Friday non-shopping links

11 Foods Inspired By The Hunger Games.

Why would we evolve to poop in the same place as our friends?

The Lake Monsters of America.

The Art of the Humorous Amazon Review, Part One and Part Deux.

How To Fight A Baby. Also, how many 5 year olds could you take in a fight?

Cats That Pose Like Pin-Up Girls.

ICYMI, yesterday's links are here.

I'm Pretty Sure That This Isn’t How My Mom Did It: Vaginal Knitting

Not the style of knitting I was taught, or that I taught my daughters:

Lousy job du jour: cutting open stomach of a dead whale, causing contents to explode all over you. Bonus 70's dead whale explosion

This doesn't warrant an NSFW alert, but definitely a major graphic grossness alert:

“This whale, before it died, ate a lot of things, it ate a lot of other creatures and those creatures started to putrefy in its stomach and released a lot of gases when they did. And so this whale has a tremendous build up of gas.”

via The Blaze.

And here's the original exploding whale:

Thanksgiving links

Adam Sandler's Hanukkah and Thanksgiving songs, with pop culture guide, plus the Thanksgivukkah Anthem.  And 9 Hanukkah-Thanksgiving Fusion Dishes.

Jingle Bells was written for Thanksgiving.

More Thanksgiving links, including Buffy, Dave Barry, and flowcharts.

10 Thanksgiving Words With Bizarre Origins.

This Man Made the First Canned Cranberry Sauce.

Thanksgiving links: Mark Twain, science, WKRP, Cicero and the best turkey fryer PSA ever.

Thanksgiving In Jail For World's Most Arrested Man.

How Turkey Got Its Name.

25 Little-Known Facts About Thanksgiving.

ICYMI, Monday's links are here.

Adam Sandler's Hanukkah and Thanksgiving songs, with pop culture guide. Plus the Thanksgivukkah Anthem

Adam Sandler's Hanukkah song:



and Thanksgiving song:



Adam Sandler's 'Thanksgiving Song': Explaining the 20-year-old tune's pop-culture references.

Jewish A Capella group six13 created The Thanksgivukkah Anthem for this year's Chanukah and Thanksgiving holidays overlap.

And here's the Maccabeats's Hanukkah Song:

Thanksgiving Etiquette by Ze Frank

Ze Frank explains everything that you need to know about proper holiday manners.

Infographic: Pi vs Pie

Mmmm... pie.

by Grant Snider

Excellent Kevin D. Williamson interview: Detroit is a case of the parasite having outgrown the host

On the subject of his book What Doomed Detroit, here's a must read (or listen to) interview of economist Kevin D. Williamson by Ed Driscoll.

Has there been a more spectacular downfall to an American city than Detroit? As late as 1965, Jerome Cavanagh, its then-mayor, the first of what would be to this very day an unending series of Democrat party officials leading the city, could say with some honesty, “frequently called the most cosmopolitan city of the Midwest, Detroit, today, stands at the threshold of a bright new future.”

And the Titanic was thought to be unsinkable as well, right up until she left the Southampton docks.

The riots of 1967 would be Detroit’s equivalent of the iceberg; the 1974 election of Coleman Young as the city’s mayor for the next two decades would cement its doom permanently, until ultimately, it was forced to declare bankruptcy this past July. And in addition to the city’s institutional reverse-racism, its fiscal mismanagement has been spectacular as well. As PJM’s own Richard Fernandez noted back in September, inside Detroit’s City Hall, from 1985 through 2009, “the pension trustees were draining the pension because they were so sure, so absolutely certain that the taxpayers would have to refill the pot they felt safe helping themselves to whatever they wanted… What could go wrong? To everyone’s amazement something completely unprecedented happened: City Hall went broke. ‘They didn’t reckon with the possibility,’ [Megan McArdle wrote in Bloomberg News] ‘that the city would simply run out of money, and the state would decline to step in, leaving them with no deep pockets to make up for their mismanagement.’ And so the Detroit pension is bust unless they find something they can siphon off to replenish it.”

To borrow from one of Glenn Reynolds’ recurring leitmotifs, a paraphrase of economist Herb Stein, something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

Or as National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson sums up all of the above in the new Encounter Broadside edition, What Doomed Detroit, “Detroit is a case of the parasite having outgrown the host.”

Youtube audio-only version is below.  PJM has a transcript of the interview along with several other audio formats.

Buffy Thanksgiving episode: "Ritual sacrifice, with pie"

Anya in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It’s a ritual sacrifice. With pie.”

Turkey Prices Have Been Exploding In The Last Decade

Bloomberg Chief Economist Michael McDonough tweeted the following chart showing the evolution of Turkey prices over the past two decades. Since mid-2006, the price of a 15 lb. bird is up 60%.

