Movie fans have gone around and around for decades about whether to classify the 1988 film Die Hard as a Christmas movie. In the last couple of years, that seems to have settled down, and the general consensus is that yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Just not the same way that It's a Wonderful Life or Home Alone is.
Now Den of Geek lays out the case that the 1987 film Lethal Weapon is also a Christmas movie, even more so than Die Hard. Neither film was released anywhere near Christmas, but they are both set during the holiday. The reason Die Hard was set during a Christmas party was because producer Joel Silver insisted on it, as he had for the previous year's Lethal Weapon. His reasoning was sound: any movie with Christmas decorations and Christmas music would be replayed in December, bringing in years of residuals.
Yet there is more than a temporal setting to Lethal Weapon that makes it a Christmas movie. Amid the car chases, gun battles, and general carnage, there is a subplot that takes Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) from a suicidal wreck to a happy man with a friends, somewhat like It's a Wonderful Life. Read what makes Lethal Weapon a Christmas movie at Den of Geek.
We make fun of the Jell-O salad fad of the 20th century because 1. we think of Jell-O as a sweet treat or dessert, and 2. we can't imagine people actually liking something that's so processed and artificial. But cooks who jumped on Jell-O when it was first produced didn't see it that way. It was an affordable way to recreate the earlier, labor intensive aspic dishes that most people had never experienced. And it was natural, up to a point. Aspic, and their vegan alternatives pectin and agar, are natural products even if they were hard to get and weren't used that much before Jell-O came along.
Then after World War II, we got refrigerators and housewives, which led to ridiculously creative Jell-O recipes. Jell-O helped out by developing celery and tomato flavored gelatin. But the madness finally came to an end. You still see Jell-O salads at potlucks occasionally, but they rarely contain eggs, shrimp, or canned veggies anymore. -via Mental Floss
Kudos to this creator.
— Rebecca (@RebeccaReadsWLW) November 21, 2021
The comedy is 🧑🍳💋! pic.twitter.com/V7kuURJghz
Literary TikToker (I'm going to just assume that's a thing for the kids these days, just like wearing an onion on your belt is for my generation) Lizzy imagines a scenario in which different incarnated fiction genres meet for their regular bookclub. They have decidedly firm opinions about the relative quality of themselves.
Notably absent is Alternate History, who was probably too busy accusing competitors of using Alien Space Bats, and Science Fiction, who is still world building instead of plot writing. Western's kids took the car keys away and can't get to the meetings anymore.
-via Rebecca Reads WLW
A Soju Bomb is a cocktail which mixes beer with soju, a Korean grain-based liquor with a very high alcohol content. Simply stirring the liquor into the beer is totally inadequate. The real Soju Bomb experiece begins with balancing the shot of soju over the beer glass on a pair of chopsticks. Knock hard on the table on which it sits to jar the shot loose. To fully prepare your brain for this experience, use something heavy, like your skull. Get your head nicely tenderized so that the booze has pain to numb.
If your shot does not fall in, try again and again, as many times as necessary, to mix the drink. The more times that you hit, the more motivation you gain to complete the drink.
Colonel Henry Ludington was an American commander in the Revolutionary War based in Connecticut. There were around 400 men under his command. On April 26, 1777, Colonel Ludington received a message that the British were attacking the town of Danbury. Time to rally the troops! But since it was April, almost all of them were scattered across Connecticut and an area that is now part of New York, planting their crops. How could he possibly notify them in time?
The Colonel turned to his oldest child, Sybil, who was 16 years old. Sybil Ludington agreed to ride off and find as many soldiers as she could, in the manner that Paul Revere did a couple of years earlier. Sybil, however, had no assistants and no time to prepare as Revere did. By the time she returned, some of the Continental troops were already reporting for duty. However, Sybil was a young woman with no military status, and her feat went unrecognized for so long that we don't even know how true it is. Read about Sybil Ludington at Cracked.
(Image credit: Charlibear7)
Brothers Jim and Will Pattiz run the site More Than Just Parks, dedicated to sharing information on America's National Parks. They've tackled the task of ranking all the parks in a list that may or may not be useful to you on your future travels.
Each of the 63 designated National Parks (National Monuments, Recreation Areas, Forests, etc. were not ranked) were rated in five equally-weighted factors: accessibility, recreation, crowds, amenities, and scenery. It's sad that a park's very attractiveness can lead to a low score due to crowds, but too many tourists can lead to dissatisfaction with the experience. In deciding whether to visit, you'll need to weigh these factors for your own purposes. If a lack of accessibility and amenities don't bother you, you could see the most glorious scenery there is, without crowds, despite a low score on this list.
The top National Park on the list is Olympic National Park in Washington state, with a score of 48 out of 50.
My state's only National Park, Mammoth Cave, ranked abysmally. It got docked for lack of recreational activities, which is true, and for lack of scenery. Seriously, scenery? What can you expect, it's a cave! Bring lights. The park that came in dead last earned that score because it shouldn't even be a National Park. See the full list of rankings, with an explanation for each score and often a video. -via Kottke
You probably know a few things about Josephine Baker. She was an American entertainer who moved to Paris in the 1920s as a teenager and became a sensation for her singing, her cross-eyed comedy, and her dancing, particularly her notorious erotic dance in a skirt made of bananas. During World War II, Baker was a spy for the French Resistance, using her fame to bypass the scrutiny everyday French citizens had to endure. And later on, she adopted a dozen children from all over the world. Those things you know already.
But there was a lot to Baker's life in between those milestones. For instance, she got the name Baker when she married at age 15. That was her second marriage! During the war, Hermann Goering personally tried to murder her, and nearly succeeded before she made a daring escape. Read these stories and quite a bit more about Josephine Baker's astonishing life at Messy Nessy Chic.
Kransekage means wreath cake in English. These cakes are made in Scandinavia out of concentric circles of baked marzipan, and are served for holidays and special occasions. But in Denmark, if the occasion is really special, like a wedding, the cake takes on a unique shape. This is the overflødighedshorn, or cornucopia cake, a Danish tradition since the late 1700s.
The horn of plenty, or cornucopia, symbolizes good fortune, wealth, a bountiful harvest, and generosity. These Danish wedding cakes are displayed overflowing with a bounty of fruits, candies, or smaller pastries. Overflødighedshorn is an expensive confection, painstakingly made by bakers who are artists. Each ring of the horn must be baked in just the right shape to be assembled into a gravity-defying curve, held together by a bit of chocolate. Read how they do it at Atlas Obscura.
And if you ever see a overflødighedshorn, better take a picture, because this work of art will be eaten!
🎬 The Shining was released more than 40 years ago, but we're still finding intricate details that make the horror movie so good. In "The Invisible Horror of the Shining", Kaptainkristian explains how the brilliant music and sound editing helped elevate the movie's status as one of the most influential horror films ever made.
🥧 The Ouroboros pie is a pumpkin pie that eats itself.
🐤 Ornithologists have finally found what they've been looking for since 2000: the "Kill Bill Tanager," which got its name because it looks just like Uma Thurman's yellow jumpsuit in the Quentin Tarantino's hit movie.
🪑 Enric Miralles' furniture don't just sit around: they're dynamic, shape-shifting things.
🎵 Did you have a good Thanksgiving? Perhaps it would've been better had Weird Al Yankovic came and sang to your family. That's what Penn Holderness imagined, and we couldn't agree more.
🍼 Have you ever seen a baby armadillo? Well, here's your chance.
😂 Here are hundreds of funny T-shirts that'll tickle your funny bone.
More neat posts: Pop Culturista, Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Supa Fluffy and Laughosaurus.
Need a neat Christmas gift? Check out the NeatoShop for tons of awesome tees!
Psst! If you're looking for a neat T-shirt for yourself or for your loved ones as a 🎄 Christmas present that they can wear and enjoy all year long, check out the NeatoShop's Black Friday Sale: Save up to 20% on ALL tees sitewide!
But you'd better hurry: this sale ends Friday night!
Don't miss: Funny T-shirt, Fantasy T-Shirts, Sci-Fi T-Shirts, and Ugly Christmas Sweater-Style T-Shirts
The science of artificial flavor allows us to taste things that we'd normally never eat. Prank marketing group MSCHF (previously at Neatorama) ran with that idea and offers us Illegal Chips. This is a limited-edition selection of (possibly potato) chips that come in the flavors of forbidden food. You can try horse meat chips, fugu fish chips, and casu marzu chips. Casu marzu is the Sardinian cheese that contains sheep milk and live maggots.
Wanna try these Illegal Chips out? It will cost you around $4 for a 3-ounce bag, but only until they sell out. There are risks involved, even though the chips don't contain any of the foods they purport to taste like. One the one hand, they could taste awful. On the other hand, you might find you like one of them so much that it induces a craving for a dish you can't obtain, or obtain easily.
You can watch a video of a taste test of the fugu-flavored chips at Boing Boing.
The a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama) presents their annual Chanukah production! This year, it's a medley of familiar tunes from the Broadway musical West Side Story. The six singers channel the Sharks and the Jets as they sing about the Jewish Festival of Lights and the history behind it. The video was appropriately recorded on the streets of Manhattan. While you know the songs from the 1961 movie, the newest film version of West Side Story is due in theaters on December 10. Chanukah begins at sundown on Sunday and lasts until the evening of December 6. Chag Chanukah same’ach!
PS: I have often spelled the festival as Hanukkah, but used Chanukah this time as that's the spelling that appears in the video. Both are considered correct.
The turducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck that was stuffed with a chicken, all deboned, separated only by a layer of sausage stuffing. It was a regional delicacy in Louisiana before 1996. New Orleans butcher Glenn Mistich had built somewhat of a reputation for providing turduckens, so he was enlisted to make one for legendary sports announcer John Madden. That happened when the St. Louis Rams played the New Orleans Saints on December 1, 1996. Madden was a well-known food enthusiast, and made no bones about what he found delicious as he narrated football games. Mistich went to great lengths to deliver the best turducken possible to the Superdome before the game. After a run-in with security, he delivered the dish, posed for a picture with Madden, and left.
It was an unwritten rule that Madden got to eat first, but the realization had hit that there were no utensils or napkins.
After a good 30 seconds of people scouring the booth and coming up empty, Madden couldn't take it anymore. He dug his hands into the turducken, ripping chunks off and eating them as the bemused crew laughed and asked him how it was. "I love it," Madden said between mouthfuls. "I absolutely love it."
Madden kept eating the turducken through the game, and made the dish a national phenomenon. The story of that day takes us through the history of the turducken, Mistich's method of creating them, and what that game meant for turducken chefs in the decades since. And it's pretty funny, too. Read the whole story at ESPN. -via Digg
A team of restorers in England were preparing for a building repair when they discovered some well-preserved Tudor wall paintings. The artworks were hidden away under layers of plaster, in a semi-derelict parlor block, until they noticed signs of early wall paintings. According to Anna Keay, director of the Landmark Trust, a British building conservation nonprofit leading the restoration, “never in my own 27 years of working in historic buildings have I ever witnessed a discovery like this.”
Image credit: Tom Burrows; courtesy of Landmark Trust
Photographer Slim Aarons is known for showing the public a glimpse of the lives of the rich and beautiful. The late photographer worked for publications such as Town & Country, Harper's Bazaar, and Life magazine, and has taken wonderful photos of aristocrats and socialites. From champagne parties on snowy retreats to lounging in different villas around the globe, his photos exude luxury, elegance, and money. In a new book discussing Aarons’ work, Shawn Waldron and his colleague shared that instead of taking the photos to celebrate or critique the lavish lifestyles these people had, he was merely driven by curiosity.
Image credit: Slim Aarons
