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Fir, Pine and Spruce
Wednesday, December 7, 2016 – 10:16
Real-world, 21st century people like us will (probably) never get to experience the joy of watching a dinosaur or dragon hatch from an egg. Luckily, Firebox has the next best thing: Egg-shaped candles that reveal baby dragons and dinosaurs as they melt. Now you can become a proud reptilian parent, without the hassle of becoming Khaleesi or running a futuristic dinosaur amusement park. In fact, you can have both egg versions, because for a limited time, they’re buy one, get one half off.
Both eggs stand at 14 centimeters tall (5.5 inches) and hold small porcelain figurines inside. As the candles burn, the figures emerge dramatically from the flames, covered in black soot (don’t worry—it wipes off easily when cooled). The dragon egg randomly yields a red, green, or black baby; the dinosaur egg always gives you a Velociraptor. Once you’re done with the candle, you can hang onto the toy as a keepsake. Just add both the dragon and dinosaur egg candles to your basket and the half-off deal will activate automatically.
For more cool candles, you can also check out our list.
December 8, 2016 – 6:30am
This year, rock Secret Santa with ease. These 11 budget-friendly ideas are ideal for stocking stuffers, gift exchanges, and last-minute presents.
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!
Even those with the most discerning taste will appreciate this affordable, Italian-made decanter with matching stopper. Its elaborate cut-glass pattern gives an air of sophistication to any whiskey of choice and it’s even dishwasher-safe.
Find It: Amazon
Banish blurry photos and shaky video with this foldable tripod. The lightweight gadget is compatible with smartphones, mini tablets, and small cameras—and is perfect for the person who’s constantly capturing moments on the go.
Find It: Amazon
An appetizing plan: Just add beer to this mix to create soft, salty pretzels in less than an hour. Include a beloved brew alongside this gift to really show you care. According to the markers, darker beers will create a heartier dough while lighter beers will add more of a citrus taste.
Find It: Uncommon Goods
This tree kit includes everything your loved one will need to show off their green thumb, including a packet of tree seeds, a biodegradable peat pot, nutrient soil pellet, and a how-to guide packed with simple-to-follow steps. There are plenty of tree options available from sycamore to ponderosa pine.
Find It: Tree In A Box
Serve up festive appetizer plates to your favorite holiday hostess. Each microwave-safe dish features a mixed-media illustration, like the one above which shows a stick figure marching with a champagne cork hat and toothpick baton.
Find It: CB2
Give the gift of relaxation. Apple, citrus, and heliotrope create a calming combination, and best of all, this soap is vegan and cruelty-free.
Find It: Soap & Paper
Ocean salt combined with mustard, garlic, and herbs makes this artisanal blend a must-have in any foodie’s kitchen. Sprinkle the homemade mix over veggies or chicken to transport taste buds to France. Other available options include the Magic Unicorn blend (salt, paprika, rosemary, and garlic) and Hot Steve (salt, cayenne, chipotle, orange, garlic, and smoked paprika).
Find It: Etsy
Shopping for a fickle fashionista can be tricky, so hedge your bets and give them four perfume options in this sampler kit from TOCCA. Each scent has its own signature mix with personality, from Emelia’s fruity zest of clementine and fig to Florence’s sophisticated florals of jasmine and iris.
Find It: Birchbox
Perfect for the Star Wars fan in your life, this ceramic bank is shaped like the BB-8 droid from The Force Awakens. The slot in the back makes saving for a rainy day easy, and all the painted details turn this bank into a fantastic addition to any Star Wars collection.
Find It: Amazon
College kids and cheese sandwich-enthusiasts can up their grilled cheese game with these toaster bags. Slide a sandwich or leftover pizza slice into one of these bags and pop it in the toaster. The gooey contents are protected from becoming a burnt mess, thanks to the bags’ Teflon coating. Each bag is dishwasher-safe and lasts for 50 grilled cheese sandwiches.
Find It: Uncommon Goods
Help a friend or family member honor another year of standout television with these mini figurines. The collection includes characters from The Flash, The Walking Dead, Golden Girls, Game of Thrones (like Daenerys Targaryen, pictured above), and more.
Find It: Amazon
December 8, 2016 – 6:00am
Why do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty? Tolkien gave them different languages, but we gave them stereotypes.
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Feynman’s Building Blocks of Thermodynamics. A simple analogy with a whimsical animation that’s easy to understand.
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Dark Tourism: A Trip to Slaughterhouse-Five. Germany walks a delicate line in promoting World War II tourism.
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The 50 best places to work in 2017, according to employees. Since happy workers don’t quit, they probably have few openings.
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10 Holiday Gifts for the History Buff in Your Life. You won’t find these at your local stores.
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English for Beginners. It’s two steps forward and one step back, but this man is determined to communicate.
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The truth about fake news is coming. Stories about established news outlets losing the public’s trust are a bit exaggerated.
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9 Secrets About Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean Ride. The nearly 50-year-old attraction has quite a history.
December 8, 2016 – 5:00am
From Tamagotchis to Teddy Ruxpin, everyone remembers the coveted holiday toys of their childhood. Some parents stood in line for hours or paid premium prices for these sold-out items, while others simply waited out the hype (and the cost) to score one as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift.
Online shopping portal Ebates took a festive walk down memory lane and created the infographic below. It lists the most desirable children’s presents from 1983 and beyond, and even hints at which toy is likely the must-have item of 2016.
[h/t Entrepreneur]
December 8, 2016 – 3:00am
This year, London’s East Village E20 is the perfect location to spruce up your beard with festive decorations and over-the-top trinkets. On Sunday, December 11, the neighborhood will host a stand at the Christmas Makers Market that will offer all the fixings for seasonal whiskers—including colorful lights. The yuletide makeover is totally free and available to anyone with a beard or pocket that needs a little extra cheer.
If you won’t be around for the holiday market, you can settle for purchasing some online.
[h/t Bored Panda]
December 8, 2016 – 1:00am
Banner image courtesy of iStock.
December 8, 2016 – 12:00am
Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 259th installment in the series.
Following the German Ninth Army’s storming of the southern Carpathian mountain passes in October-November 1916, outflanking the Romanian armies to the east, the country’s defeat was only a matter of time – and not much, as it turned out. Indeed Romania’s collapse came with remarkable speed as the dismal year closed out, yielding another big victory for the Central Powers and making the end of the war look further away than ever.
The autumn of 1916 saw the tides of war turn sharply against Romania, after it unwisely threw in its lot with the Allies in August: as General Falkenhayn’s Ninth Army poured in from the north, the Danube Army under August von Mackensen (commanding mostly Bulgarian and Turkish troops divided into two army detachments, East and West) attacked from the south, driving back the Bulgarian Third Army as well as belated reinforcements from the Russian Dobruja Army.
By early December the Central Powers were closing in on Bucharest, with Falkenhayn’s Ninth Army and Mackensen’s Danube Army converging on the Romanian capital from the west and south, respectively. The Romanian First Army launched one final, desperate counterattack in an attempt to cut the tightening noose at the Battle of the Argeș River from December 1-3, 1916, but were ultimately undone by the absence of reserves at the critical moment (as well as the Russians’ refusal to join the assault). This brave but futile effort barely delayed the advancing Central Powers forces at a cost of 60,000 Romanian casualties, including dead, wounded, and injured.
The approach of Mackensen’s Bulgarians to the outskirts of the Romanian capital replayed scenes now all too common from the war, with yet another panicked mass evacuation from a big European city, adding Bucharest to the list that already included Brussels, Antwerp, Warsaw, and Belgrade, among many others (top, German troops occupying Bucharest; below, German cavalry enter the city).
One eyewitness, Lady Kennard, a British noblewoman volunteering as a nurse with the Romanian Army, described the chaotic scene in Bucharest’s central station, where a train had been designated to evacuate foreign citizens to Jassy (Iași) in northeast Romania, with the unfortunate omission of an engine to pull it:
At the station we found a seething crowd and a strain standing, into which all Bucarest was trying to get… We found the station-master and told him that we were foreigners, and he led us through dark passages (by this time it was six o’clock) to a distant platform, where we found a long line of carriages, engineless, dark and locked. Apparently no notice had been received that foreigners and diplomats were really leaving.
