Month: December 2016

Just in time for your Star Wars movie marathon: The Death Star popcorn maker promises to make a hefty bowl of popcorn in minutes (and it will look great next to your R2-D2 French press and Darth Vader nutcracker).

To get started, simply take off the top, which doubles as a popcorn bowl. Then, scoop in the desired amount of popcorn kernels with the included tool, turn on the device, and watch as your snack comes flying out of the air chute. The Death Star popcorn maker uses hot air to cook the kernels instead of butter or oil so it promises healthier, guilt-free popcorn.

It can hold about half a cup of unpopped kernels, which makes eight cups of cooked popcorn. You can pick one up on ThinkGeek for $50 or check out its R2-D2 branded counterpart.

Scratch names off your list without splurging! Here are 11 sure-to-please gifts priced at $50 and under.

Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Thanks for helping us pay the bills!

1. STELLARSCOPE; $33

Perfect for the stargazer in your life, this handheld gadget serves as a portable planetarium, allowing viewers to easily map the night sky. All they have to do is enter a latitude and the current date and time to locate and identify the stars above them.

Find It: Amazon

2. LE MINI MACARON GEL MANICURE KIT; $35

Ensure that her detailed manicure is long-lasting. This pint-sized nail kit will provide your giftee with everything needed for a DIY gel manicure. In addition to a tiny LED drying lamp, the set includes a nail file, nail polish remover pads, a bottle of gel polish, and a cuticle stick.

Find It: Amazon

3. ECHO DOT; $50

With just the sound of their voice, your favorite techie can command the Echo Dot to play music, set an alarm, turn on a light, tell a joke, and even order a pizza while they’re in the shower.

Find It: Amazon

4. ENGRAVED BBQ SET; $42

Even if the weather outside is frightful, this high-quality set of grilling tools is perfect for the outdoor cook, and features a personalized engraving on its lightweight bamboo case.

Find It: Amazon

5. LOG CABIN CONSTRUCTION KIT; $30

For the budding architect on your list: This 37-piece set set, created in Illinois, is a rustic upgrade to the classic wooden toy. The project, made of hand-printed maple, is meant to evoke Abe Lincoln’s boyhood home.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

6. GLOSSIER BLACK TIE SET; $50

This convenient kit by beauty purveyors Glossier includes four new limited edition products essential for a cocktail party prep: lip gloss, eyeliner in soft black Graphite, Haloscope highlighter, and pink nail polish.

Find It: Glossier

7. POLK BOOM BIT; $30

For the fitness fanatic in your life, the Polk Boom Bit offers killer sound quality in a pint-sized package. It’s waterproof, easy charged via USB, and perfect for the music-lover on the go.

Find It: Amazon

8. SOLAR SYSTEM BATH BOMBS; $48

These spherical soaps from Uncommon Goods promise to “take earthlings to a relaxing galaxy far, far away.” They’re designed to look like the planets of the solar system (and Pluto) and come in 9 different calming scents evocative of each, like Mercury’s Moroccan Spices with Activated Charcoal and Neptune’s Black Raspberry and Vanilla.

Find It: Uncommon Goods

9. ROKU STREAMING STICK; $48

Perfect for the avid binge-watcher, the Roku Streaming Stick provides access to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and more. With its quad-core processor, it makes catching up on shows more streamlined than ever.

Find It: Amazon

10. BAR TOOL SET AND STAND; $50

This set of cocktail accessories is ideal for the aspiring mixologist. In sleek gold-brushed stainless steel, the collection includes a coil strainer, bottle opener, stirring spoon, two jiggers, a serrated knife, and ice tongs.

Find It: CB2

11. SYMA X5C EXPLORERS DRONE; $46

To please the technology enthusiast in your midst, look no further than this lightweight, wind-resistant drone. Recommended for ages 14 and older, this space-age flying machine can do flips, fly for 7 minutes at a time, and comes equipped with a HD camera.

Find It: Amazon

The Obsessed, Feuding Searchers Still Looking for Amelia Earhart. They have their own competing theories, evidence, interpretations, and even lawsuits.
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These are the 10 worst Christmas songs. With videos so you can judge them yourself.
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Artificial People. Meet some early computer-generated personalities that left a mark.   
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How Scientists Accidentally Found the Man With the Largest Healthy Testicles. The “nugget of knowledge” was found buried in the methods section of a medical research paper.
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5 Places You Never Knew Were Penal Colonies. The old-school solution to crime was to export criminals to far-flung territories.
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Explore the curious (and sometimes creepy) traditions of funeral foods. The after-funeral buffet evolved from more gruesome practices.
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Portion Sizes: America vs. France. It’s a matter of quantity vs. quality.
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Stunning Photos From the Peary-Henson North Pole Expedition. The 1909 expedition got plenty of pictures, but did not see Santa Claus.
 

The pain—and humiliation—of getting hit in the head with a soccer ball during gym class fades with time, but Gavin and Dan, a.k.a. The Slow Mo Guys, decided to re-create the mortifying moment as adults and immortalize it in slow motion.

For the uninitiated, the Slow Mo Guys are YouTube sensations that film chaotic moments (examples: rapidly cooled glass exploding, a fire tornado twisting through the air) in slow motion, using high-speed cinema cameras. In their latest video, the duo fill a soccer ball with water, and Gavin hurls it at Dan’s face.

To the casual bystander, the painful moment occurs too quickly to register Dan’s reaction—but a camera filming the impact at 2800 frames a second captures how the heavy sphere impacts the daredevil’s face, causing his cheeks, lips, and nose to undulate as he recoils in pain.

Watch the painfully fascinating process below, in 1000x slow motion.

Banner image: iStock

(Banner image courtesy of iStock)

Prague’s newest spot to curl up with a good book is a nearly 138-foot-long zeppelin suspended above an art museum. As Lonely Planet reports, the city’s DOX Center for Contemporary Art built the wood-and-steel structure to serve as a reading room and space for literary talks. It was unveiled in a ceremony at the art center on December 10, and opened to the public the next day.

With a Jonathan-Swift-inspired name (“Gulliver”), the design by architect Martin Rajniš is meant to reference utopian literature and the optimism of early 20th century technology. Cantilevered between buildings, the airship is accessible by stairs that stretch from the roof of one of the gallery buildings. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to dangle midair between the buildings at any point.)

Time to add Prague to your world tour of literary locales.

[h/t Lonely Planet]

All images courtesy DOX via Facebook

Edward Pearson was in his 90s when he told a newspaper reporter about the most magical day of his childhood.

“As long as I live,” he said, “and I’ve lived quite a few years, I’ll never forget that experience.”

It was December 1890, and a young Pearson was wandering the aisles of the Boston Store, an upscale department store in Brockton, Massachusetts, when he turned a corner and saw a portly man with a white beard and a red suit.

“All of a sudden, right in front of me, I saw Santa Claus,” he recalled. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.” The man smiled and approached Pearson. Like most kids, Pearson had only seen interpretations of Santa in magazine illustrations, never in the flesh. But here, in a department store in a small town near Boston, was the man himself.

In reality, Santa was James Edgar, the owner of the Boston Store and a man who bore a resemblance to the holiday icon long before he ever asked a tailor to fashion a costume for him. For the hundreds of kids who visited his store, Edgar became something their eyes could hardly believe: the first department store Santa.

Edgar was born in Duns, Berwickshire, Scotland in 1843, arriving in the United States some 24 years later [PDF]. A big, jolly man who carried his generosity with him everywhere, Edgar opened the Boston Store—later renamed Edgar’s—in 1878 and promptly began to personify the holiday spirit.