Aspiring porn star and former Anthony Weiner sexting mistress Sydney Leathers is auctioning her leftover labia

My personal opinion is that you shouldn't watch this at work, just due to subject matter.  But hey, it's your job.

via wwtdd.com, an apparently classy web site which says: 

She is having an expensive labiaplasty procedure done to cut back some of the mud flaps on her money tunnel.   

But Sydney is going the extra mile and auctioning off her vagina trimmings. A labiaplasty reportedly costs about $8,400, so a girl needs to earn a little back, but if you’re a guy looking to shell out even a dime for a piece of labia removed from any woman, let alone this worthless leech, you really, really need to reconsider every decision you’ve made in your life up to this point.

Monday links

The Fort That America Accidentally Built in Canada.

How Turkey Got Its Name.

20 Things You Didn't Know About Neanderthals.

Vintage Photos Reveal Century-Long Obsession with Dressing Up Pets.

This guy has spent a LOT of time planning the hand-to-hand aspects of surviving a zombie attack.

Gallery of Weird Bus Stops & Shelters.

ICYMI, Friday's links are here.

How Turkey Got Its Name

From the always interesting Now I Know*:

This week, many American families will gather around the lunch or (and?) dinner table, feasting on a Thanksgiving meal centered on turkey. It’s a celebration of many things, but historically, stems back to 1621, when European settlers (“Pilgrims,” as any American elementary school children will surely tell you) marked the harvest by having a similar meal.

Turkeys are indigenous to the United States and Mexico; in fact, Europeans only first came into contact with turkeys roughly 500 years ago, upon discovery of the New World. So how did turkeys (the bird) end up being named so similarly to Turkey (the country)? Let’s follow that bird’s history from the New World to the Old.

As far as we can tell, the first European explorers to discover (and eat) turkey were those in Hernan Cortez’s expedition in Mexico in 1519. This new delicacy was brought back to Europe by Spanish Conquistadors and by 1524, had reached England. The bird was domesticated in England within a decade, and by the turn of the century, it’s name — “turkey” — had entered the English language. Case in point: William Shakespeare used the term in Twelfth Night, believed to be written in 1601 or 1602. The lack of context around his usage suggests that the term had widespread reach.

But the birds did not come directly from the New World to England; rather, they came via merchant ships from the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Those merchants were called “Turkey merchant” as much the area was part of the Turkish Empire at the time. Purchasers of the birds back home in England thought the fowl came from the area, hence the name “Turkey birds” or, soon thereafter, “turkeys.”

Not all languages follow this misconception. Others, such as Hebrew get the origin just as wrong, but in the other direction. The Hebrew term for turkey, transliterated as tarnagol hodu, literally translates to “chicken of India,” furthering the Elizabethan-era myth that New World explorers had found a route to the Orient. This nomenclature for the bird is so wide-spread that it self-defeats the historical basis for the term “turkey” in English, as the Turkish word for turkey is “hindi.”

Bonus fact: As for Turkey, the country? The story isn’t as interesting. The word Turkey — actually, Türkiye in Turkish — can be broken up into two parts. “Türk” is a reference to people, potentially meaning “human beings” in an archaic version of the Turkish language. The “-iye” suffix most likely meant “land of.”

Related: Apparently, you can buy turkey on Amazon.

*Dan Lewis has published a book: Now I Know: The Revealing Stories Behind the World's Most Interesting Facts. Now I Know has been coming out as a daily email since 2010, and I've been on that list since close to the beginning; I've used articles from there several times.  I picked up the book on Amazon last week to be used as a Christmas present - unfortunately I started reading it and now don't want to part with it, so I plan to by a couple more as presents. Want further recommendations?  Every single review on Amazon is 5 stars.

Photo of Samsung's marketing fail: slogan "the penis, mightier than the finger"

Pig drumming 101

No, silly, pigs don't actually play instruments, even drums. It's someone drumming on a pig.

Firefly: The Complete Series on DVD for $6 plus free shipping

Listen up, browncoats,

Not the kind of thing I usually post, but that's a pretty shiny price, and if you have any friends/family members who haven't seen it - hey, it's possible, right? - it'd make an exceptional Christmas present.  Or Hanukkah or Festivus or whatever.

Here's the trailer for Serenity, which was based on Firefly:

Check out this ice tsunami

From May of this year (although I'd never seen it), the videos below capture a tsunami-like wave of ice called an ice heave.  I couldn't find a wiki on it (please leave a note in the comments if you do) but there's a well-reviewed book on ice that appears to have more information.


Here's a similar scene in Canada: