grounded once since 1927, when winds during the 1971 parade were too strong for them to fly.
Since 1968, the floats have been designed by artists at Macy’s Parade Studio in New Jersey. The floats can be up to 40 feet tall and 28 feet wide—but they fold down into a 12-foot-by-8-foot box to make the journey through the Lincoln Tunnel.
By the way: The parade features float-based balloons called falloons—a combination of “float” and “balloon”—which were introduced sometime around 1990. There are also balloon vehicles called balloonicles (a portmanteau of “balloon” and “vehicle”), which made their debut in 2004. Trycaloons—balloons on tricycles—hit the parade in 2011.
Macy’s balloon designers—dubbed “balloonatics”—begin up to a year before the parade with pencil sketches of each character, analyzing not just aesthetics but also aerodynamics and engineering. The sketches are followed by scaled-down clay models that are used to create casts of the balloons. Two miniature replicas are created: One that’s marked with technical details, and one that’s painted in the balloon’s colors. The models are immersed in water to figure out how much helium they’ll need to float. Finally, the schematics are scanned by computer, and the fabric pieces are cut and heat-sealed to create the various air chambers of the balloon. Once the balloon is created, it’s painted while inflated (otherwise, the paint will crack), then undergoes leak testing and indoor and outdoor flight tests. No wonder it costs at least $190,000 for a first-time balloon (after a first appearance, it costs $90,000 a year after that). The balloons are completed by Halloween and stored along a wall the design studio’s balloon warehouse.
They’re the people walking backwards in front of the balloon, directing a crew of volunteers holding guide ropes (called “bones”) and two Toro utility vehicles. Macy’s offers training three times a year for pilots. “We offer the pilots and captains the chance to go around the field a couple times with the balloon a couple of times and practice the instruction and guidance,” Kelly Kramer, a longtime Macy’s employee and balloon pilot, told Vanity Fair in 2014. “We also have classroom training.” It’s also important for balloon pilots to train physically; if not, “The next morning you wake up and you almost cannot get out of bed because your calves seize up,” Kramer said. “I walked backwards in my neighborhood at night.”
It takes 90 minutes to inflate the big balloons, which, on average, contain 12,000 cubic feet of helium, which is capable of lifting nearly 750 pounds (or filling 2500 bathtubs). Each balloon requires up to 90 handlers, who have to weigh at least 120 pounds and be in good health.
The balloons are inflated the day before the parade outside the American Museum of Natural History, then topped off the day of. Because helium expands in the sun, the balloons are typically left slightly underinflated.
That honor goes to Snoopy, who debuted in the 1968 parade and has had a grand total of seven balloons. This year marks the character’s 40th time in the parade.
Among them were the Nantucket Sea Monster (1937), the wrestler The Terrible Turk (which memorably hit a traffic pole and split in half in 1931), a Pinocchio with a 44-foot-long nose (1937), a couple of two-headed balloons (1936), an ice cream cone and a jack ‘o lantern (1945), a space man (1952), Smokey Bear (1969), cereal spokesanimal Linus the Lion (1973), and more.
There are many things that pose threats to the parade balloons: Electric wires (which caused the Felix the Cat balloon to burst into flame when it hit them in 1931), rain (which filled the Popeye balloon’s hat with water, which got dumped on spectators along the parade route in 1957), tree branches (which once tore off Superman’s hand). But a balloon’s greatest enemy is wind: In 1993, wind caused the Sonic the Hedgehog balloon to hit a lamppost; the light fell and injured one. In 1997, police stabbed a Pink Panther balloon when wind sent it careening; that same year, the wind made an oversized Cat in the Hat balloon hit a streetlight, sending two people to the hospital with head injuries (after the incident, the parade instituted new size rules). In 2005, an M&M balloon got tangled on a streetlamp, causing the lamp to fall and injuring two, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Each balloon flies at a height determined by its size and weather conditions, and the wind poses such a threat that if sustained wind speeds or gusts are too strong, the balloons won’t fly.
After the parade is over, the balloons are deflated behind Macy’s on Seventh Avenue. First, the volunteers open up zippers on the side of the balloons; when most of the helium has escaped, they lie on the balloon to get all the helium out, then roll the character up from front to back. The balloon is then put in storage until the next parade.
November 21, 2016 – 2:00pm
Robert Boessenecker
Last month, paleontologists announced a new species of ancient pinniped—a group that includes modern seals, sea lions, and walruses. The animal lived off the coast of what is now Washington state about 10 million years ago and probably fished like seals do, relying on the power of its oversized eyes to track its prey. Robert Boessenecker, an adjunct lecturer who works for College of Charleston’s department of geology and environmental sciences, recently presented a study on the newfound fossil at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Salt Lake City.
Discovered in Washington’s Grays Harbor County in the 1980s, the incomplete skeleton consists of neck vertebrae, a well-preserved ribcage, a partial sternum, and a skull with jawbones. It was encased in exceptionally hard rock that took scientists prepping the fossil two decades to clear away. Judging by the available remains, the animal was more than 8 feet long—about the size of an adult male California sea lion.