While other area stores often had their workers staying late, Edgar closed his store four evenings a week so workers could be home with their families. If a customer wanted to put an item on layaway, he gave them four percent monthly interest on whatever amount they had deposited. If a child in the area was in need of medical attention and had no money, Edgar would make sure they got the help they needed. While he did it anonymously, it wasn’t hard to figure out who was behind it.

With one daughter of his own, Edgar loved kids. He hired trolleys to ferry thousands of them into a nearby grove for a Fourth of July picnic every year, where he enjoyed dressing up in costume for their amusement. He was Uncle Sam one year and a cricket player the next. He’d climb to the roof of his store and toss pennies into the crowd below.

For Christmas, Edgar originally donned a clown costume to spread cheer inside his store. He did this for years until, in 1890, the idea struck him to try his hand at portraying Santa, using the Thomas Nast illustrations of the character from 1860s issues of Harper’s magazine as inspiration. Edgar made his way into Boston, hired a tailor, and picked up his Santa suit.

“I have never been able to understand why the great gentleman lives at the North Pole,” he once said of his ambitions. “He is so far away. He is only able to see the children one day a year. He should live closer to them.”

To say children were awestruck would not be an exaggeration. Like Pearson, they had never conceived of meeting their mysterious benefactor face-to-face before. Lines began to spiral out of the store and around the block, surging when school was let out. Edgar had planned on being Santa for just an hour a day and three on Saturdays, but he eventually had to hire a second man to play Santa when the demand outstripped his energy.

The notion of a living Santa was so intriguing that Edgar’s store attracted visitors from as far away as New York and Rhode Island. By the following year, several other stores across the country had picked up on the idea, which helped bolster foot traffic and sales. Unlike many of his successors, however, Edgar never had a place to sit and idle. He roamed his store, actively seeking out children so they could confide in him.

By the time Edgar died in September 1909, the department store Santa had become a tradition. The owners of his namesake property also seemed determined to continue his philanthropy, devoting an entire floor to cobbling shoes for the poor during the 1920s.

Edgar was not the first man to put on a Santa costume: because of the character’s many incarnations—from 4th century bishop to Coca-Cola advertising icon—that will forever be an issue of semantics. But he was the first documented department store Santa, and he arguably was the man who most closely resembled the character in terms of the good will he circulated. When he died, his funeral service was held in his second-floor apartment in Brockton. As soon as local schools let out for lunch, hundreds of children filed past his casket to pay their respects.

Additional Sources
“Original Department Store Santa,” The Billings Gazette, December 1972 [PDF]; “Department Store Santas Owe Paychecks to Col. Jim Edgar,” Enterprise, Dec. 20, 1987 [PDF]; “The First Santa Claus,” Yankee, 1979 [PDF].

This Christmas, you might find yourself elbow-deep in frosting and candy canes, trying to construct a gingerbread house that doesn’t collapse. But it turns out that creating a gingerbread house isn’t just a Christmas construction project—it’s a ritual with sometimes surprising connections to royalty, brutal fairy tales, and global trade.

Although versions of gingerbread date to ancient Egypt and Greece, the gingerbread we eat today has its roots in the Middle Ages, when cakes became all the rage in Europe as an increasingly global world opened up to new spices and ingredients. First there was fruitcake. The once-hot, now played-out treat came into favor after medieval cooks finally got access to dried fruit from Spain and Portugal thanks to increased trade in the 13th century.

That led to a vogue in cakes and breads, which spread as better construction made having an oven in your house less terrifying. Trade with the East also made the ingredients in gingerbread available for the first time. Early gingerbread recipes contain spices that were once coveted and expensive, like cinnamon, sandalwood, and saffron, which became increasingly accessible after the Crusades. Gingerbread became big business, and local variations began to arise. Lebkuchen, a gingerbread-like spiced treat, became popular in Germany, and guilds of gingerbread makers began to emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries.

As gingerbread makers got better at their craft, they began to press the luxurious creations into intricate molds and even paint them. The sweet treat became a popular way for rich rulers to impress visitors, as when Elizabeth I handed out gingerbread men to visiting dignitaries.

Then, a simple story thrust gingerbread from yummy treat to full-blown cultural phenomenon. Though the original doesn’t reference gingerbread specifically, the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” told the story of two children who are left to starve by their poor, hungry parents, then enticed and imprisoned by a wicked witch in a house “built of bread and covered with cakes.”

After the Grimms published the tale in 1812, building gingerbread houses became a popular pastime in Germany. Food historians debate whether the Grimms’ story simply drew on gingerbread houses that were already popular, or whether it gave people the idea in the first place, but it certainly seems that constructing gingerbread houses became a popular activity among Germans right around the time the Grimms began publishing their bestsellers.

By then, of course, gingerbread was already associated with Christmas. And nobody celebrates Christmas like the Germans, who pioneered everything from Christmas presents to Christmas trees to some of the most popular carols.

In the 19th century, many gingerbread house-making Germans, armed with their favorite holiday traditions, moved to the United States in multiple mass waves of immigration. The opera “Hänsel and Gretel” by Engelbert Humperdinck, which premiered in Germany in 1893 and in the United States two years later, featured a gingerbread house that may also have increased the popularity of the confectionery construction.

By 1909, Good Housekeeping was suggesting that moms make a “Jack Horner pie” (the term was used as a catch-all for any pastry that had goodies inside) featuring a miniature gingerbread house for a Hansel and Gretel children’s party. And with each Christmas, more elaborate gingerbread creations could be found.

These days, gingerbread structures are so popular that many become tourist destinations, as in the case of a three-ton gingerbread village built each year by a New York chef. And next time you see one, you might want to remember its convoluted history—one that belies its sugar-sweet looks.

In The Golden Child, Eddie Murphy plays Los Angeles social worker Chandler Jarrell, who is tasked by the priestess Kee Nang (Charlotte Lewis) to travel to Tibet to save the Golden Child (J.L. Reate)—someone believed to be a bringer of compassion that walks among us every thousand generations—from bad guy Sardo Numspa (Charles Dance). Here are some facts about the film on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.

1. IT WAS MEANT TO BE A “RAYMOND CHANDLER WITH SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS” FILM STARRING MEL GIBSON.

Writer Dennis Feldman (Just One of the Guys) wrote a screenplay called The Rose of Tibet, a “Raymond Chandler movie with supernatural elements.” Feldman later said that what would become The Golden Child (1986) “was intended to be played very straight by Mel Gibson, but Eddie Murphy loved it, and took it.”

2. EDDIE MURPHY CHOSE IT OVER 20 OTHER SCRIPTS.

The red-hot comedian was coming off of 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983), and Beverly Hills Cop (1984) when he chose The Golden Child over approximately 20 other projects in development at Paramount specifically for him.

3. JOHN CARPENTER TURNED DOWN THE CHANCE TO DIRECT IT

Though John Carpenter was offered the chance to direct The Golden Child, he preferred the somewhat similar script for Big Trouble in Little China (1986), starring Kurt Russell. “The films have a similar theme in that they both explore Chinese legend and magic, but they develop in different ways,” Carpenter said. “Golden Child is a very fine script. It has its problems, but it also has one big plus—Eddie Murphy. It will be hard to pull off that script. But if they do, it could be a wonderful movie!”

4. CARPENTER RUSHED TO BEAT THE GOLDEN CHILD INTO THEATERS.

In order to beat The Golden Child into theaters, Carpenter limited his prep period on Big Trouble in Little China to 12 weeks to make sure his movie came out in July 1986, five months before Murphy’s movie. “If Big Trouble were released at the same time as Golden Child, we would be killed at the box office because audiences love Eddie Murphy,” Carpenter said. Opening on the 4th of July, Carpenter’s film made $11.1 million, while Murphy’s made over $79.8 million.

5. MURPHY MET WITH GEORGE MILLER ABOUT DIRECTING IT.

While Murphy was an “avowed fan” and met George Miller at least twice about directing The Golden Child, the actor decided to go in a different direction. Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears, Fletch) ended up with the gig.

6. THE GOLDEN CHILD WAS A 6-YEAR-OLD GIRL WITH A SHAVED HEAD.

The titular character was a Tibetan boy, but 6-year-old Jasmine Reate got the job. She had her head shaved and was credited as “J.L. Reate” to hide her true gender.

7. A WORLDWIDE SEARCH WAS HELD TO CAST KEE NANG.

There was a “global effort” focusing on London, Bombay, Hong Kong, and United States talent. Out of 500 applicants, producers and Murphy’s manager ultimately went with teenage model Charlotte Lewis, who had only ever appeared in one film—Roman Polanski’s Pirates (1986), which came out six months before The Golden Child.

8. YELLOW DRAGON WAS PLAYED BY KIRK DOUGLAS’S SON.

The Golden Child was one of nine movies featuring Eric Douglas. The actor and stand-up comedian passed away in 2004.

9. THE ACTORS WEREN’T IN NEPAL.

A second unit team did film in Nepal, but most of the movie was shot on Paramount’s soundstages in Los Angeles. The Himalayas were recreated at the Mammoth Mountain ski area in Mammoth Lakes, California.

10. THEY UTILIZED NEW SPECIAL EFFECTS TECHNIQUES THAT WERE DEVELOPED FOR WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT.

“The Tondreau system,” developed by Bill Tondreau, was described by American Cinematographer as “a live-action motion-control system which enables any camera move to be recorded on floppy disc; where the information is stored for playback later at the (George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic) facility, and can be repeated exactly ad infinitum.” Ken Ralston, the visual effects supervisor, said the tests for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) went so well that they decided to use it on The Golden Child first.

“It was like initiation by fire,” Ralston said. “We were still doing our tests up here while we were shooting our plates down there in L.A., and it was a race to get everything set. We had our fingers crossed all the time, but we pushed the system as far as we could.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that the special effects were not completed until a few days before the film opened. One scene the ILM crew had “fun” with was the Pepsi can dancing to “Putting on the Ritz.”

11. THEY ADDED SCENES IN POST-PRODUCTION TO MAKE IT FUNNIER.

Post-production on The Golden Child was extended due to several last-minute tweaks to the film, including attempts to give it more of the humor that audiences had come to expect from an Eddie Murphy film. Producer Robert D. Wachs told the Los Angeles Times that a handful of short scenes were added, noting that “Some of the jokes just needed buttons.”

12. THE MUSICAL SCORE WAS SWITCHED AT THE LAST MINUTE.

Also adding to the film’s long post-production period: The film’s entire score was replaced at the last minute. Originally, Oscar-winning composer John Barry (Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves) was hired to score the film, but the reaction to it was not favorable. According to Wachs, Barry’s score “was magnificent but the research told us it did not move the picture along.” So Michel Colombier was brought in to create something more contemporary.

13. CHARLES DANCE WAS DISMISSIVE OF THE FILM.

Charles Dance—who played Sardo Numspa in The Golden Child, but is perhaps best known today as Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones—said he enjoyed improvising and acting with Murphy, but admitted that he didn’t think much of The Golden Child. “It wasn’t a great intellectual exercise, but it was great fun,” Dance told the Los Angeles Times.

14. THE WRITER CALLED THE FILM “A NIGHTMARE.”

Screenwriter David Feldman didn’t think Michael Ritchie did a great job with the film. “You had to get in there and make this action/adventure/detective film, but instead, everybody wanted to make an Eddie Murphy comedy,” Feldman opined. “I think that wasn’t what Eddie should have done, and it’s not what the director should have done—and he didn’t even do it that well, either. It was a nightmare.”