Winston Churchill spent Christmas of 1941 at the White House. No one invited him. After a private screening of The Maltese Falcon with FDR, his doctor noted that Churchill had had a heart attack that day. The doctor told no one at the time, not even Churchill.

Let's remember the Muppet Christmas crossover, in which the Swedish Chef saw Big Bird and immediately decided to kill and cook him

The famous Folgers incest ad was based on this earlier ad of theirs, shot in 1986. You can see how the new one made some changes, including aging up the sister.

Have you set up your Tió de Nadal yet? The Tió de Nadal ("the poop log") is a log with a face painted on it. It represents a Catalan character who will poop out treats come Christmas day.

In 1995, the Rolling Stones put out a cover of Like a Rolling Stone. It was the 30th anniversary of the song as well as of the Stones' own Satisfaction No one guessed that in *another* 30 years Dylan or even one Stone would still be alive, much less still be touring www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYo...

"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" was originally created by Saks Fifth Avenue, to promote their annual Christmas card. Writer Tommie Connor took inspiration from the below cover of The New Yorker. Here, unlike in the song, the parents know the child is present.

Popping in Home Alone 2. "That's right, kids. Food delivered to the door used to be a crazy luxury. Room service was the stuff of wish fulfilment fantasies. "Book the finest suite in Manhattan's top hotel? Rich family won't mind. But the room service bill would leave dad screaming."

Never forget that the first Kingdom Come Deliverance offered this option

In 2004, Manchester cops arrested a woman for prostitution. Magistrates issued her an "anti-social behaviour order," which said she'd be in violation of the law if they ever caught her in possession of condoms. They later did find condoms on her and so found her guilty.

I hope there's an outtake where he does this scene as Conan O'Brien. "I know what you're doing!" he'd say, then he quickly turns to look at the camera, before looking back at her. "I can't have it! This isn't working!"

The banana has a phallic reputation. Odd, since it's curved, unlike most phallic objects. The reputation goes back at least as far as the 1800s, back when the variant we eat today, the Cavendish banana, did not yet exist. They ate Gros Michel bananas, which curved less.

If Tetris pieces fell randomly, you'd soon hit a long stretch of zigzag tiles you couldn't possibly eliminate, no matter how well you play. Modern versions of Tetris avoid this with nonrandom drops. One A.I. playing the NES version decided the optimal strategy was to give up.

When confronted in October 2016 about saying "grab 'em by the pussy," Trump issued a statement, saying, "Bill Clinton has said far worse to me." Call it deflection, but it really did come off as an oddly honest response, and quite believable.

Messages between a husband and wife, two undertakers caught piling 190 bodies in their funeral home instead of cremating them.

Pluribus opened with a green and purple tint, and I thought that was an interesting artistic choice. I only gradually realized it uses Dolby Vision color, and my screen wasn't decoding it properly.

Just remembered I wrote this in 2021, as a joke. Then this year, it became actual White House strategy.

"A twenty should do it," says the Titanic guy, about compensating Jack for saving Rose's life. Then he reconsiders and offers something more gracious: one dinner with the first class crowd. A twenty was $660 in today's money and could rent a room in 1912 New York for six months.

Car pulls over. Driver: "Hey, do you know how to get to ___" Me: "Let me see. I could show you on my phone." Driver: (angry) "Even I could look it up on my phone." *drives away*

People magazine didn't start doing Sexiest Man Alive because they thought it would be a good idea to pick the sexiest man alive. They were just doing a profile of a celeb one month, like they do regularly, and they went with "sexiest man alive" as the line to stick on the cover.

What saves more gas? Raising an engine's efficiency from 10 MPG to 15 MPG or raising it from 25 MPG to 50 MPG? Answer: Raising from 10 to 15.

Hitler did not try getting a Nobel Peace Prize, no. He did get so angry about one going to an enemy that he banned all Germans from accepting Nobel prizes going forward. He set up a rival German prize for Art and Science (but not for peace, as he did not honor peace).

If a disease makes someone's skin look weird, you might assume you'll catch it by touching them. That's often untrue. For centuries, people thought leprosy transmits via skin contact. It doesn't. It transmits via the respiratory system. Also, 95% of people are naturally immune.

Food stamps were originally restricted to specific kinds of food to provide a subsidy to farmers. Stamps were administered by the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, whose job was to sell surplus farm products without letting prices drop naturally to the market rate.

Sociologists have researched where the fear of neighbors poisoning Halloween candy came from. There are no actual cases of that ever happening. One theory: People started mistrusting neighbors more thanks to racial integration.

I'd been looking for an excuse to write this synopsis somewhere

Aww. I thought "clapback" derived from people actually clapping at each other, with their hands. Punctuating their words with hand claps. But no:

Americans considered chicken wings an extreme low-class food before the 1960s. Not because you eat them with your hands but because each has so little meat. They were treated like chicken feet, good only for boiling to make stock. Then Buffalo came up with hot wings.

Every year, fourth week of October

Eddington (2025)

Remember when the Hobbit nostalgically brought back LOTR actors, the way legacy sequels do? Return of the King was only nine years old at the time. Zootopia will be older than that when Zootopia 2 comes out. Incredibles 2 will be older than that when Incredibles 3 comes out.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, the lunar surface had a temperature of around 120°C, or 250°F. The suit didn’t keep him warm. It kept him cool, using chilled water from a tank in his backpack.

Cigarette filters respond to smoke by turning brown. The discoloration isn't trapped tar. It's a design feature, a reaction to smoke passing through the filter. The color change falsely implies the filter traps more stuff than it really does.

This photo is often labeled as the mushroom cloud created by the nuclear strike at Hiroshima. That's half-true. Nukes create mushroom clouds, but even a nuke a thousand times as big as Little Boy wouldn’t produce a mushroom cloud this size. (1/2)

A Conservative MP named Colonel The Honourable Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert died from getting all his teeth removed. He'd gone blind, and he heard that removing his teeth might restore his sight. He had other adventures too.

Lady Gaga released a song this year that reviewers dismissively called "one of the only songs that doesn’t fit her vision." After some debate, fans realized it's a Taylor Swift parody. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd_M...

The song Tom's Diner is known as the “doodoo DOOdoo, doodoo DOOdoo” song, for its famous chorus. As recorded, it had no chorus. Or instruments. It was a two-minute acapella folk song. The famous version was a remix made illegally three years later.

Ahead of George W. Bush’s visit to Sioux Falls in March 2001, South Dakota man Richard Humphreys said the following joke at a bar: “God might speak to the world through a burning Bush.” Bartender called the authorities. Humphreys got 37 months in prison.

Old King Cole was a merry old soul And a merry old soul was he He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl

In the 1930s, Mussolini said Italy should wean itself off pasta and switch to risotto. Pasta made men weak, said his food scientists, while eating rice would bring back the glory of Rome. (He really favored rice because Italy grew it domestically but imported pasta wheat.)

Why is this trending

A rotationplasty. Cut through the leg twice, above and below the knee. Discard the knee. Rotate the detached leg 180 degrees and fuse the fibula to the femur. Needless to say, this is a wonderfully beneficial operation.

We call methane "natural gas," because earlier, instead of extracting methane from the ground, we manufactured it from coal. This was called coal gas, or town gas, and then we replaced that with new "natural gas."

Instructions on an MRE. Note the practical language, labeling the supporting object as a "rock or something."

In 2010, a company analyzed Ozzy Osbourne's DNA and discovered he was missing a gene related to how the body handles meth. Every previous human they'd analyzed had this gene. Every chimpanzee, every cow, every rat and every zebrafish had as well.

In 2010, a company analyzed Ozzy Osborne's DNA and discovered he was missing a certain gene related to how the body handles meth. Not only did every previous human they'd analyzed have this gene. Every chimpanzee, every cow, every rat and every zebrafish did as well.

"Users are less likely to click search results when Google provides an A.I. overview" This is surely extra true when the overview lies and says there are no search results, in defiance of the actual search results listed immediately below

Hulk Hogan laughing about how Andre the Giant would stick his thumb up the opponent's butthole. He says he never confronted Andre about it after being on the receiving end one time at a Canadian match. “You don’t say nothing to the boss man. He has his way with you, my brother.”

Shallow Hal's credits show Rene Kirby, who died this month, skiing with his arms. They also show everyone who made the film but didn’t act in it. Everyone — set dressers, camera operators, painters, accountants. It’s weirdly touching, considering these names mean nothing to us.