fact
Some pretty fantastic discoveries have been made about animals in the name of science. Did you know that koalas hug trees to regulate body temperature, or that capuchin monkeys can be taught to use silver disks like currency? Those are just a few examples of the many fascinating conclusions that have been drawn from animal studies. For more, check out the video from the mental_floss List Show above.
December 31, 2016 – 12:00am
Every generation thinks they were the ones to invent the fart joke. The truth is that people have been laughing about bodily functions—and other low-hanging humor fruit—for a long, long time, even in the margins of medieval texts. (Fair warning: Some of these images are legitimately R-rated.)
Contradictory though it may seem, the margins of religious texts were a perfect and popular place for crude humor during the Middle Ages. If the scripture was king, the margins were its jester, poking holes in the text’s (or author’s) grandeur and commenting pointedly on issues of the day. Some of that commentary was nuanced or couched in metaphors. The poop drawings … a little less so.
Art and religious historians have debated this one for centuries. Some theorize that the snail and its trail of slime represent death; others think it signifies the Resurrection. Some believe it’s a metaphor for the lower class and their struggle against the armored aristocracy. Still others think scribes liked snails because, well, they kind of look like penises. Which brings us to our next item …
Margin art was a complex, labor-intensive game for both reader and scribe, as symbolic as any family crest. Lions had one meaning and monkeys another, as did their behavior and placement on the page. Illuminators swiped existing symbols and appropriated them for new, bizarre uses. If all this sounds familiar, it’s because we’re still doing it.
Monty Python may have made illuminated butt trumpets famous, but they certainly didn’t invent them. No, those very special instruments came straight from the borders of religious texts, where they lay for centuries, amplifying and directing farts right into the holy gospels.
(Need more marginal mayhem? Check out Discarding Images on tumblr.)
December 30, 2016 – 6:00pm
Whether you’re just getting started in your career or have been slogging away at the same desk for a few decades, you’ve probably already imagined what your ideal retirement will look like. Regardless of whether it means spending your days tending to your garden or traveling the world to visit all your bucket list destinations, all retirees are going to need the same thing: money.
In terms of the actual dollar amount you’ll need to save in order to live comfortably post-retirement, that figure varies from person to person and is based on personal lifestyle and what you hope to accomplish in those post-work years. While financial planner Wes Moss says that most people can live happily ever after with $500,000 socked away, other financial analysts believe that $1 million is the golden number.
While saving up a seven-figure sum might seem like an insurmountable task, Smart Couples Finish Rich author David Bach says that, “Becoming rich is nothing more than a matter of committing and sticking to a systematic savings and investment plan,” adding that, “You don’t need to have money to make money. You just need to make the right decisions—and act on them.”
As Business Insider reports, it’s never too late to start saving. To illustrate Bach’s point that smart decision-making is the key to building a healthy nest egg, they broke down the amount of money an individual would need to save on a daily basis in order to become a millionaire by age 65.
The good news for Millennials is that it doesn’t take much: Just $2 a day would get a 20-year-old to millionaire status by the time he or she was 65, while a 25-year-old would need to save $3.57 per day—about the cost of that second latte. Of course, the older you are when you begin to save, the more money you’ll need to cobble together: A 40-year-old will need to find $20.55 in savings per day, while a 45-year-old is looking at $38.02 daily. Still, it’s never too late to start saving: if a 55-year-old can manage to put away $156.12 per day—or $4749 per month—he or she should be able to reach that $1 million goal in just 10 years.
Check out the full chart from Business Insider below, then start checking your sofa cushions for change. And if you need some ideas on how to save more, here’s one quick way to “trick” yourself into building up your savings account.
[h/t: Business Insider]
December 30, 2016 – 5:00pm
As long as there has been alcohol—and humans have known about it—there have been hangovers. And as long as there have been hangovers, humans have been scrambling to find a cure for them. Unfortunately, although we’ve had since about 7000 BCE to figure this out, the challenge has been met with only moderate success at best. Here are some of history’s more bizarre attempts to help revelers through the day after a long night out. While they almost certainly won’t work on your wicked morning-after headache, you’ve got to give some credit for innovation here.
