Category: Bazaar News

From 1765 to 1996, Ireland’s laundry institutions claimed to help vulnerable women and girls. Instead, they forced them into prison-like conditions.

In 1993, a Dublin convent sold a parcel of land. But when the developers began digging, they uncovered a decades-old scandal.

Under the Irish soil lay a mass grave that, according to Irish Central, contained 155 bodies. Most had no death certificate. An investigation revealed that the grave interred women who’d been sent to the Magdalene laundries.

These “asylums,” meant to reform women, instead abused them. Over the course of more than 230 years, girls living in the laundries were forced to work for no pay and to live in terrible conditions with no schooling.

When the scandal broke, survivors of the asylums came forward to condemn the practice.

“You didn’t know when the next beating was going to come,” survivor Mary Smith later said in an oral history conducted by Irish Research Council.

Like many survivors, Smith was not a criminal. She was sent to a Magdalene laundry in Cork after being raped.

The History of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland

The Magdalene laundry system dated back to the mid-18th century. Ireland’s first asylum opened in Dublin in 1765 with the intent to prevent prostitution. The asylum sheltered unwed mothers and women who had premarital sex, hoping to prevent their slide into sex work. Some parents sent their daughters to these asylums to hide out-of-wedlock pregnancies.

During this earlier period, women stayed in the asylums for a short time. They learned a skilled trade to support themselves after their release. And many entered the asylums by choice.

But the Magdalene asylums eventually became long-term prisons for women rejected by society. By the time the Republic of Ireland declared independence in 1922, the laundries had become a for-profit system run by four religious groups: the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Good Shepherd Sisters, and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity.

The Girls of the Magdalene Laundries

Ireland’s Magdalene laundries promised to reform “fallen” women. But who was sent to the asylums?

The nuns who ran the asylums took in “promiscuous” women. That category included unwed mothers – and their children. The people incarcerated in the convents also included victims of sexual abuse, women who were deemed too flirtatious, women with disabilities, orphans, and impoverished children.

While the Magdalene laundries were almost entirely run by Catholic nuns, according to History the Irish government helped pay for them in exchange for laundry services. And the government also sent women to the asylums, including patients in mental hospitals and wards of the state.

In the laundry system, Catholic nuns vowed to reform their charges through harsh methods.

Suffering was penance for sin, the nuns of the Magdalene laundries preached. So the girls were forced to work long hours for no pay, according to the New York Times.

Local businesses, public hospitals, and government agencies dropped off their laundry at the convents. The girls washed and ironed the clothes. If they refused to work, the nuns withheld food or physically abused the girls.

“Redemption might sometimes involve a variety of coercive measures,” historian Helen J. Self writes of the laundries in Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve, “including shaven heads, institutional uniforms, bread and water diets, restricted visiting, supervised correspondence, solitary confinement and even flogging.”

“Survivors speak of constantly being under surveillance, being verbally insulted, feeling cold, having a poor diet and enduring humiliating and inadequate hygiene conditions,” declares the advocacy organization Justice for Magdalenes. “None of the girls received an education.”

Babies born in the asylums were often taken from their mothers and given to other families. But in some homes, babies faced a much worse fate. At the St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, the remains of close to 800 babies were found in a septic tank in 1975.

As reported by RTÉ, an investigation into the home suggested that poor treatment of illegitmate children born there had “signifantly reduced” their chances of survival.

The Tragic Life Of Mary Smith

Mary Smith was sent to a Magdalene laundry in Cork after she was raped. The nuns explained to Smith that she had to be locked away “in case [she] got pregnant,” History reports.

At the laundry, the nuns cut Smith’s hair and gave her a new name. Like the other inmates, Smith had to work in the laundry and follow a vow of silence. The nuns also beat her.

The horrific conditions further traumatized Smith, who was only around 16 years old when she was locked away. She later said the nuns made the girls feel like they weren’t human.

“We were worse than humans,” she said. “We used to have to
line up… and they used to make us hold our hands and the nuns used to say to us, ‘say after me: I am a nobody. I am a nobody’ – they used to keep telling us to say that, ‘I am a
nobody.’”

Years later, Smith could not even remember how long she spent at the asylum. Smith later learned that she’d been born at a different Magdalene laundry to an unwed mother sent to the asylum by her priest. Tragically, Smith’s mother died before they could be reunited.

Survivors Speak Out

Elizabeth Coppin grew up in the Magdalene laundry system. According to the New York Times, when Coppin was two years old, her stepfather beat her, so the government removed Coppin from her home and sent her to an asylum.

Per court order, she was to be a ward of the court until she reached the age of 16. Instead, she was confined in the laundry system until 19.

While there, the nuns starved her, beat her until she was welted, locked her in cupboards, and forced to wear soiled clothes on her head if she wet herself. At the age of 12 or 13, Coppin set her clothes on fire in a suicide attempt. When she survived, she was not given any medical treatment.

“It dawned on me that I would be there for life, that I’d be buried in a mass grave; there were whispers that went around,” she told the New York Times. “I saw the people who were there, who were broken, institutionalized, illiterate, from living in a dark, dark place with no way out. I remember asking myself the questions, ‘What will I do? How will I get out?’”

When she was 17, Coppin managed to escape the laundry. Three months later, child protection workers forced her to return.

Marina Gambold also survived the Magdalene laundries.

“I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening,” Gambold told the BBC. “I was starving with the hunger, I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast.”

When she accidentally broke a cup, the nuns tied a string around Gambold’s neck and made her eat off the floor.

“It was common for the girls and women to believe that they would die inside,” reports Justice for Magdalenes. “Many did.”

The Abuse Scandal Breaks

Shockingly, the Magdalene laundries operated well into the 1990s – and the last one closed in 1996.

It’s estimated that up to 300,000 “fallen” women passed through Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries between 1765 and 1996. Records show that at least 10,000 girls and women were sent to the laundries between 1922 and 1996. But the true number is likely much higher, as many laundries kept inaccurate records and neglected to report when girls died.

After the scandal broke, the United Nations investigated the Magdalene laundries for violating human rights. Per History, the UN concluded that the victims were “deprived of their identity, of education and often of food and essential medicines and were imposed with an obligation of silence and prohibited from having any contact with the outside world.”

Magdalene Laundry Survivors Grapple With Their Pasts

Survivors of the abusive laundry system often fled Ireland. “A lot of them didn’t even have passports,” journalist Norah Casey said, according to the New York Times. “They got the hell out of Ireland as soon as they could and never came back.”

In 2018, a group of 220 survivors met in Dublin. While within the asylums many girls were isolated, many survivors were able to connect with each other in the aftermath to share their stories.

“I heard about one woman who is here somewhere today who I think I knew in Kerry,” said Elizabeth Coppin. “I’ll be looking for her later.”

While the Magdalene laundries have been closed for decades, many women still live with the scars of their abuse.

After investigations into the laundries revealed that about a quarter of women in them were sent there by the Irish state, Ireland set up a compensation scheme to pay surivors reparations. Per Reuters, the Irish government agreed to pay up to 58 million euros, or about $75 million, to hundreds of laundry survivors.

“This has destroyed my life to date,” Smith said after the compensation scheme was announced. “All this that is going on will never take away our hurt.”

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Ireland’s laundry system was not the only case where vulnerable children suffered abuse. Next, go inside the Elan school for troubled teens, and then read about the Indigenous residential schools system.

Archaeologists believe that the vessel sank sometime in the 19th century when ships were as prevalent as “Amazon trucks.”

After two hurricanes battered a beach at Daytona Beach Shores in Florida, local residents started to notice wooden structures poking out from the sand. Now, archaeologists have announced that they believe the storms revealed a lost 19th-century shipwreck.

“Whenever you find a shipwreck on the beach it’s really an amazing occurrence,” maritime archaeologist Chuck Meide of St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum, who led the team examining the wreck, told the Associated Press. “There’s this mystery, you know. It’s not there one day, and it’s there the next day, so it really captivates the imagination.”

As the Associated Press explains, beachgoers first noted the wooden structure around Thanksgiving weekend. It appeared to be between 80 and 100 feet long and around 25 feet wide and had been apparently revealed after Hurricane Ian and Hurricane Nicole eroded sand on the beach.

At first, no one was sure what to make of the structure. The New York Times reports that people hypothesized that it could be anything from an old pier to spectator seating from when NASCAR held races on the beach.

But after Meide and his team of archaeologists investigated the cluster of wood, they determined that it was a shipwreck.

“I can tell you definitively that it is a shipwreck,” Meide told NBC News.”We’re finding frames — or ribs — of the vessel, we’re finding steeling planking, which is the interior planking… down on the bottom of the cargo hold.”

He added: “It’s more likely to date to the 1800s than any other century because there’s just so many more ships sailing in the 1800s.”

Another archaeologist on site, Christopher McCarron, compared 19th-century shipping to Amazon. He told Fox 35 Orlando, “Imagine as many Amazon trucks that you see on the roads today, this was the equivalent in the 1800s.”

But the archaeologists aren’t sure what the ship was carrying when it sank.

“If it was coming from the Caribbean it could have been fruit. It could have been lumber,” Meide told WESH 2. “If it was coming from the Gulf of Mexico, it could have been manufactured goods.”

Without artifacts, the archaeologists can only guess about where the ship was built, what the ship was transporting, and where it was going.

“Sometimes you can make the connection between what was being transported and what was being built at the time,” McCarron told Fox 35 Orlando. “It’s too early to say unfortunately. We’re having a fight to tide.”

He added: “That’s where those diagnostic artifacts identifiers come in handy, to help us narrow down potential areas. Unfortunate for this particular wreck, we might not have that information still left.”

Despite the questions that remain about the shipwreck, the discovery has thrilled locals living near Daytona Beach Shores.

“If something good could come out of those two horrible hurricanes we had, I’ll take it — and it’s history,” Dean Coleman told WESH 2.

Barry Chantler seconded him, saying: “I love history and something that’s not been discovered is almost like finding history for the first time, which I think it is. It’s just exciting when you are going out to the beach and unexpectedly there’s this shipwreck, this relic of the past.”

For now, the Associated Press reports that there are no plans to fully excavate the shipwreck from the sand. Not only would that cost millions of dollars, but it would likely damage the wreck itself. Instead, archaeologists will measure it, draw it, and take wood samples for further study.

In any case, Meide explained that the wet sand is the best place for the wreck, since it will keep it in one place and protect it from the elements.

“We will let Mother Nature bury the wreck,” he told the Associated Press. “That will help preserve it. As long as that hull is in the dark and wet, it will last a very long time, hundreds of more years.”

In fact, sand has already started to cover the wreck. Soon, it will slip beneath the beach again, just as it slipped beneath the waves centuries ago.

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After reading about the wooden structures in Florida revealed to be a 19th-century shipwreck, discover the stories of some of the most famous shipwrecks from human history. Or, see how archaeologists determined that timber found in Oregon was really part of the “Beeswax Shipwreck,” which may have inspired Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Goonies.’

Flying around the holidays can be stressful. You have to deal with long lines, coordinating with relatives, and lugging suitcases stuffed with presents. There’s no magic trick for reducing airport crowds in late December, but there is one step you can take to make going through security a bit easier. If you’re traveling with gifts this year, make sure to wrap them after you reach your destination.

As WSAZ reports, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) advises against bringing wrapped boxes to the airport this holiday season. Even if your blender for grandma is TSA-approved, it may set off alarm bells when it goes through the X-ray machine. When that happens, the only way for agents to clear the item is to open the package and examine it by hand—even if you’ve already covered the box with Rudolph-themed wrapping paper. This applies to presents in your checked bags as well as any in your carry-on.

The best way to avoid this scenario is by waiting to wrap your gifts until the last minute. Of course this increases the chances of your family sneaking a peek, and it may add more stress to your pre-holiday schedule, but it’s better than having to wrap them twice. It also makes life easier for the TSA agents who have no interest in being seen as a Grinch.

If you truly won’t have time to wrap your gifts after landing, consider gift bags or boxes instead of paper. That way, agents can look inside the package without destroying it. Another option is to ship your presents to your destination so they’re waiting for you when you get there. (Just make sure your family knows they shouldn’t open the boxes.)

To ensure the rest of your holiday plans go smoothly, check out these travel tips.

[h/t WSAZ]

Many Christmas traditions have roots predating the holiday itself. The Gaels and Celts burned “Yule logs” during their winter solstice celebrations, and people have been using evergreens to decorate their homes for winter since before the dawn of Christianity. You may not question the prevalence of ham around the holiday, but even this tradition has pagan origins.

Though not as closely tied to Christmas as turkey is to Thanksgiving, ham is still considered the classic protein to serve on December 25 (at least since Christmas peacock and goose fell out of fashion). The spiral-sliced and honey-baked version is a relatively new addition to the holiday table, but pork has been part of winter feasts for centuries.

According to Wane.com, the precursor to Christmas ham may have been wild boar. The Norse people associated boar with Freyr—the god of fertility and good weather—and they sacrificed the animal to appease him. Germanic pagans folded the hunt for wild game and the subsequent feast into their annual Yuletide festivities marking the return of the sun.

When early Christians were looking for an opportunity to celebrate Christ’s birth in the 4th century CE, winter solstice made perfect sense. It was already a time of feasting throughout much of Europe. Rather than stamping Germanic Yuletide out of Roman Saturnalia completely, Christians repurposed these celebrations to fit their new religion.

Boar survived the transition to Christmas, but instead of a sacrifice to Freyr it became associated with St. Stephen, whose feast day falls on December 26. Boar head was a staple of Christmas feasts during the Middle Ages. Some old recipes instructed cooks to rub the pig with lard and ash to recreate the creature’s black fur.

Around the mid-20th century, cured pork thigh—a.k.a. ham—became Americans’ preferred way to eat pig on Christmas (and other Christian celebrations). Cost was a driving factor behind the dish’s popularity. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, ham cost 62 cents per pound on average in 1950. For compassion, it cost 74 cents for a pound of lamb, 74 cents for beef rib roast, and 94 cents for steak that same year. Advertisements encouraging cooks to dress up ham for the holidays with cloves, pineapple slices, and maraschino cherries helped boost the meat’s festive reputation.

Don’t let the addition of canned fruit fool you: Ham is as classic as any dish served around the winter holidays. When you sit down to dinner this Christmas, be thankful you didn’t have to sacrifice the pig yourself (and that you’re eating its leg instead of its head).

Chocolate lava cake is a regular item on dessert menus for a reason. The baked good—which reveals its gooey, molten center once you cut into it—is as decadent as it is impressive. Luckily, you don’t need to go out to enjoy this show-stopping final course. You can make the cake at home in roughly 30 minutes using just five ingredients.

This recipe for chocolate lava cake comes from the Institute of Culinary Education. Though the end result is restaurant-quality, ICE’s lead recreational chef-instructor Roger Sitrin recommends it to anyone who’s new to baking. “It definitely is a beginner’s recipe, and that’s the beauty of it,” he tells Mental Floss.

The recipe makes four servings, so start by greasing four 4-ounce ramekins and coating them with sugar. Next, mix 4 ounces of melted, unsalted butter with 4 ounces of dark chocolate. The butter should be off the burner but still hot enough to melt the chocolate. Set the mixture aside to cool.

To make your batter, whisk together 2 egg yolks, 2 whole eggs, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of flour in a separate bowl. Stir in the room-temperature chocolate and pour the batter evenly into the prepared ramekins. The mini-cakes will be done after 8 minutes in a 400°F oven (the centers should still be gooey). You can release them from the ramekins by flipping them onto a plate. Serve with ice cream or fresh fruit or, alternatively, eat them plain from the ramekin with the nearest spoon.

If you’re looking to impress guests, this is the right dish to make. In addition to their dramatic presentation, molten chocolate cakes are easy to make ahead of time. “You make them, then you put them in your freezer. Then when people come over you pop them out of the freezer right into the oven,” Sitrin says. “I always have these in my house […] so when someone shows up unexpectedly I have dessert for everyone.”

Even if you’re not much of an entertainer, the individual cakes are good to have on hand in case of emergency chocolate cravings.

The Institute of Culinary Education offers classes in cooking and hospitality management out of its campuses in Los Angeles and New York. Whether students are pursuing a new career in the culinary arts or they’re veterans looking to continue their education, ICE has courses to suit their needs. To learn more recipes like the one below, you can find the school’s curricula here.

Serves 4

4 ounces dark chocolate
4 ounces (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter
2 large whole eggs
2 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon sugar, plus more for molds
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1. Preheat oven to 400° F. Prepare four 4-ounce ramekins by praying them with cooking spray and coating them in sugar.
2. 
Melt butter in sauce pan. When melted and still hot, remove from heat and add chocolate. Mix until smooth.

3. Allow to cool to room temperature. 
In a separate bowl, whisk together the whole eggs, egg yolks, sugar, and flour.

4. Whisk in the chocolate mixture and distribute evenly between the four ramekins. At this stage, cakes can be refrigerated up to 3 days or frozen for up to 6 months.

5. Bake in oven for 8 minutes. Remove while center still looks uncooked. Flip mold onto a plate and unmold. Serve with ice cream, raspberries, or some other garnish.

The thylacine died in 1936 at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, but zoo records failed to document the whereabouts of the tiger’s remains, leading many experts to fear they had been lost forever.

For decades, experts have been searching for the lost remains of the last-known Tasmanian tiger, and finally, their search has come to an end. It was recently discovered that the thylacine’s remains had been stored at an Australian museum all along.

“For years, many museum curators and researchers searched for its remains without success,” scientist and author Robert Paddle said, according to The Guardian. “No thylacine material dating from 1936 had been recorded in the zoological collection, and so it was assumed its body had been discarded.”

But while searching through the museum’s taxidermist’s annual report from 1936/37, Paddle and the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), Dr. Kathryn Medlock, found that the thylacine was indeed among the specimens that had been worked on that year.

“We tried to work out which specimens we could trace to something. There was just a skeleton and flat skin left over,” Medlock said.

As it turned out, when the female marsupial died in September 1936, its remains were immediately handed over to the museum, where it was preserved for educational purposes — not for research. As a result, it was never properly cataloged and remained hidden in storage.

According to Smithsonian magazine the museum’s taxidermist at the time, William Cunningham, had indeed skinned the thylacine and tanned its hide so that it could be easily transported to schools for demonstrations.

Likewise, the thylacine’s skeleton was broken apart, and its bones were placed on a series of five educational cards, which they still sat on when Paddle and Medlock uncovered them. The bones and skin have since been put on display in the museum’s thylacine gallery.

For quite some time, a Tasmanian tiger called Benjamin — which was not the name given to him by zoo staff — who was photographed often while being held in captivity at the Beaumaris Zoo, was widely believed to be the last thylacine. New research, however, found that there had been a female of the species that outlived Benjamin — and her remains were the ones that had long eluded researchers.

She was an old female, captured in 1936 by a trapper named Elias Churchill. Churchill sold the thylacine to the zoo, but Paddle said the sale was never recorded because, “at the time, ground-based snaring was illegal and Churchill could have been fined.”

The female thylacine only lived for a few months after the sale before dying of exposure. Her body was then gifted to the museum, where it was unwittingly used in educational demonstrations.

“It is bittersweet that the mystery surrounding the remains of the last thylacine has been solved,” said the museum’s director Mary Mulcahy. “Our thylacine collection at TMAG is very precious and is held in high regard by researchers.”

In the early 1800s, when European settlers first began to colonize regions of the South Pacific, roughly 5,000 thylacines still lived in Tasmania. At the time, they were the largest marsupial carnivores on the planet — and relatively shy ones at that. For the most part, Tasmanian tigers avoided humans.

Yet the colonizers feared — and incorrectly assumed — that the thylacines were preying on their livestock, and so they put out bounties for the creatures and hunted them down en masse. Naturally, this was a major cause of the species’ eventual extinction.

“Most new settlers didn’t really value Australian wildlife. They were just seen as pests to whatever commodity those settlers were trying to cultivate,” said conservation biologist John Woinarski. “It was all about short-term benefit and profit. I’m sure that most people didn’t think that a bounty on thylacines would result in their extinction, and even if they did, I don’t think that would have been an undesirable outcome for them.”

This discovery also comes not long after the genetics start-up Colossal Biosciences — the same company that, last year, announced they were going to try and bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction — announced plans to de-extinct the Tasmanian tiger, Smithsonian reports.

The ambitious plan also involves later re-introducing thylacines back into the Tasmanian ecosystem, but the project has proved controversial, with some researchers referring to it as “a fairy tale science.”

“It’s pretty clear to people like me that thylacine or mammoth de-extinction is more about media attention for the scientists and less about doing serious science,” said Jeremy Austin, an evolutionary biologist from the Australian Center for Ancient DNA.

Time will tell if Colossal’s ambitious project comes to fruition, but for now, at least one mystery surrounding the thylacine has been put to rest.

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After reading about the recovered remains of this Tasmanian animal, read the story of the seven Tasmanian devils born on mainland Australia for the first time in 3,000 years. Or, read about the oldest human remains in the Americas — that were likely lost in a fire.

The strange habits of Santa Claus are ripe for interrogation, from his use of the chimney as a thoroughfare to his use of coal as a disciplinary measure. His trademark ho ho ho raises questions, too, such as: What?

It’s generally agreed that when Jolly Old St. Nick spouts a trichotomous ho, he’s laughing with mirth. But the history of ho ho ho as laughter—and how it became Santa’s catchphrase—is a little more complicated than that.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a double or triple ho was used to express “derision or derisive laughter” possibly as far back as the late 12th century, and it was definitely in play by the 16th century. A solitary ho, meanwhile, could connote “surprise, admiration, exultation (often ironical), triumph, [or] taunting.”

While Papa Noël doesn’t taunt or deride, there is something pretty puckish about the way he steals undetected into and out of people’s houses at night, and getting away with that kind of benevolent mischief certainly merits a triumphant ho or three. In fact, the mythos of Santa Claus involves quite a bit of trickery on all sides—from parents trying to keep their kids from finding out the truth to kids trying to catch the bearded anti-burglar in the act.

Early mentions of ho ho ho in conjunction with Father Christmas—though not all spoken by him—reflect that theme. In 1877, for instance, newspapers printed a story by John Brownjohn in which a young believer by the name of Miltiades Peterkin Paul sticks a steel trap down his stocking in the hopes that it will ensnare Santa’s hand. 

“Then I’ll hurry downstairs in an instant and free him. Ho! ho! ho! We’ll soon know if a body may see him,” he says. (It isn’t Santa that Miltiades captures, but his own grandfather.)

Ten years later, The Clyde Mail of Kansas printed an ad written from the perspective of Santa Claus, who had just “delivered” toys and other goods to a local store in early December.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! Ho!” Santa says, “Howdy, Children! Didn’t Look for Me so Soon, Did You!” 

Ho ho ho’s connection to Santa Claus continued to grow stronger even as its lexical nuances began to fade. And that’s largely because it was kept alive in Santa-specific songs and stories.

In 1867, for example, William B. Bradbury published a hymnal that included a song about Kris Kringle and his Christmas tree. “Oh ho, Oh ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho,” you’d sing, followed by a number of jingles. 

The previous year, Benjamin Russell Hanby had published the music and lyrics for “Santa Claus”—a ditty known better today as “Up on the Housetop.” In Hanby’s original iteration, the line in question was “O! O! O! Who wouldn’t go.” But by the dawn of the 20th century, songbooks had already started replacing the o’s with hos. And when Gene Autry released his famous rendition in 1953, it was actually titled “Up on the House Top (Ho! Ho! Ho!).”

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum contributed to the popularity of the expression, too. In his 1902 children’s book The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, the titular character bellows this jolly song as his sleigh takes off: 

“With a ho, ho, ho!
And a ha, ha, ha!
And a ho, ho, ha, ha, hee!
Now away we go
O’er the frozen snow,
As merry as we can be!”

It would still be a while before ho ho ho fully supplanted ha ha ha as Santa’s go-to guffaw. In Disney’s 1932 animated short Santa’s Workshop, for example, Santa Claus very clearly exclaims “Ha! Ha! Ha!” rather than “Ho! Ho! Ho!” as he peruses letters and inspects toys. 

But the interjection’s association with jolliness was solid enough by the mid-20th century that when vegetable manufacturer Green Giant created a jingle for the Jolly Green Giant in the early ’60s, producers had vocalist Len Dresslar record a booming ho ho ho to slot in after the word jolly. 

The Jolly Green Giant’s appropriation of the phrase didn’t seem to weaken Santa’s brand. And judging by the number of 6-year-olds today who will answer your “Who says ho ho ho?” with a resounding “Santa!,” it’s clear who got the last laugh.

If you try hard enough, anything is possible. But it turns out training pigeons to discriminate between a Picasso and a Monet isn’t actually all that hard. Pigeons can tell the difference between the two artists with relatively little effort (at least relative to what we would have imagined).

Pigeons and Picasso and Monet

In 1995, researchers Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita published a paper called “Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso” in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. In it, they showed:

“Pigeons successfully learned to discriminate color slides of paintings by Monet and Picasso. Following this training, they discriminated novel paintings by Monet and Picasso that had never been presented during the discrimination training. Furthermore, they showed generalization from Monet’s to Cezanne’s and Renoir’s paintings or from Picasso’s to Braque’s and Matisse’s paintings. These results suggest that pigeons’ behavior can be controlled by complex visual stimuli in ways that suggest categorization. Upside-down images of Monet’s paintings disrupted the discrimination, whereas inverted images of Picasso’s did not. This result may indicate that the pigeons’ behavior was controlled by objects depicted in impressionists’ paintings but was not controlled by objects in cubists’ paintings.”

Birds and bees

Later on, in 2013, behavioral scientists showed that honeybees could also discriminate between paintings by the two artists.

Perhaps more hilariously, a 2010 article in the journal Animal Cognition showed that “Pigeons can discriminate “good” and “bad” paintings by children.” Imagine a pigeon letting your child know their art is “bad.”

Wonder how it was done? In the words of the researcher:

“In this study, I investigated whether pigeons could be trained to discriminate between paintings that had been judged by humans as either ‘bad’ or ‘good’. To do this, adult human observers first classified several children’s paintings as either ‘good’ (beautiful) or ‘bad’ (ugly). Using operant conditioning procedures, pigeons were then reinforced for pecking at ‘good’ paintings. After the pigeons learned the discrimination task, they were presented with novel pictures of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ children’s paintings to test whether they had successfully learned to discriminate between these two stimulus categories. The results showed that pigeons could discriminate novel ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paintings.”

Who knew nature had such art critics?! — WTF fun facts

Source: “Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso” — Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

December is filled with images of a jolly old man, snowy haired and round-bellied, wearing a red suit trimmed with white fleece. He’s become a symbol of festive gift-giving, shown often at his home in the North Pole or sitting on a sleigh driven by his loyal reindeer. 

But the Santa Claus we know today would have been unfamiliar before the mid-19th century.  So how did this particular image of Old Saint Nick come to take shape? The answer lies partially in the work of a cartoonist who was otherwise best known for his work in a very different field.

The illustrator Thomas Nast, born in 1840, is perhaps America’s most famous political cartoonist. Among other things, he has been credited with the visual association of donkeys with Democrats and elephants with Republicans, and was praised by Abraham Lincoln for his support of the Union in his cartoons during the Civil War.

But another of the most enduring parts of his legacy as an illustrator comes in the form of the figure who is most associated with Christmas: Santa Claus. Nast first drew him for the January 3, 1863, edition of Harper’s Weekly. His image, which included elements from the 1823 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and the cartoonist’s German heritage, showed Santa visiting a Union Army camp to deliver gifts to soldiers. From then until 1886, Nast contributed yearly illustrations of Santa to the magazine—and in the process, did a great deal to cement many aspects of the Santa legend in the popular imagination.

Before Nast, Santa often wore tan; it was the cartoonist’s work that began to shift this perception and popularize the red suit that endures to this day. He also created the image of a plump Santa with a large stomach (“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” a source of inspiration for Nast’s Santa, distinctly describes Santa as having “a little round belly”). 

Nast influenced more about Kris Kringle than just his appearance. He decided that Santa lived at the North Pole, and also gave him a helpful crew of elves. And though Nast’s cartoons didn’t originate the idea of flying reindeer, his inclusion of the magical beasts in his  illustrations did help make their association with Father Christmas more popular. His version of Santa became more and more widespread as people who created and sold Christmas cards in the 1870s and ‘80s drew upon his images for their own creations.

Nast’s interest in politics and Santa sometimes became intertwined. In addition to his first cartoon showing Santa visiting soldiers, a famous image from 1881 is sometimes credited as one of the most influential portraits of the magical man. In it, a smiling Santa with a full, white beard puffs a long pipe. He carries an armful of goods, including a doll and a toy horse. But the picture also carried a subtext: It was loaded with symbols related to the military, and was intended to support a campaign at the time to increase the wages of those serving in the army and navy.

Nast had created more than 30 images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly by the time he resigned in 1886. After leaving the magazine, he increasingly struggled to find work as an artist. He was still held in high esteem for his political engagements, though: Theodore Roosevelt appointed him as a diplomat to Ecuador in 1902. Sadly, Nast died of yellow fever only a few months after his arrival in the country.

While his diplomatic career may have been short, his legacy as an artist endures through the wealth of cartoons that survive to this day—and in the very image of Santa Claus as we know him.

In February 2004, Carlie Brucia was kidnapped from a Florida carwash a mile from her house — and found dead just a few days later in a field behind a church.

On the evening of Feb. 1, 2004, an 11-year-old girl named Carlie Brucia was abducted in Sarasota, Florida while walking the one mile from her friend’s house to her own home. She was found dead in a field by a church five days later in a crime that sent shockwaves throughout her community.

This is her tragic story.

The Abduction Of Carlie Brucia

Carlie Jane Brucia was born on March 16, 1992. By 1993, her mother and father had divorced, with Brucia visiting her Long Island family during the summer and winter school breaks. Brucia was living with her mother Susan Schorpen and her stepfather in Sarasota when the unthinkable happened on that February evening.

Brucia had been sleeping over at a friend’s house and was headed home to watch the Super Bowl that evening, it was around 6:15 p.m. when she began her one mile walk back to her house.

Her friend’s mother, Connie Arnold, had called Brucia’s mother to check that it was okay for her to walk, and Schorpen replied that she did not want Brucia walking along the busy Bee Ridge Road. She consequently sent her husband to pick her up — but he never found her.

Brucia’s parents called 911 around 7:30 p.m., and police initiated a large-scale search for Bruscia as the unbearable hours ticked by. Then around midday the following day, police bloodhounds tracking Bruscia’s scent, came upon Evie’s Car Wash at 4735 Bee Ridge Road.

The dogs tracked the scent behind the car wash before it suddenly vanished.

Footage taken from the car wash’s motion sensor cameras showed a man in a mechanic’s uniform leading Brucia by the arm at 6:21 p.m. the previous evening. Police rewound the tape and saw a yellow Buick driving into the parking lot three minutes before her recorded abduction.

According to The New York Times, the footage was immediately released to the media and an Amber Alert was issued for Brucia — but it would be to no avail.

Though Brucia’s abductor was quickly identified from the footage as local mechanic Joseph Peter Smith, it was already too late for Brucia.