An engine was finally located and the carriages unlocked, but their ordeal was just beginning. Kennard recalled conditions that, if not quite as bad as those experienced by troops in the battlefield, were still very trying by civilian standards:
The key arrived and we surged in, a seething mass of people, moving in waves. The doors were banged on the coat-tails of the last man in, and the train started before we had even formed a proper queue in the passage. Most of the women were offered seats, the rest of the passengers stood or lay on the floor amongst the baggage; there was no water, there was no light, there was no food… One man had bought a string of sausages during those last frantic minutes at the Bucarest station, and a Russian officer produced some bread and a little chocolate. This is all the food that fourteen peopled shared for twenty hours!
With the ragged Romanian First Army beating a hasty retreat to the northeast as well, on December 6, 1916 Bucharest fell to German troops after scattered fighting, beginning two years of occupation and hardship for its residents. Of course the situation was little better for those who fled, with thousands of civilian refugees starving or dying of disease amid the chaotic retreat. Worse, the survivors were crammed into the remaining unconquered provinces of the kingdom’s rural northeast, a backwards region with primitive infrastructure and inadequate housing.
Romania’s Queen Marie, who lost her infant son to disease just as the final retreat began, remembered the horror of these months:
Those who have never seen them have no notion of what Rumanian roads can become in winter, of how difficult is all circulation, how communication becomes an effort almost beyond human strength – and this winter was a winter of terrible snow and frost. Part of our army had to be quartered in small, miserable villages, cut off from everything, buried in snow, transports were almost impossible, untold of hardships had to be borne… Food was scarce, hardly any wood for heating, soap was a thing almost not to be found, linen was a luxury of better days – illness in every form broke out amongst the soldiers and many died before we could give sufficient aid!
As with any hastily improvised movement of masses of people, accidents happened – with gruesome results. Later in December Lady Kennard described the fate of a train full of refugees that plunged off the rails:
Last night we visited at sunset such a scene of horror as can never, and should never, be described. A train from Bucarest – the last to start… – collided and derailed… No one knows how many hundreds died there by the roadside, some in the flames of the engine’s exploded petrol tank, the greater number crushed into one huge formless mass of flesh and horse-hair, splintered bones and wood.
Kennard added that this was just the final horror endured by the hapless refugees:
The train had started from the capital three whole days before. Family groups clustered on the roofs of carriages… Many died prematurely from exposure, and the few survivors from the final tragedy told nightmare stories of children’s corpses brushed past the carriage windows when the train swept under bridges whose height no one had had the though to measure mentally before they braved the roof.
As Romania’s armies collapsed, Romanian and Allied officials scrambled to deny the country’s wealth of natural resources to the enemy – especially its supplies of petroleum, the largest in Europe (outside Russia’s Caucasus region), which were critical as a source of both fuel and industrial lubricants. Conscious of the growing food shortages afflicting the Central Powers, they also worked to destroy huge quantities of wheat and other grain.
The project of wrecking the Romanian oilfields was organized by a British engineer and member of Parliament, Colonel John Norton-Griffiths, who traveled to Romania and led a team of foreigners and locals in a desperate campaign of large-scale industrial sabotage. Using techniques like filling wells with cement and setting them on fire, Norton-Griffiths and his men managed to destroy 70 refineries and 800,000 tons of oil, or roughly 3.5 million barrels (below, oil wells burning). However with typical efficiency the Germans were able to return many of the wells to service within six months.
The wrecking campaign, unfolding amidst the chaos of a general retreat and mass refugee movements, certainly made for some spectacular scenes. Yvonne Fitzroy, volunteering with a group of Scottish nurses in Romania, recalled the sights as they fled a burning town in eastern Romania in her diary entry on December 8, 1916:
As soon as carriage was past, we got the door open again. The horizon was in a blaze, oil-tanks, granaries, strawstacks, everything burnable was set light to. It was very terrible and very beautiful. Peasants, men, women, and children were running alongside the train in a panic, trying to clamber into the already overcrowded trucks, others had given up the struggle, and collapsed by the side of the line, or had settled down into that familiar dogged tramp with the blazing sky behind them.
Meanwhile December 7, 1916 saw the Great War claim yet another political casualty, as British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, who had presided over Britain’s entry into the conflict, resigned amid growing criticism of his handling of the war effort. He was replaced by David Lloyd, the Welsh Radical who had previously served as Secretary of State for War, and before that Minister of Munitions (below).
Lloyd George had first joined the government as Minister of Munitions in the spring of 1915, when Asquith was forced to reshuffle his cabinet and form a coalition government by the “shell crisis,” a scandal involving ammunition shortages in the early part of the war. Lloyd George’s energetic maneuvering subsequently helped depose Sir John French, replaced by Douglas Haig as commander of the British Expeditionary Force, and sideline Secretary of State Lord Kitchener (whom Lloyd George succeeded after his death in June 1916).
By now however the fiery Welshman had come to view Asquith himself as the main obstacle to the successful prosecution of the war – in large part because the Prime Minister was more given to plodding deliberation, preferring to adjudicate disputes between rival factions rather than take a position himself. This approach was reflected in the unwieldy War Committee, a special group intended to take executive control of the war effort, which had however ballooned from its original three members to sometimes over a dozen participants, and tended to defer more decisions than it made.
Beginning in November 1916 Lloyd George engineered the overthrow of Asquith with help from political allies including the Unionists (who advocated Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom) Bonar Law and Edward Carson, as well as Law’s ambitious young protégé Max Aitken. In the end it was a palace coup, revealed to a mostly unsuspecting public when On December 7, 1916, King George V asked Lloyd George to form a new government.
Lloyd George would see the British war effort through to the end, and played a major role in crafting the punitive Treaty of Versailles, which many historians believe set the stage for the Second World War. In the short term, however, his appointment was viewed as another indication that the war was destroying the old political order – and there was no end in sight. One ordinary soldier, Edwin Abbey, an American volunteering with the Canadian Army in France, wrote in a letter to his mother on December 10, 1916:
We have a tendency, I think, to be too optimistic and too comfortable and sure of things. That is especially so in England. As a matter of fact, though we shall win in the end, there is struggle and bitterness ahead for us all. I think the new English Premier will be a great advantage to us. Every one has been inspired with his ability to get ahead with things. The crying need everywhere to-day is for leaders, and they are pitifully few.
See the previous installment or all entries.
December 7, 2016 – 11:00pm
iStock
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” and “A Holly Jolly Christmas” were all written by the same man: Johnny Marks, who was Jewish.
Meet Salto, a tiny jumping robot inspired by nature. Robotics experts at the University of California-Berkeley designed the adorable, one-legged bot to leap like the bush baby, or galago. Those small primates, native to eastern (and parts of Sub-Saharan) Africa, possess the ability to soar nearly 7 feet into the air in a single hop. Salto reportedly has the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded, and according to LiveScience, researchers hope to someday harness this ability to quickly scan rubble in search-and-rescue missions.
Salto (which is short for Saltatorial Locomotion Terrain Obstacles) stands 10 inches high, and weighs a mere .2 pounds. But what the robot lacks in size, it makes up for in nimbleness. Salto can leap to heights of more than 3 feet—and then jump again, and again. (Other robots can technically jump higher than Salto, but they have to “wind up” before repeating the process.) The speedy automaton can also climb at a rate of nearly 6 feet per second, faster than any other machine of its kind.
Salto is the brainchild of UC-Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, and its members recently published news of its existence in the journal Science Robotics. The study’s lead author—Duncan Haldane, a robotics PhD student—said he was inspired to create a machine like Salto after conversing with first responders at an urban search-and-rescue training site. He envisioned a gadget that was tiny (and quick) enough to move through the rubble without dislodging it.
A machine like the one Haldane described would have to have superior jumping abilities, so he and his lab mates searched the animal kingdom for an animal with the requisite “vertical jumping agility”—a term they use to describe “the ratio of the maximum jump height to the time it takes to complete one jump.” The winner ended up being the bush baby, which can leap between tree branches at 7 feet per second.
The secret to the African primate’s famous jump is its legs: They’re able to crouch ultra-low toward the ground, which allows them to store energy in their tendons and release it en masse seconds later.
“Animals adapted specifically for jumping have this kind of super-crouch posture,” Haldane explains in a video recorded by UC-Berkeley. “The longer they stay in a crouch, the more energy they can transfer into their tendons and the more energy they can return for jumping. So we built into Salto the capability for a super-crouch.”
Salto’s “tendon” is a latex spring that’s attached to its motor, which twists before it lifts off to create—and release—jumping energy. It can’t jump quite like the bush baby, which can jump 2.24 meters per second. However, Salto comes close, with 1.75 meters per second.
Watch Salto in action in the video below.
[h/t LiveScience]
December 7, 2016 – 4:30pm