When folks found themselves hungover in ancient Assyria—which included present-day Syria as well parts of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey—they liked to grind up the beaks of birds and mix them with myrrh, the fragrant resin of the Commiphora tree, and then eat it. Myrrh is normally just used for perfumes and as a tincture, not in its highly pungent resin form, so it’s even odds that eating it would be any better than just going without and suffering the hangover. And that’s to say nothing of the bird beak part.
Many cultures seem to recommend consuming pickled things to cure a hangover—and in Poland, you’re supposed to drink pickle juice straight up. But Mongols from the era of Genghis Khan took it a step further: They prescribed a breakfast of two pickled sheep’s eyes. This supposed cure is still used in the region, although now they chase it with a glass of tomato juice; it’s known as a “Mongolian Mary.”
Some Native American tribes believed that “sweat swishing” is the only way to rid yourself of a pesky hangover. What you do is, you have yourself a workout the morning after, lick up the toxins that your body has expelled, and swish them around in your mouth. You gotta spit it all out afterward, though, or it won’t work. Or don’t spit it out, and then it also won’t work. No matter what you do with your sweat, this probably won’t work.
If you wanted to shake it off in 17-century England, author and herbalist Nicholas Culpeper advised “stuffing the nasal passages with the juice of tree ivy.” Culpeper also made a career out of blaming certain diseases and afflictions on astrology, so you may want to take everything this guy said with a grain of salt.
In Puerto Rico, some would-be revelers opt for preventative measures—by rubbing a slice of lemon or lime into their armpits before a night of boozing. Some versions say you only need to do this on your “drinking arm.” The science-free explanation is that it’s said to keep you hydrated.
Introduced at the 1878 Paris World Exposition, this remedy has nothing to do with actual oysters—nor, seemingly, any prairies: It’s just a raw egg in a shot glass with whiskey and Tabasco. Some variations add vinegar and/or Worcestershire sauce.
The ancient Romans were pretty hardcore about their days-long parties, and through Pliny the Elder, we know that they liked to fry up a canary and eat it for breakfast the morning after a bender. (Raw owl’s eggs and sheep’s lungs were another Roman anti-hangover brunch fave.) Ah, so that’s why they named a beer after him.
Cowboys in the American West thought that if you went outside and got some rabbit pellets, made a tea out of them, and drank it, your hangover would disappear. Now, it’s true that rabbit poop contains salts and nutrients—such as potassium—that might have been depleted while you were tying one on last night. But nowadays, you can probably just eat a banana or something.
Irish legend dictates that if you want to cleanse yourself of a hangover, you need to do is go to the river and bury yourself up to your neck in wet river sand. The idea is that it will chill you and get your blood pumping, in the manner of a cold shower. No word on why river sand has stronger curative powers than ocean sand, or whether you’re allowed to have someone help you.
In the 1930s, the Ritz-Carlton hotel in New York City served its post-blitz patrons a glass of Coca-Cola and milk. The head barman claimed that after someone drank it, he or she would “take a little nap, and after that, you feel wonderful.”
In 17th-century England, a physician named Jonathan Goddard sold a product that he called Goddard’s Drops, which were comprised of powdered human skull, dried viper, and “spirit of hartshorn,” which we now call ammonia. Not just any skull would do, though—it had to be the skull of person who had recently been hanged. King Charles II swore by them.
For centuries, the Scots have relied on a special concoction to kill that next-day headache: Mix a bit of corn starch (known as corn flour in the UK) into some buttermilk, heat it up, season it with salt and pepper, and guzzle it down. The drink shares its name with a dance that was popular in the 1800s.
Caldo de cadran, or bull penis soup, is the national hangover cure of Bolivia, and it’s pretty flamboyant to behold—considering that the penises are served whole and that they average about a foot-and-a-half in length. Once the penis has simmered in a rich, concentrated broth for about 10 hours, pieces of lamb, beef, chicken and boiled egg are added, along with rice and potatoes. The dish is also considered an aphrodisiac and is said to cure back pain, too.
A helpful hint from the 19th-century Medical Adviser for dealing with a hangover: Just drink a lot of vinegar, then rub some into your temples. If this doesn’t work, it advises you to strip naked and try dumping a bucket of water over your head.
A favored cure in Medieval Europe was raw eels for breakfast, and in Portugal specifically, the standard hangover cure was to eat a lamprey boiled in wine and its own blood. (No, a lamprey is technically not an eel, but folks may or may not have known that in the 1200s.)
