fact
Alaskans raise herds of reindeer on massive grazing lands, but for the most part, reindeer is an unpopular food in the non-Alaskan states. What’s the deal?
In this MinuteEarth video, we learn some of the challenges of introducing reindeer into the American diet.
Further reading: 11 Things You Might Not Know About Reindeer.
December 25, 2016 – 12:00pm
You know not to get them wet, expose them to bright light, or feed them after midnight. But here are 21 things you might not know about Joe Dante’s creature-filled dark comedy classic, which turns 30 years old today.
Truth be told, it’s Steven Spielberg who is really responsible for the introduction of the PG-13 rating. Both Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which he directed, and Gremlins, which he executive produced, were rated PG upon their release, and subsequently criticized for not being kid-appropriate. To avoid being slapped with an R rating in the future, Spielberg suggested that the MPAA add a rating between PG and R. On August 10, 1984, Red Dawn became the first movie to be released with the new PG-13 rating.
Warner Bros
The original Gremlins script, written by Chris Columbus, was much, much darker. Case in point: Earlier scenes included the Gremlins eating Billy’s dog then decapitating his mom and throwing her head down the stairs. Spielberg, director Joe Dante, and Warner Bros. were all in agreement that they should tone down the gore in order to make the movie more family-friendly.
He wrote it as a spec script and writing sample. It found its way into the hands of Spielberg, who explained that, “It’s one of the most original things I’ve come across in many years, which is why I bought it.”
“By day, it was pleasant enough,” Columbus noted of the Manhattan loft that he lived in while attending film school at NYU. “But at night, what sounded like a platoon of mice would come out and to hear them skittering around in the blackness was really creepy.” Those mice inspired the Gremlins.
Much of the chatter spoken by Gizmo and the Gremlins is ad libbed, or in reaction to whatever is happening in the scene. Keeping the dialogue loose also allowed the filmmakers to localize the dialogue for the film’s various international markets.
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It was the suggestion of voice actor Frank Welker, who voiced Stripe in Gremlins (and Fred on Scooby-Doo before that), that Howie Mandel be hired for the role.
The song was written by Jerry Goldsmith, who hired a 13-year-old girl who was a member of his synagogue to sing it for the film.
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Yes, this is the same Michael Winslow who is better known as “the guy who makes all those funny noises in the Police Academy film series.”
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There was a lot of buzz surrounding Burton after the success of his short film, Frankenweenie—so much so that Spielberg considered him to direct Gremlins. But the fact that Burton had yet to direct a feature film worked against him, and the gig was given to Joe Dante. A year later, Burton released his first theatrical feature, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
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Because there was no CGI at the time of Gremlins, the creatures were animatronic puppets, each of which took a major chunk out of the film’s budget. Zach Galligan revealed that when leaving the set each night, security personnel asked the cast and crew to open the trunks of their cars to ensure that they hadn’t stolen any of the props.
Creature creator Chris Walas used balloons in an innovative fashion: they were the secret VFX ingredient when the new Mogwai popped out of Gizmo’s body, and he used a balloon again to explode the Gremlin in the microwave.
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Given her sweet demeanor as Kate, it’s hard to imagine that not everyone was on board with casting Cates. But her infamous topless scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High gave the studio pause about putting her in the lead.
Though there were better-known actors like Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson in contention for the role of Billy, Spielberg cast his vote for Galligan, based on the chemistry he and Cates displayed during auditions.
By now, Spielberg’s E.T.-themed logo for Amblin Entertainment is familiar to all moviegoers. But Gremlins marked its first on-screen appearance.
If the fictional town of Kingston Falls in Gremlins looks familiar, that’s because it was filmed on the same set used for the town of Hill Valley in Back to the Future, released a year later.
Warner Bros.
Offbeat as it may be, Gremlins is definitely a Christmas movie, and as such had been planned for release during the Christmas season. But when Warner Bros. realized it didn’t have a “summer movie” to put up against Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Ghostbusters, it moved up the release date. The film performed well and ended up being the fourth highest-grossing film of 1984, behind Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
As a nod to the popular urban legend, Kate tells the story about how her father died while dressed up as Santa Claus and climbing down the chimney. When the rough cut was complete, both Spielberg and the Warner Bros. executives wanted it cut, as it wasn’t clear whether it was meant to be sad or funny. Dante insisted that that’s what made it a perfect metaphor for the film itself, and insisted it be kept in. In Roger Ebert’s three-star review of the film, he singled out this scene in particular, citing her story as being “in the great tradition of 1950s sick jokes.”
