Makes a nice change not to be posting this lot from NHS premises 
Happy Christmas, and enjoy this special day of using the Internet to escape from your infuriating family rather than your infuriating colleagues 
Happy invoicing!
Happy Christmas, and enjoy this special day of using the Internet to escape from your infuriating family rather than your infuriating colleagues - Victorians’ Christmas Parlor Games Will Leave You Burned, Bruised, And Puking - A variety of brutal games: ”Most of the Christmas traditions we take for granted today are Victorian inventions: Christmas trees, Christmas stockings and Christmas carols didn’t exist much before the 1840s. Yet while these are somewhat diverting, the most exciting and outrageous Victorian traditions have been almost totally forgotten.”
- A History of Women Who Burned to Death in Flammable Dresses - Another forgotten aspect of traditional celebrations: ”In the mid-19th century, women wearing the style of the day would burst into flames if their dress caught fire — and I do mean burst. Their dresses were so dangerously flammable that if they caught fire, it would spread in an instant, sometimes leading to groups of women dying at the same time.”
- The Forgotten Golden Age of Mixed Martial Arts:
- Part 1: The Golden Age of Wrestling and the Lost Art of American Catch-as-Catch-can
- Part 2: The Rise of Judo and the Dawn of a New Age
- Part III: Sherlock Holmes, Les Apaches, and the Gentlemanly Art of Self Defence
- Part IV: Ultimate Fighting of the Belle Époque
Continuing the nostalgia vein, a detailed history of various modes of fighting-as-entertainment. "At the time, outside of Lancashire, wrestling held little interest for the English populace. A few professionals were making a living performing in Music Halls, alongside the strongman acts, but the best wrestlers, such as Tom Connors and Joseph Acton, often found a more receptive audience in the United States." (Fun fact: my great-great-great-grandfather was an all-in wrestler who appeared regularly at the Liverpool Empire in Victorian times.)
- Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber - "In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments—experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard?”
- Santa Claus the Magic Mushroom & the Psychedelic Origins of Christmas - "Have you ever wondered why Father Christmas wears a red and white suit?… Yes, urban legend has it that Santa himself and his red and white outfit, was designed by Coca Cola in the late Victorian period as a massive ad campaign, and while this may be partially true, there is some evidence that points to the fact that the somewhat blurred origins of Mr. Claus may have emerged, pre-Coca Cola, from Siberian shamanism and the use of the Amanita Muscaria, a red and white spotty hallucinogenic mushroom, in their shamanic practices."
- Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain - "Everyone says the blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is going to change EVERYTHING. And yet, after years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use for the blockchain—besides currency speculation and illegal transactions." Kai Stinchcombe plays Devil’s Advocate.
- How We Celebrate Christmas - From the German Propaganda Archive: ”The Nazis put significant efforts into de-Christianizing Christmas, focusing instead on the winter solstice. This 1939 article from a Nazi educational monthly for the Frankfurt area. The war had been in progress for four months.”
- Google Maps’s Moat - Justin O’Beirne returns with another look at some intriguing advances in Google’s Maps: ”At some point, Google realized that just as it uses shadings to convey densities of cities, it could also use shadings to convey densities of businesses… Annechino and Cheng spent months researching one city. But not only did Google capture all of their commerical corridors (and several more), it somehow came up with them for thousands of cities across the world.”
- Every Christmas Horror Movie, Ranked - Share this with the family and argue over which one to waste your evening on: ”We decided on the following criteria. A Christmas horror movie should be feature-length, set on or around Christmas day, and feature some combination of terror, villains, and/or the threat of death. We also put no limit on tone so horror comedies count every bit as much as torture porn. A handful of titles that fit these guidelines still managed to slip by us due to a lack of availability, but those stragglers aside this remains a holiday miracle and the most comprehensive ranked list of Christmas horror movies ever assembled.”
- Dead Birds - No, not turkeys: ”A dead European robin frozen from the cold was bound to elicit Victorian sympathy and pity and may reference common stories of poor children freezing to death at Christmas. The 1880s card may have invoked one’s own good fortune and that of the card’s recipient during the holidays.”
Happy invoicing!
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