The Morbid Discovery Of Brucia’s Body

Police eventually received Smith’s address, and authorities learned that the suspect was actually on parole for drug offenses. The previous year, Smith had violated parole twice, but authorities decided not to remand him.

Police searched Smith’s rented room and found mechanic uniforms in his closet, but no other evidence tying him to Brucia. When officers found drug paraphernalia in his car, Smith was taken into custody for a parole violation.

Joseph Smith’s brother, John, was then shown the CCTV footage and he agreed to help the FBI to get a confession from him. “If it’s him,” John cautioned, “you won’t get it out of him.” And yet on February 5, Smith called his brother John, who was then able to take FBI agents and a local officer to the Central Church of Christ — and directed them to a nearby field 2.8 miles from the site of Brucia’s abduction.

While at the church, John received another call from his brother, who described the location of Brucia’s body.

In a field behind the church, 11-year-old Carlie Brucia was found lying on her back, a deep ligature mark prominent on her neck. She was naked below the waist — apart from a sock on her right foot — with her right leg outstretched, and her left leg curled underneath her.

During that phone call, Smith had admitted that he had “rough sex” with Brucia before strangling her.

Smith’s Conviction

The Sarasota County medical examiner determined that Brucia had been strangled from behind, and abrasions on the side of her body indicated that she had been dragged to her final resting place. A semen sample found on her shirt matched Joseph Smith’s DNA profile, and two of Brucia’s head hairs were recovered from the yellow station wagon he had borrowed, with seven fibers matching the red shirt that Brucia was wearing.

Smith had disposed of Brucia’s backpack and clothing in different trash bins, as reported by CNN. All of this evidence was enough to charge Smith with Brucia’s abduction and murder.

Convicted on all charges, Smith was sentenced to death on March 15, 2006. In 2018, Smith’s sentence was commuted to life, but reinstated to a death sentence in April 2020. However, Smith died on death row of unknown circumstances on July 26, 2021, according to the Herald Tribune. The police have also suspected Smith in the unsolved murder of Tara Reilly, whose naked body was found in a retention pond behind a Walmart in Bradenton, Florida, in 2000.

Brucia’s horrifying death did incite legal action, however. In 2004, a bill named Carlie’s Law was proposed that amended existing laws to toughen parole rules for sex offenders. The bill however, failed to pass congress, and appears to have been abandoned.

Tragedy followed Brucia’s family. In July 2005, Brucia’s mother lost custody of her seven-year-old son after she failed a drug test, according to the Tampa Bay Times. At the time, Schorpen said she had turned to drugs “because the pain within my reality is too much to bear.” Sadly, she died of a heroin overdose in April 2017.

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After learning about the abduction and murder of Carlie Brucia, read about the disturbing story of Susan Smith, the mother who drowned her own children. Then, learn how John Wayne Gacy’s daughter, Christine Gacy, avoided becoming one of his victims.

For consumers, passwords are a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until the internet and the rise of online commerce and security that we’ve been tasked with remembering dozens of access codes to financial institutions, email accounts, streaming services, and retailers.

For too many people, that arduous task is resolved by choosing an easy password. How easy? Cybersecurity firm NordPass recently examined data culled from online security incidents in 30 countries to determine how often certain easy-to-guess passwords are used.

The top 50 found in the United States are below, all of which violate the cardinal rules of strong password protection like making them long, nonsensical, and alphanumeric. If any of these look familiar, change yours. (Which you should do often anyway.)

1. guest
2. 123456
3. password
4. 12345
5. a1b2c3
6. 123456789
7. Password1
8. 1234
9. abc123
10. 12345678
11. qwerty
12. baseball
13. football
14. unknown
15. soccer
16. jordan23
17. iloveyou
18. monkey
19. shadow
20. g_czechout
21. 1234567
22. 1q2w3e4r
23. 111111
24. f-ckyou
25. princess
26. basketball
27. sunshine
28. jordan
29. michael
30. 1234567890
31. reset
32. zinch
33. maiden
34. 123123
35. 81729373759
36. superman
37. hunter
38. anthony
39. maggie
40. super123
41. purple
42. love
43. ashley
44. andrew
45. justin
46. killer
47. pepper
48. tigger
49. buster
50. nicole

Across all countries, password was the most common, with nearly 5 million accounts making the bare minimum effort.

NordPass also found that people rely heavily on fashion brands (Tiffany, Nike, Gap), sports teams, TV show names, and food (pizza, popcorn, potato) to build their passwords. Generally speaking, if a password has words that help you remember, it will probably help a hacker, too.

[h/t NordPass]