December 30, 2016 – 4:00pm
If you need another reminder that nothing can escape the all-seeing eye of the internet, this latest Friends find should do the trick. The folks at 22 Vision just released a video documenting a previously unthinkable connection between the long-running sitcom and 1990’s Home Alone. It turns out that Monica and Chandler may have bought the house owned by the McCallisters in the movie. How is that possible? With the help of some Hollywood trickery.
The McCallister family lives in Chicago, while Monica and Chandler are seen purchasing a house in the suburbs of New York in the final season of the show. So they obviously don’t live in the same on-screen house. However, the view of the neighborhood from inside Monica and Chandler’s house reveals the same exact one seen from inside the McCallister residence in Home Alone, right down to the blue garage of the Murphys’ house across the street.
As the video points out, it seems that the folks behind Friends simply reused stock footage from Home Alone for the set of the Bings’ new house. On the 22 Visions YouTube page, the channel even wrote, “This bizarre fact has been confirmed by the people who live in the Home Alone house in Winnetka, IL.”
TV shows and movies recycling certain bits of footage and sets is nothing new, but it’s usually fairly well hidden or too obscure to be noticed. So to make a connection between Home Alone and an episode of Friends from 2004 simply by looking at a blue garage outside the window gives a whole new definition to the term eagle-eyed.
[h/t Refinery 29]
December 30, 2016 – 3:30pm
Every time a new year rolls around, people set out to better themselves. They promise they will lose weight, find a new job, or maybe even take that vacation they’ve always talked about. But why do we make these promises to ourselves, and where did this tradition come from? Why does this tradition live on when so many people fail to keep the resolutions they make? Well, we can start by blaming the ancient Babylonians.
Around 4000 years ago in Babylon, the earliest recorded celebration honoring the coming of a new year was held. Calendars weren’t as they are today, so the Babylonians kicked things off in late March during the first new moon after the Spring Equinox. The collective ceremonial events were known as the Akitu festival, which lasted 11 days. The festivities were dedicated to the rebirth of the sun god Marduk, but the Babylonians made promises in order to get on the right side of all of their gods. They felt this would help them start the new year off on the right foot.
Resolutions continued on with the Romans. When the early Roman calendar no longer synced up with the sun, Julius Caesar decided to make a change. He consulted with the best astronomers and mathematicians of the time and introduced the Julian calendar, which more closely represents the modern calendar we use today. Caesar declared January 1 the first day of the year to honor the god of new beginnings, Janus. The Romans celebrated the New Year by offering sacrifices to Janus.
To this day, the traditions of the ancient Babylonians and Romans continue on around the world. So much so that Google launched a Resolution Map in 2013 where people could add resolutions and see others adding theirs in real time. However, no matter how many people participated in Google’s project, the numbers are bleak when it comes to the amount of people who maintain their resolutions; only eight percent of people are successful in sticking them out.
The most popular resolutions:
Lose Weight
Get Organized
Save More Money
Enjoy Life
Get—and Stay—Healthy
Learn Something New
Quit Smoking
Help Others Pursue Their Goals
Find Love
Spend More Quality Time With Family Members
If those failed resolutions above look familiar and remind you that the whole concept is a bust, or if they inspire you to create your own list of promises for 2017, just remember that this tradition is destined to live on. We have 4000 years worth of history telling us so, and that’s a statistic that’s hard to argue with.
Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.
December 30, 2016 – 3:00pm
Don’t live anywhere near New York City but still desperate to see something—anything—drop during the countdown to 2017?
We can help. (Well, we can help some of you. Some of you might have to go on a road trip.) Check out these places that have put their own twists on the rather odd tradition of hoisting a giant object up in the air to celebrate the beginning of a new year.
Peeps’s parent company, Just Born, calls the eastern Pennsylvania town home, which is why Bethlehem drops a 4.5-foot tall, 85-pound, illuminated Peep to mark the new year. Though Peeps come in shapes to suit every holiday these days, the drop is done with a traditional chick that flashes different colors at midnight.
Why the town would create a 3-foot-tall, 30-pound wooden flea is a real head scratcher—unless you know that the town was once known as Flea Hill.
Why a Moon Pie? According to PR Newswire, the tasty snack cake is the “favored throw” at the Mardi Gras parade (never mind that whole bead thing), which originated in Mobile. Sadly, the 600-pound Moon Pie is electronic, not edible.
Most carp don’t see 15 seconds of fame, let alone 15 minutes. But every year in Prairie du Chien, Lucky the Carp is the center of attention when he’s lowered onto a throne to celebrate the new year. It’s the culmination of a week of activities, including hanging carp ornaments on a pine tree, the Carp Plunge (Prairie du Chien’s version of a Polar Bear Plunge) and busting open a carp piñata. As far as we know, the piñata contains candy, not carp.
It descends from the top of Price Tower, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building, and falls neatly into a martini glass.
Paying homage to the tourist industry that keeps the town hopping, Panama City Beach drops an 800-pound beach ball at midnight. Those who prefer beach balls of the non-deadly variety can attend the children’s drop at 8:30 p.m., where more than 10,000 inflatable balls are released from overhead nets.
The area has sardine fishing and canning roots, but Eastport also drops a Maple Leaf as a friendly gesture to their Canadian neighbors across the bay.
Get it? Mechanicsburg?
As home to both a Pat Vincenti Duck Decoy store and the Duck Decoy Museum, it makes perfect sense that Havre de Grace would drop a glowing duck decoy on New Year’s Eve.
Go figure. If you prefer your crowd of revelers to be large on New Year’s Eve, Atlanta is the place to be: the Peach Drop is the largest New Year’s Eve celebration in the southeast.
In case you’re missing the connection, here’s a bit of trivia for you: Flagstaff sits in one of the largest Ponderosa Pine forests in the world. And the town has come a long way from the garbage can with pinecones glued on it that was used during the drop’s inaugural year in 1999—see for yourself:
Paying homage to their “Little Apple” nickname, nearly 10,000 residents and visitors gather every year to watch the city drop a brightly-lit Red Delicious.
It’s no doubt got some competition, but Plymouth proudly proclaims itself the Cheese Capital of the World, which is why it drops a large chunk of Sartori cheese to welcome the new year.
Her name is Sushi (the drag queen, not the stiletto). But Sushi is just one of the many midnight drop options in Key West: They also drop a 6-foot conch shell at Sloppy Joe’s and a pirate wench at the Schooner Wharf Bar.
If you’re a cured meat connoisseur, you need to know that Lebanon bologna is kind of a big deal. That’s why the city of Lebanon deems it important enough to ring in the new year with [PDF].
The little town of about 7000 drops a glowing chunk of coal from the community flagpole every year to celebrate its heritage.
St. George’s is another town that celebrates local industry at the end of the year. They drop a glowing onion as a nod to Bermuda’s large onion export.
As if dropping a giant rodent wasn’t unique enough, Princess Anne has decked the stuffed semiaquatic rodent out in a top hat and bow tie. No, Princess Anne isn’t the hometown of the Captain and Tennille; the humble muskrat has been a target for trappers in the area since humans first inhabited it.
In the self-proclaimed “Opossum Capital of the World,” one of the little guys is lowered carefully at midnight, protected by a plexiglass cage. Though the critter is fed and released post-drop, PETA has been fighting the state to stop the live drop for several years. Looks like everything is proceeding this year as planned, though.
If you love briny cucumbers, you’ll appreciate the 3-foot pickle that drops down the flagpole at midnight Greenwich Mean Time. That’s 7 p.m. eastern.
It would take a Godzilla-like squirrel to carry away this 10-foot-tall nut made of 1250 pounds of copper and steel. Regular-sized squirrels can have a go at it, though: The acorn lives in Moore Square the other 364 days of the year and was created by sculptor David Benson to celebrate the City of Oaks.
Lower Allen Township wins for the quirkiest drop. The 5-foot-tall Bunyan-sized britches honor the local Yellow Breeches Creek—and for the kiddos, a pair of “baby breeches” is dropped at 10 p.m. instead of midnight [PDF].
This year will be Boise’s fourth year dropping a giant spud.
The city of Show Low got into the New Year’s object-drop game just a few years ago. According to city legend, the city was named when two feuding men decided to draw cards to decide who had to leave town. “If you show low, you win,” was the game, and the winner turned over the deuce of clubs.
In 2012, the city of Frederick began the tradition of dropping a 5-foot by 2.5-foot wooden key from a suspension bridge. Why a key? To honor one of its most famous sons, of course—The Star-Spangled Banner lyricist Francis Scott Key.
