With his series Lost in the Pond, Laurence Brown has made a career of comparing the place he grew up in, the UK, with the United States, where he has lived for the past fifteen years or so. Both places celebrate Christmas in a big way, but it turns out the most popular songs played on the radio over his lifetime are different, depending on the country he was in at the time. It never occurred to me to wonder whether the Christmas songs we've heard over and over for decades ever made it in Britain, but apparently a lot of them didn't. Brown highlights eight Christmas songs he never heard before coming to America, ranked in order  from best to worst, and gives us his initial impressions. I mostly agree with his rankings, but for different reasons.  

In colonial America, people drank way more alcohol than would be considered safe today. They rode horses instead of driving cars, the water wasn't all that safe, and alcohol eases pains that medical practices couldn't help. George Washington certainly drank his share, and distilled whiskey on his farm Mount Vernon.

Like many people, Washington enjoyed eggnog for the holidays. The president's eggnog recipe survives (although not written by Washington's own hand), and it's quite, let's say, hearty. The recipe calls for four kinds of booze: brandy, whiskey, rum, and sherry, in addition to milk, cream, and eggs. The finished product seems to be about 35% liquor, and would have preserved the milk and eggs for a long time. His kitchen would produce it by the gallon when guests were expected. A good time was had by all. Read about Washington's drinking habits and his eggnog recipe at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company 

Eun Seo-ran (pronounced OON-SAW-RAHN), 44, met her best friend, Lee Eo-rie (pronounced EE-AW-REE), 38, back in 2016 after they had both moved to the Jeolla region of South Korea, wanting to escape the stresses of city life. Soon after meeting, they found out how they had many things in common and they developed a deep friendship. Later, they decided to live together.

However, even though they were particularly close friends, had been accustomed to each other's lifestyles, and can practically be called 'family', they still weren't legally related. This was especially the case during medical emergencies.

Under South Korean law, only family members have the right to visit patients in the hospital or sign off on anything that the patient needed such as urgent surgical procedures or any other invasive treatments which requires some form of consent.

So, Seo-ran and Eo-rie thought about ways they could become legally considered a family. They thought about faking a romantic relationship but since same-sex marriages are still not legally recognized in South Korea, it wasn't plausible.

Fortunately, adult adoptions are possible in South Korea, and the process is surprisingly easy. Only three things are necessary for the process: Seo-ran had to prove she was older than Eo-rie, they had to get Eo-rie's mother's consent, and Eo-rie must not be Seo-ran's biological child.

After completing the paperwork, they started the process which finished within 24 hours. The story became viral so much so that Seo-ran wrote a book about it titled I Adopted a Friend.

(Video credit: Macau Business TV/Youtube)

Math can be fun, and there are some interesting bits of math trivia that we all can appreciate. Just like the one shared by Snehal Shekatkar, a reader of Futility Closet, which states that there are exactly 17 numbers whose prime factors add up to 17. Those numbers are enumerated above including their prime factors, which all do add up to 17.

(Image: Screenshot from Futility Closet)

Ed Emberley has been drawing and making art for children's picture books for six decades now. Some of his work include instructional drawing books, inspired by his belief that everyone can learn to draw.

In his drawing books, he illustrates step-by-step instructions on how to draw animals, insects, plants, people, faces, vehicles, structures, and even themed objects like those for Halloween and Christmas.

Here are a few samples from his Christmas drawing book, where he illustrates how to draw a Christmas tree, a ball of mistletoe, Santa's sleigh along with Santa and some elves, Santa's reindeer, and even a snowman.

Using very simple shapes and figures that younger children (and even adults who don't necessarily have the aptitude for sketching) can follow, Ed shares his love for drawing through these picture books. He has illustrated or contributed to 50 books in his career, and has written 24 drawing books. -via Everlasting Blort

(Image credit: Ed Emberley/Present & Correct)

Santa's sleigh and elves

Santa's reindeer

Born the third child and second daughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Alice should have lived a life of comfort and luxury. However, her life was anything but. From the moment she was born, she endured nothing but tragedy.

Her parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, had raised their children in modesty and middle-class family values. No opulence, no fancy clothes, no luxurious dinner parties. They wore humble clothing and lived in a simple home without regular heating.

Despite her position in the family, she was very close to her elder siblings, Princess Victoria and Prince Edward, and she got along well with the rest. But at some point down the road, her strong-willed nature and stubornness caused her to clash often with her mother.

Things became particularly intense when her mother pushed her to marry at a young age. With help from Princess Victoria, they found her a couple of suitors who she disliked. Thankfully, she fell in love with her third suitor, Prince Louis of Hesse.

But then, the first among a series of tragedies struck. Her maternal grandmother, with whom she was particularly close, died. Not long after that, her father, Prince Albert, died as well, severely affecting Queen Victoria, so much so that even during Alice's wedding, the queen forced her to wear black.

Alice's relationship with her mother soured even more after that. Then, her second son and fifth child, Friedrich, inherited hemophilia passed down from the queen. He died at the age of two and a half after falling from a window 20 feet high.

As if that wasn't enough, in 1878, the household had been stricken with diphtheria which claimed the life of her youngest daughter Marie. Wanting to spare her other children from the grief, she kept Marie's death from the others, until she eventually told her son Ernest, who did not take the death of his sister well.

Alice, wanting to console her son, kissed him to ease the pain. However, she ended up contracting the disease, and after a few days, succumbed to it as well. If only things ended there for Princess Alice.

Alas, her daughter Princess Alexandra was married to Tsar Nicholas II. We all know how that ended. This is the forgotten story of Princess Alice, who may be the most tragic British royal in history.

(Image credit: Franz Backofen/Wikimedia Commons)

Though it was a great relief that the Allied Forces won WWII, the events that followed may be less so. The four leaders of the Allied Forces -Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Chiang Kai-Shek- each had a different idea of what the world would look like after the war.

Churchill wanted to rebuild France and Germany, forging an alliance between them and the UK. This pact would serve as the counterbalancing force to keep Stalin's Soviet Union in check and maintain peace and order in Europe.

However, Roosevelt's distrust for Germany and misgivings about Britain and France's imperialist history caused him to reject Churchill's vision of Europe. Instead, he came up with the idea of the Four Policemen.

Essentially, Roosevelt's idea entailed that all countries except for the four WWII victors to be disarmed and world order to be maintained by each superpower in their respective 'spheres': the UK in Western Europe and its territories, Russia in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, China in East Asia and the Western Pacific, and the US in the rest of the Western hemisphere.

However, Churchill's concerns over Stalin and the Soviet Union proved to be true, as they crept ever closer into central Europe. Not to mention, Churchill had his own political struggles at home. Meanwhile, Mao took over China and pushed Chiang and his faction to Taiwan.

All this left Roosevelt's vision in shambles. Churchill's plan of rebuilding France and Germany, however, proved to be a wise decision and they have since been strong allies helping maintain balance in Europe.

Roosevelt's Four Policemen idea might have seemed a good idea at the time, but perhaps his naivete over European politics caused him to think that peace could be maintained in such a system and that the other "allies" would agree to his proposed setup. If only things were that simple.

(Image credit: Mister Sheen/Alt History Fandom)

During the era of absolute monarchy and the divine right, members of the nobility were untouchable. It was considered a punishable offense to lay a hand on nobles. At the same time, corporal punishment was still being implemented in educating children.

This then presents a problem. If tutors of the royal family could not discipline young princes, then what were the tutors to do when their students misbehaved? In comes the whipping boy, whose sole purpose was to be beaten for the misdeeds of their liege.

Whether or not these whipping boys actually existed has been debated by scholars, although several references about them in literature point to the practice having been employed by some royal courts, if not commonly throughout medieval Europe. Generally, people accepted the story of whipping boys to be true.

The concept seems straightforward enough. However, whether the presence of the whipping boys produced the desired effect depended upon the character of the monarchs in question. For example, Louis XV of France was said to have had a whipping boy. Louis' epithet of Louis the Beloved may hint at the effectiveness of the practice.

Another famous depiction of a whipping boy, shown above, was that of Edward VI, whose reign, though short-lived, greatly influenced the history of England as it sparked the flame for the English Reformation.

Despite their designation as the royal scapegoat or fall guy, whipping boys also received the same education as the young princes and kings. Some minor nobles thought of the vocation as a means of climbing the social ladder as it granted them access to future royals and aristocrats. So it wasn't all doom and gloom for whomever was to receive such an assignment.

Back to the question of its effectiveness. Though there are examples which may lend credence to such effect, we can argue that these could only apply to individuals who were predisposed toward empathy and compassion, as seeing their peer being maltreated for their sake would bring out those good traits from them. Meanwhile, those who lacked such traits might inevitably turn into cruel tyrants.

Thankfully, we have moved away from such practices and we can now only encounter them in the annals of history.

(Image credit: Walter S. Stacey/Wikimedia Commons)

Happy Holidays everyone!

Here is a Santa Claus from every province, from west to east and through the territories.

1. British Columbia pic.twitter.com/FY3J8sWU5e

— Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx (@CraigBaird) December 21, 2023

Craig Baird is a historian with a podcast called Canadian History Ehx. As a Christmas gift to his followers, he harnessed artificial intelligence to create a series of Santa Claus portraits for each Canadian province and territory. Sure, there are stereotypes involved, but they are all lovingly rendered. He even takes back the Santa from Nova Scotia by giving him a re-do at the end.

A Santa Claus from every province, from west to east and through the territories.

11. Nunavut pic.twitter.com/o3FkC9vdlc

— Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx (@CraigBaird) December 21, 2023

Wait until you get a load of Quebec's Santa Claus. See the entire collection of Canadian Santas at Twitter, or at Thread Reader if you prefer.

Until today, the only thing I knew about Charles II was that he's the reason the current British King is named Charles III. Charles II ruled Scotland, then went into exile during the reign of Oliver Cromwell, and later became king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. You can bone up on Charle's place in history at Wikipedia, because this video is only concerned with his personal life, meaning his many lovers. Charles II had a wife plus a long line of mistresses and flings that ended up in the history books. They were court members, actresses, commoners, friends of friends, and even at least one spy. One of them could be called the love of his life, but she was not his wife, and neither did she keep him from other women. None of this was kept secret; after all, the king was the king in the 17th century, and popular opinion had no sway over his behavior. Come to think of it, even today when the king has no real power, popular opinion still doesn't have any sway over his behavior.  

Well, maybe you will, because of the picture. But I was surprised to learn that the 1983 film Trading Places (Una poltrona per due) with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd is an Italian Christmas tradition. Although the movie was a hit and is set during Christmas, it barely registers as a Christmas movie today, possibly because of its New York Stock Exchange plot that could have occurred at any time of the year. But every Christmas Eve, TV station Italia 1 airs Trading Places, and the nation tunes in. It's a shared tradition like Swedish people watching Donald Duck cartoons on Christmas Eve, or Germans watching Dinner for One on New Year's Eve. They were all broadcast one year in the days before cable TV, everyone saw it, and it became a thing they did every year.  

Excitement is growing for this year's broadcast, and there's even a Facebook page dedicated to the annual showing. Read about the Italian tradition of watching Una poltrona per due at Cracked.

Based on a 30-year study analyzing how children's development is affected by the size of their family, researchers have found that having a larger family may worsen the cognitive abilities of children.

According to the researchers, this is most likely due to the reduced attention and resources given to each individual child, as every new child is born. Moreover, the research also found that the eldest child's cognitive scores decreased the most as they gained more siblings.

A few interesting observations came about from the study. They found that the youngest were often the most well-behaved, based on their mothers' assessments. Furthermore, the assumption that being an only child will cause behavioral and cognitive issues was not supported by the data. Instead, the reverse was true with the first-borns exhibiting more behavioral problems with each addition to the family.

Although the study seems to have been done with a fair amount of rigor and forethought, I think it all comes down to how parents raise their children.

It is true that with the pressures of society today, parents have the tendency to spread themselves too thinly if they were to have more than two children. However, I think it is entirely possible for parents to have a larger family without compromising their children's development. The opposite is also possible. Not all only children will receive an abundance of resources.

It might be good to understand how the parents, who participated in the study, raised their children so that we can figure out if the main factor for the deterioration of children's cognitive scores was really due to having more siblings or if there were other external factors. Otherwise, I will tend to look at this study with a grain of salt.

(Image credit: National Cancer Institute/Unsplash)

No one can completely understand how several wonders of the ancient world had been constructed by human beings thousands of years ago, or why they were even erected in the first place. Monuments like Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, and Machu Picchu both inspire awe and bewilderment.

Though scientists are continuously researching on these structures to find out what ancient peoples and societies were up to, and how they came about with the building of these landmarks, other people have different explanations. One such idea proposed by English antiquarian Alfred Watkins was the concept of ley lines.

By looking at the alignment of different monuments on the map, Watkins claimed that ancient peoples had been aware of this invisible grid of straight lines and so they erected structures along that grid. It also provided a route that Stone Age traders used to arrive at the next settlement.

Many in the scientific community rejected the idea because Watkins' method of connecting these landmarks faced some challenges such as the geographical terrain which would have prevented people from following a straight path from one landmark to the next and the fact that drawing a straight line on a map would inevitably touch upon several of these landmarks.

Then in the '60s, Tony Wedd unearthed the ley lines idea, and suggested that they were used as runways for alien spacecraft. However, without any evidence, this too was shelved pretty quickly.

In 1969, perhaps one of the more plausible attempts at having the ley line idea accepted was John Michell's introduction of the 'Earth energies' concept. He asserted that these monuments oozed spiritual energy from deep within the earth, and ones with psychic consciousness could sense them.

However, through a decade-long research into the idea, scientists found no evidence that such things existed. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Alfred Watkins/Wikimedia Commons)

Starting from 2017, the team from BookMarks.reviews has had a tradition of curating some of the most savage criticisms of books published that year. This year is no different with some books by or about celebrities and political figures comprising majority of their 2023 list including: a biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, a memoir by Paris Hilton, a self-help book by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and an attempt at literary fiction by Tom Hanks. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Freddy Kearney/Unsplash)

We're not talking about the peachy pigs being raised in farms. Wild pigs, boars, hogs (Sus scrofa) may just simply eat entire ecosystems away if they were to be left on their own. And this is because they are considered extreme generalist foragers which means they can practically eat anything that they can get their hooves on.

Although 90% of their diet consists of plants, they can also eat insects, fungi, clams, and mussels. But more than this, they can apparently engage in predatory behavior as well, killing and eating rodents, deer, birds, snakes, frogs, lizards, and salamanders.

This is the reason why the US has launched initiatives and efforts to control and eradicate these wild pigs, as they can cause wildlife to become extinct, whether directly by predation or indirectly by hogging (pun intended) the resources from other animals.

In fact, just recently, some wild pigs from Canada were reported to have migrated into Minnesota which can make things more difficult. What's so troubling about this is that these wild pigs, called "super pigs", were crossbred to make them larger and hardier than the wild pigs found in the US.

One might think that simply introducing a predator to these wild pigs may assuage the situation. However, these wild pigs apparently have no natural predators, so the only way to get rid of them is to hunt them.

(Image credit: Ed van duijn/Unsplash)

(Video credit: WCCO - CBS Minnesota/Youtube)