(Source unknown.)
Author: Richard
The Origin of Rudolph
Image by Eda Cherry via Flickr
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is today one of the most popular and immutable fixtures of the Christmas season. But has it always been thus? Where and when did the Rudolph story originate? After all, you may have noted that Rudolph does not feature in the beloved 1823 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas / The Night Before Christmas”; the poem lists only eight reindeer (“Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer and Vixen, / On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem”), and Rudolph is not among them.
Rudolph, it turns out, was created by the Montgomery Ward department store in 1939. From the Smithsonian:
Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer first appeared in 1939 when Montgomery Ward
department store asked one of its copywriters, 34-year-old Robert L.
May, to create a Christmas story the store could give away to shoppers
as a promotional gimmick.The
retailer had been buying and giving away coloring books for Christmas
every year; and it was decided that creating its own book would save
money. In the first year of publication, 2.4 million copies of Rudolph’s
story were distributed by Montgomery Ward.
Rudolph was further popularized, of course, by Gene Autry’s 1949 song (lyrics by Robert May’s brother-in-law) and Burl Ives’s 1964 TV special. You can read more here and here.
Ohio lighthouse turned into ice
This is incredible. A lighthouse near Cleveland has apparently been encased in ice by spray from Lake Erie. Have a look at this video footage:
There’s an article to match here.
The first solstice/lunar eclipse overlap in 372 years… tonight!
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Astronomical events such as this don’t come around often. Be sure to head outside tonight to check out the lunar eclipse, if it will be visible in your area (it’s supposed to be particularly spectacular for North Americans). For more information, you can visit the useful page NASA set up for the occasion. According to NASA,
the eclipse will last about three hours and
twenty-eight minutes. For observers on the east coast of the U.S. the
eclipse lasts from 1:33am EST through 5:01 a.m. EST. Viewers on the west
coast will be able to tune in a bit earlier. For them the eclipse
begins at 10:33 p.m. PST on December 20 and lasts until 2:01am PST on
Dec. 21. Totality, the time when Earth’s shadow completely covers the
moon, will last a lengthy 72 minutes.
The “terrible hairy fly” rediscovered in Kenya
Our friend Ryan brings our attention to this unusually-headlined article (this one, especially, sounds like a bad low-budget film, and one that I’d gladly watch). The article’s short, so I won’t let my commentary get in the way of your curiosity:
Scientists in Kenya have located one of the world’s rarest and oddest-looking flies after a long hunt for an insect dubbed the “terrible hairy fly,” experts said on Wednesday.
Scientists first stumbled across the yellow-haired fly in 1933 and then
again in 1948. Since then, at least half a dozen expeditions have
visited a site between the towns of Thika and Garissa to find it again.
At about one centimeter long and so far found on a single 20-meter high
rock, the Mormotomyia hirsuta looks more like a spider with its hairy
legs, scientists said.
Unable to fly and partial to breeding in bat feces, the fly is thought
to live only in the dank, bat-filled cleft of an isolated rock in the
Ukazi Hills. It also has non-functional wings that resemble miniature
belt-straps, and tiny eyes.
More details – and a photo – here.
Bush hid the facts
This headline does not, in fact, refer to the Bush Administration’s conduct vis-a-vis the Iraq war (as accurate as it may be). Instead, according to Wikipedia, it is “a common name for a bug present in the function IsTextUnicode of Microsoft Windows, which causes a file of text encoded in Windows-1252 or similar encoding to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in mojibake.”
In other words, when you type “Bush hid the facts” in a new Notepad document, save it, close it, and reopen it, the characters “畢桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴” inexplicably appear instead. A rather strange error, and certainly one that will unnerve conspiracy theorists! Try it out for yourself, if you’re using Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP (the error doesn’t occur in other versions of Windows). According to Wikipedia, other text strings that have similar effects include “this app can break”, “acre vai pra globo”, and “aaaa aaa aaa aaaaa”
Check out this Google Maps teleporter
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spent a great deal of time on Google Maps / Google Earth just browsing around and seeing the sights. MapCrunch.com, though, makes all of that much more exciting: hit a button, and it will take you to a random street-view location somewhere in the world. It’s easier seen than explained, so check it out (today’s location-of-the-day is especially strange).
Abraham Lincoln’s lost speech
In 1856, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech so inspiring, so captivating, so compelling-… that every reporter present forgot to take notes, and everyone who attended, lacking a written record, eventually forgot about the speech’s content, too.
The speech was so compelling, in fact, that it is often credited with helping to launch Lincoln’s national career (like Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the DNC). There’s even a historical marker commemorating the spot where it occurred.That the speech was so important, though, makes it all the stranger that it was “lost.” From Wikipedia:
The speech known as Abraham Lincoln‘s “Lost Speech” was given on May 29, 1856, in Bloomington, Illinois.
Traditionally regarded as lost because it was so engaging that
reporters neglected to take notes, the speech is believed to have been
an impassioned condemnation of slavery. It is possible the text was deliberately “lost” owing to its controversial content.There are no known transcripts or written accounts of the Lost Speech,
other than a brief summary in the local press. Eyewitnesses have offered
snippets of some of Lincoln’s content that day. William Herndon asserted that some of Lincoln’s House Divided Speech
was not based on new concepts at the time of its delivery. He wrote
that Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” originated
with the famous Bloomington speech of 1856.
Others speculate, of course, that listeners were merely distracted from the content of the speech by Lincoln’s notoriously scratchy voice. You can find out more here.
David Bowie (Will Ferrell) and Bing Crosby (John C. Reilly) sing Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy
The actual Bowie/Crosby version of this is probably one of my favorite Christmas songs, but this parody manages to be highly amusing while staying true to the original.
For reference, here’s the original:
