Amazon’s powerful Alexa-enabled Tap portable speaker is a pretty nifty gadget. The hand-sized speaker pumps out rich Dolby-powered sound, and whenever you want music all you have to do is tap its microphone and ask it to cue up Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, or other top streaming services. It’s a lot of power in a small package, and if you need a smart, portable speaker, you can’t go wrong with the Amazon Tap.
The Amazon Tap usually retails for $129.99. Today, though, Amazon is running a pretty incredible deal on the Amazon Tap. For $119.98, you can get an Amazon Tap, and Amazon will kick in a the seven-inch, 16 GB version of its popular Fire Tablet for free. Yes, you read that correctly: Picking up an Amazon Tap bundled with a 7″ Fire Tablet is actually $10 cheaper than buying an Amazon Tap on its own. The 16 GB version of the Fire Tablet retails for $69.99, so the bundle knocks $80 off the two items’ normal price. If you’ve been on the fence about picking up an Amazon Tap or a Fire Tablet, jump on this one while it lasts.
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Certain Christmas traditions never seem to go out of style. Along with wreaths, gingerbread cookies, and reruns of A Christmas Story sits the poinsettia, a red-tinged leafy arrangement that’s become synonymous with the holiday. Upwards of 100 million of them are sold in the six weeks before December 25.
Why do people associate the potted plant with seasonal cheer? Chalk it up to some brilliant marketing.
In 1900, a German immigrant named Albert Ecke was planning to move his family to Fiji. Along the way, they became enamored of the beautiful sights found in Los Angeles—specifically, the wild-growing poinsettia, which was named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the U.S.-Mexican ambassador who first brought it to the States in 1828. Ecke saw the appeal of the plant’s bright red leaves that blossomed in winter (it’s not actually a flower, despite the common assumption) and began marketing it from roadside stands to local growers as “the Christmas plant.”
The response was so strong that poinsettias became the Ecke family business, with their crop making up more than 90 percent of all poinsettias sold throughout most of the 20th century: Ecke, his son Paul, and Paul’s son, Paul Jr., offered a unique single-stem arrangement that stood up to shipping, which their competitors couldn’t duplicate. When Paul III took over the business in the 1960s, he began sending arrangements to television networks for use during their holiday specials. In a priceless bit of advertising, stars like Ronald Reagan, Dinah Shore, and Bob Hope were sharing screen time with the plant, leading millions of Americans to associate it with the holiday.
While the Ecke single-stem secret was eventually cracked by other florists—it involved grafting two stems to make one—and their market share dwindled, their innovative marketing ensured that the poinsettia would forever be linked to Christmas.
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Sometime in early 2017, residents of Seattle, Washington, will be able to experience what promises to be a revolution in shopping: Amazon’s first brick and mortar retail grocery store, Amazon Go, which promises to hold all the thrill of shoplifting without the legal consequences.
According to the company’s press release, Amazon Go will use a mobile app to completely transform how shoppers interact with a consumer environment. A visitor will be able to walk into the compact, 1800-square-foot space to grab food and beverage items, including ready-to-eat goods. Tracking sensors keep tabs on both the shoppers and the product items, knowing when they’ve been put in a cart or back on the shelf. When the trip is over, visitors simply walk through electronic turnstiles and out the door with their bags—the app performs a “checkout” that completely eliminates conveyor belts and lines.
Amazon calls it “Just Walk Out Technology”—a model it’s been working on for the past four years. The company plans to emulate it in a series of locations across the country. You can sign up for an email notification of when they’re open to the public here.
From the Hufflepuff scarf in Newt Scamander’s suitcase to mentions of the Lestrange family, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them has tons of easter eggs to satisfy Harry Potter fans—including one you may have missed. According to INSIDER, the design studio MinaLima has been hiding a recurring character in the pages of The Daily Prophet since the third Potter movie—and she also popped up in Fantastic Beasts‘s New York Ghost.
Meet the Ginger Witch, a career criminal who has been in and out of Azkaban for more than 70 years. She made her first appearance on the back page of The Daily Prophet in Prisoner of Azkaban, where she was responsible for a product recall of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. In The Goblet of Fire, the Ginger Witch was described as a “Hooligan” who was arrested during a “Muggle Football Match”; she was later implicated for interfering with muggle air traffic with two flying pigs. In The Order of the Phoenix, she appeared in an article about surviving a henna explosion that was featured on the front page of The Daily Prophet. Finally, a series of stories in The Quibbler—a wizarding tabloid and “The Wizarding World’s Alternative Voice”—featured the Ginger Witch getting arrested with fake henna in Brazil. She was later sent to Azkaban for her role in a “fake henna scandal.”
Now we know that her criminal record stretches back until at least 1926, the year Fantastic Beasts takes place. A short article in The Daily Prophet notes that the “mysterious” Witch is under investigation. That investigation may have caused her to flee to the United States, where, according to The New York Ghost, she was prosecuted for stealing wigs in the Bronx.
MinaLima is responsible for all of the design work in the Potterverse, from Quidditch World Cup Posters to textbook covers and beyond. Though Rowling wanted certain headlines to appear in The Daily Prophet and The New York Ghost, MinaLima had the freedom to fill in the rest with their own headlines about characters like the Ginger Witch. (The character was inspired by a red-haired woman in the art department named Debbie.) “We know now that things do get seen,” MinaLima co-founder Miraphora Mina told INSIDER. “In the past, we didn’t realize how much these would be scrutinized by fans.”
The Ginger Witch was released from Azkaban at the end of the Potter films, but it’s likely she’ll strike again in future installments of Fantastic Beasts. While you’re waiting, you can pick up a limited edition print of an issue of The Daily Prophet that mentions the Witch here.
Map lovers have a new treasure trove of international maps to look through, thanks to the CIA. The agency just released an archive of its formerly classified intelligence maps dating back to the 1940s, as National Geographic reports.
The maps—organized by decade on the CIA Cartography Center’s Flickr—chart international conflicts from a U.S. intelligence perspective, covering topics important to high-level government officials at the time, including maps of German dialects and the Russian front during World War II, missile activity in Cuba just a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, and Baghdad in 2003.
“The mission of the Cartography Center is to provide a full range of maps, geographic analysis, and research in support of the Agency, the White House, senior policymakers, and the [Intelligence Community] at large,” the center explains on its Flickr page. “Since 1941, the Cartography Center maps have told the stories of post-WWII reconstruction, the Suez crisis, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Falklands War, and many other important events in history.”
White House photo by Eric Draper
The release is a celebration of the Cartography Center’s 75th birthday. The albums also feature a few photos of presidents being briefed by intelligence officials using the maps, like a map of Afghanistan used to brief President George W. Bush at Camp David in 2001 after the September 11 attacks.
Holiday shopping season is in full swing, and not surprisingly, Amazon.com is a popular destination. But if you’re one of the millions of people to recently order an item from the e-commerce giant (or you’re still browsing around for present ideas), be aware of a sneaky new phishing scam. As Inc. reports, both Amazon Prime members and regular customers have reported receiving fake (yet very official-looking) emails that appear to come from Amazon asking them to re-enter their credit card information.
The email’s subject line says, “Your Amazon.com order cannot be shipped.” According to AARP’s blog, the full message reads:
Hello,There was a problem processing your order. You will not be able to access your account or place orders with us until we confirm your information.click here to confirm your account. We ask that you not open new accounts as any order you place may be delayed.
For more details, read our Amazon Prime Terms & Conditions.
Recipients who follow the email’s instructions and click on the link are taken to a convincing “Amazon” page. There, they are invited to input their names, address, and credit card info (including the expiration and CVV security code). Once they hit Save & Continue, they’re automatically guided to the real Amazon website.
Hopefully you’re now on high-alert, and you won’t fall for this scheme. But, as AARP reminds us, you should never click on an embedded link in an email from Amazon (or, for that matter, any other company). Instead, check to see whether the items mentioned in the email are ones you’ve actually purchased (you can head to Amazon’s “Your Orders” section to jog your memory if need be), be suspicious of typos and spelling mistakes, and hover your cursor over any URLs provided and the sender’s email address to take a close look—phishing scams will notoriously use URLs similar to the real deal.
If you do recognize an Amazon email as fake, don’t just ignore it. The New York Times recommends reporting to them by forwarding the whole message as an attachment to stop-spoofing@amazon.com. And since phishing schemes are likely to continue (and even grow) in the weeks leading up to Christmas and Hanukkah, check out Amazon’s list of tips for avoiding payment fraud.
A German landlord evicted a tenant after they spread Surströmming (fermented fish) brine on the stairs. The tenant sued, but the court ruled in favor of the landlord when he opened a can of Surströmming in the courtroom. Here is the recent video of some guys tasting Surströmming. 10
What is the trendiest baby name in American history? Jayden? Madison? Khaleesi?
The answer might not sound so trendy to you: Linda.
Quantifying trendiness is tricky, since there’s no universally accepted way to calculate how much of a fad a name was. But according to researcher David Taylor, Linda may very well be the trendiest name ever. Taylor devised a metric for trendiness that takes into account overall popularity as well as steepness of a name’s rise and fall. So while Mary was very, very popular, it was popular over a long time period, and therefore not trendy. And while Deneen had a huge quick spike in popularity over a few years in the 1960s, it never accounted for a very high percentage of names even at its peak.
In 2015, just .022 percent of all female births in the U.S. were Lindas. But in 1947, it had the largest yearly rise ever, accounting for 5.48 percent of all baby girls’ names. This sudden meteoric rise was due to the wild success of one hit single: a 1946 Jack Lawrence song named, appropriately, “Linda.”
“Linda” was written in 1942, but only released in 1946, later nearing the top of the Billboard Juke Box Record Plays charts in 1947. The song was written about then-1-year-old Linda Louise Eastman, later known as Linda McCartney.
Linda peaked in popularity as a baby name a year later in 1948, and it would remain in the top 5 names for girls through 1963. However, by 1954, Linda had already declined to be around half as popular as it was at its peak, having been overtaken at number 1 by Mary, the name it had replaced at the top.
For the historically curious, it can be a fun exercise to go through baby name fads to try and discover what led to a name’s rise in popularity. Another high profile example from pop culture is the name Shirley, spurred on by the child actress Shirley Temple. Shirley peaked as a baby name in 1935. Like Linda, it didn’t take long for it to decline in popularity.
Going by Taylor’s metric, all but one of the top 10 trendiest names of all time were girl’s names. The only top 10 name from male births is Dewey, with peak years at the end of the 19th century. By whatever measure, it does seem to be the case that popular names given to female babies tend to be more ephemeral. A recent compilation of 30 baby name fads by MooseRoots was also mainly names given to girls.
According to a 2009 PNAS study by marketing professor Jonah Berger, this rise-and-fall behavior may actually be the norm and not the exception: “Most names show a period of almost consistent increase in popularity, followed by a decline that leads to abandonment.” Berger’s analysis found that what made names differ is “how quickly their popularity rises and declines.” Berger examined rates of rise and decline, and found that names which became popular faster tended to be abandoned faster as well. Berger also surveyed expectant parents on their attitudes about baby names. Names that gained quick popularity tended to give parents pause. They were “seen as more likely to be short-lived fads,” thereby making parents less likely to adopt them.
Will there be another name like Linda? No and yes. The days when any one name could achieve 5 percent popularity for baby girls seem to be long gone. Top names for girls now hover at around 1 percent, indicative of a much greater overall diversity—and a hesitation to get on a really popular naming bandwagon.
But will parents seek out new names en masse only for those to fall out of favor shortly thereafter? Absolutely. Just as Britney and Miley have declined in recent years, so now Arya and Aria are seeing a bit of Game of Thrones-fueled growth (helped along by the show Pretty Little Liars). What new name will emerge from 2016? Don’t be surprised if a good amount of parents watching Stranger Things this year decide to name their baby girls Eleven.