At the end of the film, Gizmo saves the day by pulling up a window blind and exposing Stripe to sunlight. Originally, Gizmo lifted the first blind, followed by Billy. Spielberg suggested the scene be edited so that it was clear that it’s Gizmo, not Billy, who is the movie’s hero.
Warner Bros
It was also at Spielberg’s suggestion that Gizmo’s role in the film grew. Originally, it’s the cute little Mogwai pet himself who transforms into Stripe the Gremlin. But Spielberg knew that audiences would want to see as much of Gizmo as possible, so he withdrew the idea so that they would appear as totally separate characters.
Warner Bros
Though Gremlins did spawn a sequel (1990’s Gremlins II: The Next Batch), there’s been much talk in recent years about a reboot of the original. In April 2014, Ain’t It Cool News reported that Warner Bros. had placed the film on the remake fast track.
In a 2012 interview with Screen Rant, Columbus noted: “I think it’s impossible to re-create [Gremlins] in a CGI environment. I think it will inevitably lose some of its charm. Those are edgy Muppets in a sense and you don’t want to lose that sense of anarchy that those gremlins had, because behind the scenes are 25 puppeteers making them to come to life.”
December 25, 2016 – 10:00am
Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 260th installment in the series.
“The third war-time Christmas … No one talks about peace any more,” wrote Piete Kuhr, a German teenager living in East Prussia, in her diary entry on December 23, 1916. Kuhr gave voice to a bleak realization shared across Europe, as the wracked and bleeding continent limped to the end of one dismal year, and fearfully contemplated another promising to be even worse—although no one could predict just what it held in store.
A few months before, in September 1916, Alois Schnelldorfer, a Bavarian soldier, warned his parents: “I am certain that we have not gone through the worst yet; things will still get worse. Unfortunately, once war has started, it cannot easily be stopped … the war will not end any time soon. It is inevitable that we will have [another] Christmas at war.” On the other side of the battle lines, Hazur Singh, an Indian soldier serving with the British Army in France, prophesied in a letter to his mother dated November 30, 1916: “The war will not be finished for a very long time. It will certainly not be finished before 1918. My regiment will certainly not return.”
These grim predictions were confirmed in mid-December 1916, when Germany made a public offer to begin peace negotiations with the Allies, only to have it dismissed out of hand. In fact, Germany had no real intention of following through: the bogus peace proposal was simply meant to sway public opinion at home and abroad, especially in neutral countries, by shifting the blame for continuing hostilities on to the Allies. In truth it was merely a preamble to a brutal new intensification of the German war effort.
The offer of unconditional peace negotiations, sent to the Allies via neutral intermediaries December 12, 1916, was intended in large part for domestic consumption in Germany. After the German Social Democratic Party broke into two factions over the issue of whether to vote the government more war credits in late 1915, the moderate wing (which continued voting credits for the war effort, in contrast to the radical wing led by Karl Liebknecht) demanded evidence that Germany’s leaders were actively working for peace as the price of their continued support.
While hoping to placate the moderate socialists, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was coming under mounting pressure from the new military high command, led by chief of the general staff Paul von Hindenburg and his quartermaster general (in fact a close advisor on strategy) Erich Ludendorff, to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, most recently halted following American diplomatic protests prompted by the sinking of the Sussex in March 1916. Encouraged by Admiral von Tirpitz, the creator of Germany’s prewar navy, Hindenburg and Ludendorff believed that the growing fleet of German U-boats could bring Britain to its knees by cutting off access to weapons, food, fuel, and other supplies crucial to the war effort imported from overseas—especially the United States.
To achieve this, however, they demanded that German submarine commanders once again be allowed to sink any and all ships, including unarmed merchantmen carrying neutral flags, without warning. Of course this would once again put Germany on a collision course with the United States, which had twice threatened to break off diplomatic relations (a thinly veiled threat of war) over unrestricted submarine warfare.
The peace offer of December 1916 was Bethmann Hollweg’s last, vain attempt to square the circle. By publicly offering to begin peace negotiations with the Allies—which he knew they would almost certainly refuse—the chancellor hoped to cast the blame for the continuation of the war on the Allies in the eyes of the American public and other neutral nations. Then Germany could claim it had no choice but to resort to extreme measures, including unrestricted submarine warfare, to subdue the warmongers. In other words, the sinking of neutral vessels by German U-boats would really be the fault of the Allies, prompted by their rejection of the German olive branch.
Unfortunately for Germany nobody bought this version of events. The German offer to begin peace negotiations was “unconditional,” meaning that the Central Powers would continue to occupy Belgium, northern France, Poland, and most of the Balkans while the two sides discussed peace terms. As the German leadership well knew, this was a non-starter for the Allies, who stipulated that the Central Powers must withdraw to pre-war borders before peace negotiations could begin (this is to say nothing of conflicting demands by the Allies and Central Powers for reparations and indemnities, which only made a real negotiated peace more improbable).
Following the Allies’ swift rejection of the bogus peace offer, the stage was set for Germany’s ill-fated resumption of U-boat warfare—and with it, America’s entry into the First World War.
The close of 1916 also brought the end of two of the bloodiest battles in history: Verdun and the Somme. Both battles had been intended to finish the war, or at least set in motion the events that would do so, but both fell tragically short of this goal. What they accomplished, rather, was simply death on a scale defying comprehension.
At Verdun, Germany’s fruitless attempt to deliver a knockout blow to France, the French suffered 337,231 casualties, including 162,308 dead and missing (with most of the missing also dead, blown out of existence). For their part the Germans counted 337,000 casualties, including 100,000 dead and missing.
The almost even number of casualties is testimony to the abject failure of the plan formulated by the former German chief of the general staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, to lure the French into a battle of attrition—a failure which finally led to his dismissal and replacement by Hindenburg, the hero of Tannenberg. Indeed, one of the first actions taken by Hindenburg and Ludendorff on assuming the high command in September 1916 was the canceling of the Verdun offensive. But they couldn’t prevent the French from launching their own bloody counter-attack, which pushed the Germans back close to their starting positions by December 18, considered the official end of the battle.
Verdun is forever paired with the Somme, the Allied “Big Push” intended to break through the German defensive line in northern France and reopen the war of movement, setting the stage for Germany’s final defeat. The original plan for a massive Anglo-French joint offensive was derailed by the German onslaught at Verdun, which forced the French to withdraw many of their troops to defend the symbolic fortress city. The British bravely carried on with the Somme offensive at the request of the French, desperate to take the pressure off Verdun, but multiple failures in planning and execution resulted in disaster.
After the opening horror of July 1, the Somme quickly devolved into another brutal slugging match in the mud, with tens of thousands of lives sacrificed for gains rarely exceeding a few kilometers at a time. Each subsequent “Big Push” at the Somme was an epic battle in its own right, burning the names of tiny villages into the memory of the British public forever, including Bazentin Ridge, Pozières, Morval and Thiepval Ridge.
The combat debut of tanks at Flers-Courcelette raised British morale and spread terror in the German ranks, but failed to deliver a decisive blow, due to their small numbers and untested tactics.
By the time it ended on November 18, 1916, the Battle of the Somme had cost Britain 420,000 casualties (including many troops from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and South Africa; above, Australian troops enjoy Christmas dinner at the Somme), the French 200,000, and the Germans at least 434,000. Altogether over 300,000 soldiers from both sides died at the Somme. The combined death toll of Verdun and the Somme, approaching 600,000, is comparable to all four years of the American Civil War.
The famous Christmas Truce of 1914, and limited local truces during Christmas 1915, apparently weren’t repeated in 1916, although once again there were reports of troops disobeying their officers by attempting to fraternize with the enemy. These isolated incidents suggest that there were still feelings of goodwill across the battle lines—but for the most part any signs of untoward good cheer were nipped in the bud, as this account of a short-lived truce around New Year’s Day from Francis Buckley, a British junior officer, demonstrates. After a few signs of Christmas camaraderie, according to Buckley:
“… on New Year’s Day it went even further. A soldier of the 5th N.F., after signals from the Germans, went out into No Man’s Land and had a drink with a party of them. After this a small party of the enemy approached our trenches without arms and with evidently friendly intentions. But they were warned off and not allowed to enter our trenches. This little affair, I believe, led to the soldier being court-martialled for holding intercourse with the enemy.”
In fact informal ceasefire agreements—without actual fraternization—continued to be a regular feature of trench warfare throughout the year, especially in quiet sectors of the front. But these provided no relief from the basic misery of living in a muddy, flooded ditch. As luck would have it, the winter of 1916 was one of the coldest on record, and across Europe growing shortages of food and fuel were felt both on the home front and in the trenches.
In many places along the Western Front, ice alternated with mud according to the temperature. John Jackson, a British junior officer, wrote of an everyday occurrence on the Somme, where the inescapable mud wasn’t merely uncomfortable, but actually life-threatening:
“… our attention was drawn to two men in a trench we were passing. On examination we found they were both stuck hard and fast in the mud in which they had been standing up to their waists for some hours. They were members of a party who had been relieved about midnight, and now, they had given up hopes of being rescued alive. Their strength was done, and our efforts to haul them out were of no use, until we leaned over the edge of the trench and unbuckled their equipments, and loosened the greatcoats they wore… Just a little further on we found two more fast in the mud, and to these also we gave a helping hand…”
Elsewhere on the Western Front, Louis Barthas, a barrel-maker from southern France, recorded typical conditions as snow alternated with rain in one particularly brutal week of December 1916:
“During these five days the torrential rain and snow never let up. The walls of the trench were sagging; the precarious shelters which men had dug for themselves collapsed in certain places. The trenches filled with water. It’s useless to try to describe the sufferings of the men, without shelter, soaked, pierced with cold, badly fed—no pen could tell their tale. You had to have lived through these hours, these days, these nights, to know how interminable they were in times like these. Proceeding in nightly work details or to and from the front lines, men slipped and fell into shell holes filled with water and weren’t able to climb out; they drowned or froze to death, their hands grasping at the edges of the craters in a final effort to pull themselves out.”
As always, the miserable weather and living conditions were compounded by the other non-human foe of the ordinary soldier—boredom. Henry Jones, a British officer serving in the supply services behind the line, wrote home on November 22, 1916: “It is just a sordid affair of mud, shell-holes, corpses, grime and filth. Even in billets the thing remains intensely dull and uninspiring. One just lives, eats, drinks, sleeps, and all apparently to no purpose. The monotony is excessive.”
Again and again, in letters home soldiers emphasized that it was impossible to fully describe their experiences at the front, frequently adding that their listeners should consider this a blessing. Thus Asim Ullah, an Indian soldier serving in France, wrote home on October 16, 1916:
May God keep your eyes from beholding the state of things here. There are heaps and heaps of dead bodies, the sight of which upsets me. The stench is so overwhelming that one can, with difficulty, endure it for ten or fifteen minutes … God does not show any pity for them in their awful trial. In fact, the state of affairs is such that, on beholding it, one’s power to describe it ebbs away.
Subjected to these indescribable conditions, many men found themselves fundamentally changed, and rarely for the better—another common theme of letters and diary entries. On hearing about a gruesome accident at home, Clifford Wells, a Canadian officer, wrote to a friend on November 5, 1916: “It must have been quite a shock to you when your street-car killed the auto driver. It would have been to me a year ago, but now bloody death is a familiar sight. I am a different man to the one who enlisted in Montreal fourteen months ago. No one can go through the day’s work out here and remain unchanged.”
Similarly, in Erich Maria Remarque’s famous memoir and novel All Quiet On the Western Front, the protagonist Paul finds himself an alien when he goes on leave back home in Germany:
“I imagined leave would be different from this. Indeed, it was different a year ago. It is I of course that have changed in the interval. There lies a gulf between that time and to-day. At that time I still knew nothing about the war, we had only been in quiet sectors. But now I see that I have been crushed without knowing it. I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world.”
Even non-combatants found themselves hardened by the catastrophe still unfolding, which rendered death commonplace, even trivial. On that note the Conde de Ballobar, the Spanish consul in Jerusalem, wrote in his diary on March 27, 1917: “Assuredly everything is evolving and changing in this world: Before, I wasn’t capable of seeing a mouse die, and now, I not only watch typhus victims dying but can hear all about it almost with indifference…”
In this context it’s no surprise that many thoughtful individuals also found themselves questioning long-held religious beliefs. The British diarist Vera Brittain, now working as a nurse, wrote to her brother Edward in May 1916: “… I must admit that when, as I am doing at present, I have to deal with men who have only half a face left & the other side bashed in out of recognition, or part of their skull torn away, or both feet off, or an arm blown off at the shoulder, & all these done only a few days ago, it makes me begin to question the existence of a merciful God …”
Often the undermining of traditional religious beliefs created a spiritual vacuum, which (depending on the individual) might be filled by folk superstitions, or in some cases even occult beliefs. Thus Hanns Bachtold, a Swiss ethnologist, told an audience at the University of Frankfurt on October 30, 1916:
“As the war drags on, the opinions of small religious societies and pseudo-scientific circles are spreading more and more next to the religion represented by the Church … With these new religious communities, some very old ideas and practices that were thought to have been forgotten for a long time resurfaced, mainly caused by the concern about keeping oneself alive. These ideas had held peoples in previous centuries spellbound and were still lying dormant in our people … For these changes mirror exactly all the fear and the misery and the hope that the war has caused in the people’s inner lives …”
Bachtold noted the spread of folks superstitions including protective ointments, shooting spells, protective shirts, and chain letters. In the same vein R. Derby Holmes, an American volunteer serving with the British Army, observed:
“Soldiers are rather prone to superstitions. Relieved of all responsibility and with most of their thinking done for them, they revert surprisingly quick to a state of more or less savage mentality. Perhaps it would be better to call the state childlike. At any rate they accumulate a lot of fool superstitions and hang to them … Practically every soldier carries some kind of mascot or charm. A good many are crucifixes and religious tokens. Some are coins.”
As Holmes’ description indicates, some of the good luck charms were standard religious talismans, widely accepted by Christian believers before the war—but soldiers were increasingly fascinated by ancient symbols associated with the strange occult beliefs circulating before the war (the legacy, in part, of European obscurantist societies concerned with alchemy or other forms of secret knowledge, as well as the spiritualist craze which spread to Europe from the United States and Britain in the nineteenth century).
Often enough occult beliefs went hand in hand with racist ideologies, which asserted the supremacy of white “Aryans” over other races, influenced by the bizarre cosmology fabricated by spiritualists like the Russian medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, which included reincarnation, pre-human species of super beings and secret underground cities. Reflecting Blavatsky’s interest in ancient Hindu and Tibetan mysticism, one of the favorite symbols of these marginal but growing groups was the swastika, which stood for the fundamentally cyclical nature of the universe as it passed through multiple phases of cosmic history (the direction of the arms indicating whether the universe was in an ascending or descending stage of evolution).
Influenced by another proponent of occult racism, the Austrian theosophist Guido von List, some German soldiers wore swastika charms into battle, either as a protective amulet or a promise of reincarnation if they were killed. However the use of the swastika wasn’t limited to German soldiers, as it was widely considered an emblem of good luck in Europe and America and employed in personal charms, even when it wasn’t associated with occult beliefs.
See the previous installment or all entries.
December 25, 2016 – 12:00am
Have you ever stared at your weather app in frustration because it’s showing current weather for somewhere dozens of miles from where you live? You’re not alone. Most of us live pretty far from official weather observing stations, which are usually located at airports or National Weather Service offices scattered around the country. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to become an amateur scientist using the smartphone in your pocket or dedicating a tiny part of your yard to science.
Weather radar is arguably the best piece of technology we have to predict bad storms, but even this advanced life-saving equipment has its limitations. The greatest restraint is that radar can’t see what precipitation reaches the ground. That’s because a radar dish sends out a beam of energy on a slight angle, and combined with the curvature of the earth, the beam climbs higher off the ground the farther away from the dish it travels.
Since the radar can only see what’s happening a few thousand feet above our heads, mPing is an app that lets you help meteorologists “see” what kind of weather is actually reaching the ground. This free app, available for Apple and Android, lets you use your phone’s location feature to report current conditions to meteorologists in real time. If it starts snowing, filing a report with your mPing app will tell meteorologists when snow showing up on the radar is actually reaching the streets. Alerting them if snow changes to freezing rain will help others by allowing scientists to adjust warnings and forecasts accordingly. You can even report tornadoes, hail, and wind damage.
One little app can let you help advance the science of meteorology, and your reports many even help save lives during a severe weather event.
Having official weather reporting stations spaced out by dozens of miles across the country is fine for tracking temperature trends or overall wind patterns, but it’s not very useful when you want to keep track of heavy rain or heavy snow. Precipitation is extremely localized—we’ve all seen one of those thunderstorms where it’s raining down the street but bone dry where you’re standing. It helps to have lots of high-quality measuring stations to track storms like that.
That’s where CoCoRaHS comes in. Short for Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network, CoCoRaHS is a network of thousands of citizen-run weather observing stations across the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas. Participants in the CoCoRaHS network use official rain gauges and snow rulers to measure precipitation right in their backyard. These gauges are immensely helpful for meteorologists trying to figure out how much snow fell in a certain town or how much rain has fallen over certain areas—a crucial factor in determining how prone an area is to flash flooding in future storms.
Participating in CoCoRaHS isn’t free—you have to purchase an official rain gauge, which costs about $30—but it’s worth it if you’re dedicated to keeping track of the weather for yourself and your neighbors.
If you’re really interested in the weather, you can go one step further and purchase your own personal weather station to set up on your property. Most decent personal weather stations go for about $100 and can measure temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, and automatically measure rainfall. Some personal weather stations allow you to upload the data to the internet in real-time, which is immensely helpful for networks run by organizations like Wunderground and Weatherbug.
The only catch is that you have to have a yard large enough to properly site a weather station. If the station is too close to a building, trees, or fencing, the obstructions will interfere with your measurements and the data won’t be accurate.
If you’ve ever heard reports of severe weather on the news talking about a “trained spotter,” they’re talking about one of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have participated in official storm spotter training. SKYWARN is the official weather spotter training program run by the National Weather Service (NWS). The program is a short, free course run by local NWS offices several times every year. It teaches you the basics of spotting severe and hazardous weather, and properly reporting that weather back to the NWS.
SKYWARN spotters are a critical part of the early warning system in the United States. Accurate reports of tornadoes, damaging winds, hail, and flooding sent to the NWS by trained storm spotters have helped meteorologists issue severe weather warnings with enough time to save lives. The program is worth it even if you don’t plan to go out chasing storms on the Plains—severe weather can happen anywhere, and knowing the difference between a harmless cloud and a lethal tornado could save someone’s life.
If you want to participate in SKYWARN training, keep an eye out for announcements from your local NWS office for training days. You can also participate in free online SKYWARN training through the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which runs a treasure trove of online learning modules for everyone from weather enthusiasts to meteorologists brushing up on advanced topics.
December 25, 2016 – 6:00am
Woodworker Frank Howarth makes Christmas ornaments each year, and he shows us the process in his videos. The videos aren’t simple how-to presentations, though; they’re little works of art, featuring timelapse, very little language, and even stop-motion photography. This year’s ornament video is no exception.
In this 11-minute video, Howarth makes what he calls an “inside-out Christmas ornament,” complete with a mini-Christmas tree inside. It’s fascinating to watch a master at work, especially when he gets into wood turning on a lathe. He also intercuts the process of selecting and cutting down his family’s Christmas tree at a tree farm. Tune in, relax, and enjoy.
If you liked that, here are some previous ornament videos: Snow Bell ornament, Inside Out ornament (different from this year’s), Segmented ornament, and Another Segmented ornament.
December 25, 2016 – 4:00am
The Beatles are one of history’s most influential rock bands, but unless you’re a music history buff, there’s a chance you don’t know a ton about the Fab Four. In the video above, mental_floss List Show host John Green doles out 28 obscure facts about the careers and lives of Ringo, Paul, George, and John. Find out whether or not the “the” in “The Beatles” is supposed to be capitalized, which concert two band members’ future wives both attended, what the puzzling lyrics sung in “I Am The Walrus” really mean, and more. (Just don’t be offended by how many times Green compares them to One Direction.)
Banner image: Getty Images
December 25, 2016 – 12:00am
Over the years, lots of amazing things have happened on December 25. The birth of Jesus Christ, however, was not one of them. J.C.’s arrival—the precise timing of which remains unknown—wasn’t pegged to 12/25 until 336 CE. While it’s certainly come to dominate its calendar square, Christmas isn’t the only reason to celebrate the date. What follows are 25 other incidents and milestones that make December 25 a day worth commemorating with silly songs and colored lights.
Originally taking effect in 45 BCE and traditionally considered reintroduced to England in 597, it took a little over 200 years for England to fully commit to Julius Caesar’s preferred means of measuring time (and they were nearly another 200 years behind the rest of Europe in switching over to the Gregorian calendar in the 1750s). At least Caesar’s hairstyle, on the other hand, never goes out of style.
In his role, the man also known as Charles the Great and “the father of Europe” helped to foster the Carolingian Renaissance—a glorious explosion of culture and intellect nobody has ever heard of.
Ol’ Chris turned lemons to lemonade, using timber from the ship to build a fort near the modern Haitian town of Limonade.
Some 270 years later, Americans still don’t know what the hell those numbers mean.
German farmer and amateur astronomer Johann Georg Palitzsch spotted the fireball, confirming Edmond Halley’s theory of 76-year cycles. Before that, everyone had figured it was driven by willy-nilly by demons or elves or something.
He kept telling his men what a righteous painting it would make one day.
He removed a 22 pound ovarian tumor, but the hardest part was probably getting insurance approval.
This would’ve been a good day to get on the waitlist for Hamilton tickets.
And then, a few days later, he celebrated his 60th birthday by throwing a party for 300 of his grandchildren’s closest friends.
Mary Stillwell was just 16 when she wed the inventor, who apparently neglected his family in favor of his work. Unless you live in a house without light bulbs, don’t judge.
The magnum opus of the “March King” was declared the official march of the United States in 1987.
America’s first bobsled track built to international standards is on the National Register of Historic Places. Sadly, the gift shop doesn’t sell “I’m a Luger, Baby” T-shirts.
The show was Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, and a critic/color commentator talked through most of it.
He was promptly swaddled in Hawaiian shirts, baptized in tequila, and worshipped by future yuppies in the nursery.
If Pete Best ever gets a time machine, he’s making sure Richard Starkey gets a tuba instead.
The trial portion of the film takes up twice as much time as in the book because star Gregory Peck demanded more screen time.
The pair never wed, but Asher can say she inspired such Beatles classics as “And I Love Her” and “Here, There and Everywhere.” Plus, she avoided being in Wings.
Nothing terrible happened, which is why you’ve never seen a movie about it.
Thanks to his iconic “Tramp” character, the silent film star remains a hero to well-meaning bumblers with funny mustaches.
Two blokes in a Freight Rover Leyland Sherpa drove Great Britain from bottom (Land’s End) to top (John o’ Groat’s, Scotland) in four days, likely singing Wham! all the way.
This was a full 10 degrees colder than a brass toilet seat in the Yukon.
Six years later, he starred in a Pizza Hut commercial.
Seinfeld taught us we’re all terrible people living meaningless lives. We miss it still.
The New Mexico University placekicker attempted an extra point against UCLA in the Las Vegas Bowl, but it was blocked. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.
The “hardest working man in showbiz” finally got a break.
All images via Getty.
December 24, 2016 – 10:00pm
While January will see dozens of contemporary classic films like The Shining and E.T. making their way to Netflix, it also means that some of your favorite movies and television shows must go. Here’s everything leaving Netflix in January. Spoiler alert: You’d better get your Saved by the Bell fix in now!
January 1
30 for 30: Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks
30 for 30: No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson
30 for 30: The Day the Series Stopped
30 for 30: Jordan Rides the Bus
30 for 30: Without Bias
30 for 30: Once Brothers
30 for 30: Bernie and Ernie
30 for 30: Requiem for the Big East
30 for 30: The Price of Gold
Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein
Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman
The Amityville Horror
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December 24, 2016 – 4:00pm
If the thought of planning Christmas dinner makes you nervous, be glad you weren’t born in the Renaissance. The earliest known published Christmas menu included pork, beef, goose, lark, pheasant, venison, oysters, swan, woodcock, and “a kid with a pudding in his belly,” to name just a few dishes.
This is according to The Accomplisht Cook, written by Robert May in 1660. May was an English chef who trained in France and cooked for nobility throughout his life. In a section titled “A bill of fare for Christmas Day and how to set the meat in order,” May suggests 39 dishes split over two courses, plus oysters, oranges, lemons, and jellies for dessert. The menu is surprising not only because of its size, but because it contains so many proteins—there are 11 different types of birds alone—and not much else. Well, unless you count pastry. There’s lots of pastry, too.
Oysters
1. A collar of brawn [pork that is rolled, tied, and boiled in wine and seasonings].
2. Stewed Broth of Mutton marrow bones.
3. A grand Sallet [salad].
4. A pottage [thick stew] of caponets [young castrated roosters].
5. A breast of veal in stoffado [stuffed veal].
6. A boil’d partridge.
7. A chine [a cut of meat containing backbone] of beef, or sirloin roast. Here’s May’s recipe:
To roast a Chine, Rib, Loin, Brisket, or Fillet of Beef
Draw them with parsley, rosemary, tyme, sweet marjoram, sage, winter savory, or lemon, or plain without any of them, fresh or salt, as you please; broach it, or spit it, roast it and baste it with butter; a good chine of beef will ask six hours roasting.For the sauce take strait tops of rosemary, sage-leaves, picked parsley, tyme, and sweet marjoram; and strew them in wine vinegar, and the beef gravy; or otherways with gravy and juice of oranges and lemons. Sometimes for change in saucers of vinegar and pepper.
8. Minced pies.
9. A Jegote [sausage] of mutton with anchove sauce.
10. A made dish of sweet-bread (Here’s a recipe from A New Booke of Cookerie by John Murrell, published in 1615: Boyle, or roast your Sweet-bread, and put into it a fewe Parboyld Currens, a minst Date, the yolkes of two new laid Egs, a piece of a Manchet grated fine. Season it with a little Pepper, Salt, Nutmeg, and Sugar, wring in the iuyce of an Orenge, or Lemon, and put it betweene two sheetes of puft-paste, or any other good Paste: and eyther bake it, or frye it, whether you please.)
11. A swan roast.
12. A pasty of venison.
13. A kid with a pudding in his belly.
14. A steak pie.
15. A hanch of venison roasted.
16. A turkey roast and stuck with cloves.
17. A made dish of chickens in puff paste.
18. Two bran geese roasted, one larded [larding is inserting or weaving strips of fat in the meat, sometimes with a needle].
19. Two large capons, one larded.
20. A Custard.
Oranges and Lemons
1. A young lamb or kid.
2. Two couple of rabbits, two larded.
3. A pig souc’t [sauced] with tongues.
4. Three ducks, one larded.
5. Three pheasants, 1 larded.
6. A Swan Pye [the showpiece: a pie with the dead swan’s head, neck, and wings sticking up from it].
7. Three brace of partridge, three larded.
8. Made dish in puff paste.
9. Bolonia sausages, and anchoves, mushrooms, and Cavieate, and pickled oysters in a dish.
10. Six teels, three larded.
11. A Gammon of Westphalia Bacon.
12. Ten plovers, five larded.
13. A quince pye, or warden pie [pears or quinces peeled and poached in syrup, then baked whole in a pie].
14. Six woodcocks, 3 larded.
15. A standing Tart in puff-paste, preserved fruits, Pippins, &c.
16. A dish of Larks.
17. Six dried neats [calf] tongues
18. Sturgeon.
19. Powdered [salted] Geese.
Jellies.
And you know, nothing says Christmas like powdered geese and jellies.
This piece originally ran in 2013.
December 24, 2016 – 2:00pm