Boessenecker and his team were able to classify the creature as a new species of Allodesmus, a pinniped genus whose members once roamed coastal Japan and North America’s western seaboard. Although a species name has been chosen for the animal, it has yet to be made public. “We plan on naming [it] after a beloved colleague who has contributed extensively to pinniped paleontology,” Boessenecker tells mental_floss. “But we’re going to keep that under wraps for now.”
The newly discovered animal hailed from a marine mammal family known as the desmatophocids, which evolved around 23 million years ago. From the neck down, they looked very much like today’s seals and walruses, both of which sport a combination of enlarged front flippers and well-developed hind limbs. But the skulls contained a mix of features seen in a variety of pinnipeds today—and some evidence suggests that they had trunk-like noses similar to modern elephant seals.
Notably, the new Allodesmus also features proportionally huge eye sockets, each of which could house a poolroom eight ball. Their dimensions suggest it had exceptionally keen eyesight, allowing the animal to function as a deep-diving predator. Because the ocean gets darker the farther you get from the surface, the size of its eyes would have allowed it to absorb large quantities of light far beneath the waves. While navigating through the inky depths, it would’ve most likely hunted down such game as fish and squid.
Boessenecker’s team closely studied the skeleton to see what they could learn about its life. With the exception of some seals, most pinnipeds are strongly sexually dimorphic: Their relative body size, in other words, makes it easy to distinguish their gender. Fossil evidence reveals that the same was true of this Allodesmus species; the skeleton’s size and the thickness of its canines suggest it was male.
It’s also obvious that the Grays Harbor specimen was nibbled on after it died. “Fossil dogfish teeth were found around the skeleton of our Allodesmus, and numerous bite marks are present [as well],” Boessenecker says. Then, as now, a marine mammal’s corpse must’ve looked like an irresistible banquet to the ocean’s many opportunists.
At about 10 million years old, the animal is the youngest-known desmatophocid specimen on record. Its relative youth may reveal quite a bit about the evolution and ultimate disappearance of this pinniped group. “Truth is, we have no idea why desmatophocids died out,” Boessenecker says. “Perhaps our new species was in a very specialized niche, surviving as long as possible [until it was] eventually snuffed out, a possibility that remains for our most charismatic extant pinniped.”
To Boessenecker, the “most charismatic extant pinniped” is the walrus. In fact, the rise of walruses might have been a factor in the disappearance of pinnipeds like the Grays Harbor animal, because they may have gradually outcompeted Allodesmus and its kin between 13 and 8 million years ago. Back then, the walrus family was a large and diverse group whose members included such oddballs as the four-tusked, mollusk-eating Gomphotaria pugnax. But today, there’s only one remaining species of walrus—and it’s currently at risk of becoming endangered. Boessenecker and his team hope that by learning more about the Grays Harbor Allodesmus, we’ll be able to better understand and protect pinnipeds today.
November 21, 2016 – 1:30pm
Thanks to some persistent superstition, black cats are believed to be notoriously difficult for adoption agencies and humane shelters to place in homes. That’s why Seattle Humane in Bellevue, Washington is offering free adoptions for inky-black cats this coming Black Friday.
According to data collected by The Huffington Post in 2013, more than a quarter of respondents felt color was “important or very important” when selecting a new cat, while 13 percent of Americans find it unsettling when a black cat crosses their path. Sounds like a bad combination. But in a separate analysis done by the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), researchers found that black cats made up more than 30 percent of overall adoptions—the Society argued that perpetuating the myth only helps reinforce it.
That hasn’t seemed to slow the promotions down, however. Recently, a Nevada shelter advertised them as “mini-panthers” and successfully rehomed 18 of them.
The Seattle shelter plans on being a free black-kitty dispensary from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, November 25. Adoption fees usually range from $25 to $125.
[h/t KOMO News]
November 21, 2016 – 1:00pm
If your smartphone’s battery life has seemed particularly pathetic lately, it may be time to do a little purging. Android users are reporting a 20 percent boost in battery endurance after deleting the Facebook app.
The app’s appetite for power is well established. Complaints about its drain on the iPhone have been amassing for years, thanks in part to Facebook’s constant location tracking and background refresh features.
Facebook has also had its share of issues with the Android version of its app. Last year, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox encouraged his staff to switch to Android phones so they could see the problems and frustrations firsthand. The tactic apparently was not enough to get things sorted, and Android users are facing the same issues as their Mac-loving counterparts. Tech bloggers and reporters who removed the app from their Androids consistently saw their sluggish batteries perking up and lasting significantly longer.
“We have heard reports of a few people encountering speed issues coming from our Android application,” a Facebook representative told Tech World Zone. “We are investigating this and will update you as often as possible. We are focused on keeping on enhancing these issues.”
So yeah, the app is an energy vampire. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up your endless Facebook scrolling altogether. It’s still accessible through browsers like Chrome and Safari and through wrappers like Metal.
If you’ve deleted the app and still aren’t satisfied with your battery life, there are plenty of other things you can do. First, stop charging it every night; charge it only when the power is low. Next, switch on Airplane Mode when you’re in an area with no Wi-Fi. This will save your poor phone the fruitless struggle of trying to pick up a signal. You can also reduce the brightness on your screen, be liberal with your use of Low Power mode, and stop force-closing apps when you’re done with them.
[h/t Tech World Zone]
November 21, 2016 – 12:45pm
