Who here knows the legend of animals being given the gift of speech at midnight on Christmas Eve — allegedly to reward them for giving up their manger (and the rest of the barn) to the newborn Jesus.
I find it kind of odd that this legend seems to have floated along, under the radar, and isn’t more of a main myth every Christmas. Every child wants to wait up and catch Santa delivering presents, but no one wants to have a chat with Fluffy?
Anyway, this adorable compilation of singing animals was sent to me by Kent. I do not think I can improve on his explanation, which went thus:
Merry Absurd Χριστός-mas, Granty. ooo Kent And Ally. After extensive review, I have found that the x’s might be kisses and the o’s might be hugs. So just hugs to you, or kisses, take it however you like. Also, xxx might have been misleading. So yeah, back to the point, I just showed you why they call it X-mas, in a long winded, roundabout way.
Happy Caturday, Kent and everyone!
Love wine but hate corkscrews? This Bosch power screwdriver comes with a corkscrew attachment so you can power that pesky cork right out of the bottle.
Two thoughts come to mind — first of all, that this would be great not only for manly-men who want a powerdrill-corkscrew, but also for arthritics. And secondly, that this is miles better than my current scheme of sending a drill bit deep into the cork and then smashing the bottle in a rage against the nearest brick wall and slurping the wine out from the shards of glass.
(Amazon, via OhGizmodo and tdw)
Although I’m semi-rural, I’ve never been a fan of snowmobiles or of rising a toboggan behind a truck. That said, I would definitely give it a shot if someone came by with a jet fighter.
According to Neatorama, it’s “allegedly” a Swedish Air Force jet.
(via tdw)
Oh dear, this is too descriptive of many conversations I’ve had with my mom.
(from UWindsor, via Mike Potter)
I am both enthralled by this art project, and saddened that it’s come to this — we need an ati-billboard to remind us that the natural environment is worth looking at.
My friend and co-worker Colleen pointed me towards this piece in the Design Observer:
Out in Washington State, Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han, of Seattle’s Lead Pencil Studio, recently put up a piece along the Canadian border that is stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful. [[there is] a story about it in the new issue of Icon.] To counter the visual clutter along the road into the United States—countless billboards of garish, cheesy advertising fouling a once pristine landscape — they’ve created their own billboard, a negative billboard that frames the ever-changing sky. The structure itself is an evanescent thicket of steel rods, left incomplete along the top edge so your mind can fill in the shape.
Giant billboards are some of the most invasive forms of advertising, especially when you consider that they are strictly visual and mostly stationary. They’re just so huge!
What an interesting way, then, to make an artistic statement: to make the viewer mentally erase one of those billboards by providing, instead, a frame, and filling it with the natural vista behind. It reminds me of the artwork in Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo,’ which showcased photos from which all the advertising had been erased — leaving blank circles, squares and ovals where ads and logos had been.
Instead of just blank gray spaces, though, this one gives the viewer a great gaping hole, something to look through and see what would otherwise be hidden.
I like it.
This staircase looks almost like a bookcase, doesn’t it?
I love it — I love the way it is jarring and dissonant, and yet there’s nothing really all that wrong with it. The stairs would be perfectly functional. You just would have no option about whether you wanted to go right-foot-first or left-foot-first.
Each stair riser is double height, and the left is offset from the right, so they don’t look normal stairs, but when you see both sides together, it’s obvious what they are.
The whole effect is one of pleasant disorientation — “This is … different,” says your brain, “but not necessarily wrong.”
If you take a close look at the top of the staircase in this picture, you’ll see that the top stair on the left is “half-height” (or, “normal height”) and I kind of wonder what it looks like in real life.
But it also looks set back from the top stair on the right, so it appears that the floor wraps around the top, where I assume there’s a railing. I’ll bet it’s pretty functional.
This is exactly the type of do-a-double-take architectural feature that I would love to have in my house — I just wish I had an attic that needed new stairs.
It’s got the right amount of whimsy for a kid’s loft, too, if you had the right kind of kid.
The photo was taken by Foster Huntington, who blogs at A Restless Transplant, and the stairs live in his grandfather’s Wisconsin farm house.
As part of a top-secret homemade Advent calendar project for Amy, I came up with a couple of Christmas playlists for her. But, now that she’s opened that door in the Advent calendar, I can share those Christmas playlists with you.
There are two playlists, with 20 songs each. I played with trying to get to 24 or 25 songs each, but it seemed to naturally fall at 20 songs. One of the playlists is a little slower and quieter, the other one a little faster. But neither of them are exactly raucous. And both tend towards the folky/acoustic side of things, but not from any actual effort on my part to make them that way.
My entire modus operandi was to create playlists that you could put on in the background of a holiday party — nothing that would be the main event itself. And yet, I wanted to branch out and find non-standard Christmas tunes. I tried to only use Christmas songs that I had never heard before, although a couple of familiar ones did sneak in.
Let me know what you think!
She’s Underneath the Mistletoe Again - Antsy Mcclain
Great Adventure - Dan Bryk
Don’t Want Another Christmas (Like Last Christmas) - Gentleman Auction House
Xmas In The Jailhouse - Ox
All I Want For Christmas - The Genuine Fakes
It’s Christmas Time Again - Harley Poe
All These Winter Nights - The Higher Elevations
Christmas On The Beach - Irene
Jingle Jangle Christmas - Metro Jets
Christmas Peace - Shadetree
Christmas Day - Strayfolk
Here Comes Christmas - Bill Kelly
(Merry Xmas) Thanks For The Roses - Antje Duvekot
Whiskey Christmas - Darby O’Gill And The Little People
Gold Front Tooth - Dick Smith
X-mas song - Fireflies
Last Christmas (Wham! cover) - Jimmy Eat World
Just Like Christmas - Low
I Wanna Spend My X-Mas Time With You - Phil Lee
Black Christmas - Poly Styene
Download “Red Christmas” in a single zip file!
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Christmas at the Trailer Park - Antsy Mcclain
Christmastime Blues - Jaimi Shuey
Christmas in London - Krista Detor
Christmas Is Coming Soon - Blitzen Trapper
It May Be Winter Outside (But In My Heart It’s Spring) - Milberg
Oh Sweet Christmas! - Oh Sweet Music!
A Blue Christmas - The Perishers
Carol For The Lonely - Sofia Talvik
Holy Night - Thomas Denver Johnsson
Christmas Isn’t Christmas - The Boy Least Likely To
I’d Like You for Christmas - Christabel and the Jons
Red-Eyed Santa - Dick Smith
Christmas In Prison - Emmy The Great & Lightspeed Champion
Be My Valentine On Christmas - Glenna Bell
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Hem
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Hoax Funeral
The Christmas Song - Mark Jungers & the Whistling Mules
Christmas is for Losers - Mike Nicolai
All I Want is Truth (for Christmas) - The Mynabirds
That Was The Worst Christmas Ever! - Sufjan Stevens
Download “Green Christmas” in a single zip file!
We’ve posted about Misery Bear before — a BBC creation who just doesn’t have a very good life, no matter how much he tries. Or drinks.
No one does soul-crushing depression better than the Brits. See also: Marvin, the Paranoid Android; and The Office.
Cannot be unseen, but is oh, so cool once seen.
(via Reddit)
You know, I think in the Japanese translation of the Bible, Jesus enters a coal-fired power plant and overturns the generators.
Which would explain the negative connotations of coal in your stocking.
(via @buzzsawbravado)
When my sister was pregnant, she got Amy to take some shots of her and her husband, to document it. This is pretty standard, I think, isn’t it? They did a series of nice shots in the park, with my sister and her husband posing to show off the gigantic belly to its best effect.
One thing they did not do is pose with my brother-in-law’s face, in soft focus, behind my sister’s ass. I’m not sure what the photographer was thinking in this case (maybe it was an outtake) but in an case, it ended up on the internet and then it invariably ended up on a site called Pregnant Chicken, featuring Awkward Pregnancy Photos of all sorts.
It’s astonishing how many feature guns.
Or, as the site says, “if it looks skeezy when nobody is pregnant, then a baby bump ain’t saving it so don’t do it.”
Forty-five minutes of some of the best footage of the space shuttle I’ve ever seen — close-ups and slow-motion capture from NASA engineering cameras, including technical details that really put the space shuttle into glorious perspective.
Don’t have 45 minutes? Find it. Because if I find out that you instead chose to rent some crappy rom-com, I might just travel to your house and rip it from your DVD player.
Sadly, I think the space shuttle is, partly, a victim of its own success: its goal was to make space travel mundane. It never did that, of course — each launch is a marvel — but it sure made people treat it as mundane.
More space travel, less War on Terror, please.
(via Jalopnik)
Don’t like the idea of shelving your books atop the mantelpiece of a traditional fireplace? Combine the two concepts in this delightful, Christmassy doohickey!
Yes, it’s a floating shelf with a tiny little gas flame fireplace built in. And if you don’t like the tres-mod swoopiness of this shelf, well, I dunno, build your own, now that you’ve learned the concept.
But if you don’t happen to have your gas-fitters ticket, then I guess you’re stuck buying this one — for the princely sum of $4,755.
I don’t care, I’m worth it.
(CosiHome, via Gizmodo)
New York magazine has an in-depth guide on how to hate the Beatles. It’s a detailed seven-step guide on how to perplex people by telling them that you don’t think the Beatles were really all that.
Of course, it’s followed by 10 pages of comments, wherein Internet people believe that they can change the writer’s mind.
And, as it turns out, the article isn’t really about hating the Beatles, it’s more about cultivating an interesting indifference to them:
Do it at the right parties, and you can wind up standing in a corner looking like a delightful raconteur, with half a dozen people standing around you hanging on your every word, because they’re desperate to convince you that you could not possibly hate the Beatles and must be mistaken somehow.
It’s worth reading. But, just in case you actually like the Beatles, I’ve happened across another site that will help you develop contrary opinions to enliven your Christmas parties and frustrate the people you’re talking to. It’s called Smugopedia, and it is billed as “a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects … the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.”
Perfect! Just what I need! For a taste, check out the entry for author Malcolm Gladwell:
The problem with Malcolm Gladwell is that he writes too well: when you read him, you don’t know if you’re agreeing with his controversial ideas because he’s right, or because he’s enchanted you.
Why, I think I’m going to bust that one out this holiday season for sure.
I don’t know exactly how to play the Mexican Lotto, but apparently it takes 54 different cards, 10 game boards and a bag of dried pinto beans. You can buy all of that — in a brand-new yet vintage-looking Star Wars style! — for $50 here.
And if that’s too pricey, you can buy prints of the individual cards here for just $9 apiece.
Awesome! And just in time for Christmas!
(via If It’s Hip It’s Here)