There’s more than one way to toast the new year. Temecula, which is in the heart of California Wine Country, does it with a 5-foot-by-8-foot bunch of grapes made of 36 illuminated spheres and 48 sequined balls.
The Music Note dropped at midnight in Nashville is a nod to the town’s “Music City” nickname.
Pensacola pays homage to its city mascot by letting one with a 20-foot wingspan come home to roost at midnight. It’s not a real pelican, mind you, but an aluminum one studded with more than 2000 lights.
“Last Night Fayetteville” is considered one of the top 10 New Year’s Eve celebrations in the U.S.—and part of that accolade is due to the Hog Drop. Made with 1085 individually controlled LED lights, this oinker took more than 100 hours to create. Wilbur, eat your heart out—this is definitely Some Pig.
What goes up, stays up … at least when it comes to these objects that are raised instead of dropped.
“Big Orange” is a 35-foot neon orange that climbs 400 feet up the side of the InterContinental Hotel in Miami. And if that’s not enough for you, there’s also Pitbull.
When it gets to the top, the ball opens to release 12 real watermelons, making a mess that would make Gallagher proud in the splash zone below.
The Kiss weighs 300 pounds and is seven feet tall before the “paper” plume is added. The banner brings the massive candy’s height to 12 feet.
For those of us who aren’t well-schooled in city nicknames, Charlotte is sometimes known as the Queen City because Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was Queen consort of Great Britain when the city was incorporated. The crown is raised 25 feet in uptown Charlotte.
This year marks the fourth annual “Up the Cup” celebration in Savannah. The cup is sponsored by Wet Willie’s, an establishment that serves frozen alcoholic drinks in—you guessed it—a to-go cup.
December 30, 2016 – 2:00pm
If you’ve got a burning desire to ring in the new year twice, and an extra $200,000 lying around, PrivateFly—a private jet charter company—is offering New Year’s Eve revelers the chance to officially welcome in 2017 twice, with a one-way trip from Sydney to Los Angeles aboard a Gulfstream G650ER, the world’s fastest long-range private jet.
The party kicks off Down Under (so you’ll need to hurry to get there if you’re not already in Australia), where you’ll eat, drink, and say hello to 2017 in Sydney. At 2 a.m., you and up to 17 friends will hop aboard your champagne-stocked private jet (catered food is also included in the price) for the 12-hour flight to Los Angeles, which will take you back in time because of the 19-hour time difference. When you touch down in California, it will be only 7 p.m.—plenty of time to pop another bottle of bubbly and prepare to sing “Auld Lang Syne” for a second time.
Of course, all this partying doesn’t come cheap; the total cost of the experience, regardless of the number of passengers, is $184,750 (which works out to just over $10,000 apiece if you fill up all 18 seats). According to CNN, the opportunity—which was offered last year as well—has yet to find any takers, so you’ve still got time. There goes that resolution to “save more money” in 2017.
[h/t: Condé Nast Traveler]
December 30, 2016 – 1:00pm
Though we still may be a couple of years away from the flying cars predicted by The Jetsons and so many sci-fi movies, automobile technology is advancing at a mind-blowing rate. In just the past few months, we’ve heard about new sensors designed to protect the ears of Mercedes drivers in the event of a crash and, of course, the arrival of self-driving vehicles around the world. At the forefront of this technological revolution is Tesla, the Silicon Valley-based automaker that counts Elon Musk among its co-founders.
Earlier this week, footage from a dashboard camera of a Tesla Model X showing Tesla Autopilot, a safety-focused piece of self-driving hardware, was released that appears to show the system alerting the driver to a car accident two cars ahead just seconds before it happens, and automatically slowing down—allowing the driver to narrowly avoid a collision.
Though Tesla has not confirmed the footage, Musk did retweet a post about the story from Elektrek Co. The bigger story, of course, is how bringing this kind of technology to the masses could improve road safety and reduce accidents. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see who’s the better driver: technology or humans.
[h/t: Elektrek]
December 30, 2016 – 12:00pm
The New Zealand town of Brightwater had 5 electric street lights in 1911 powered by a hydroelectric generator which was auto-controlled by a flock of chickens. At night, the chickens would go inside their coop and their weight would close an electric circuit, turning on the street lights. 00
