What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

The band Redbone, behind "Come and Get Your Love"? All Indigenous Americans with Mexican heritage. Hell, "Redbone" itself is apparently slang for someone with mixed heritage.
So, I guess that this performance isn't just some Stupid Fucking White Man kitsch:





Maybe not strictly accurate to the Yaqui tradition (admittedly, most of what I know about that particular tribe comes from Carlos Castaneda) most of its members were from, but at least they're natives, so it's not cringe.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The first commercially available microwave oven (the Radarange by Raytheon) stood almost six feet tall, weighed 750lbs, and sold for between $2000 and $3000 (equivalent to $28 000 and $30 000 today).

And some idiots insist there’s no such thing as progress.

Boru

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

German chocolate cake is American, not German. It was named for an English-American baker named Samuel German who invented a form of sweet baking chocolate in 1853. The cake dates from the 1950s and was originally called ‘German’s Chocolate Cake.’

Boru

[Rev. Rye]

It’s possible for a video to have zero views, but already have 50 likes and 13 comments.

[Fake Messiah]

Only two people have ever accepted a second-hand Nobel Prize as a gift.

One of them was Joseph Goebbels.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

If you break up candy canes and process them through a coffee grinder, you make peppermint sugar. It’s lovely in tea, horrible in coffee.

Boru

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Wayne Newton has suffered from severe asthma since he was a child.

Boru

[Rev. Rye]

A good 5000K light can go a long way in lighting your photographs, especially if you’re shooting in the basement.

[Rev. Rye]

Some points from the new episode of Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities: 

• Gorillas were only confirmed to exist (at least by Western Man) in 1847. And for whatever reason, we became bizarrely obsessed by the possibility of gorillas fucking human women. I can only assume it's a way of sublimating racist fears of miscegenation in a form that's somehow more acceptable than a black man and white woman fucking. 
  
• Even in an era where the line between documentary and fiction was razor thin, somehow just making a mockumentary once had disastrous legal consequences.
  
• The Uncanny Valley porbably caME ABOUT AS An evolutionary response to competition with other hominid species.

Also, not so much a new thing I learned and more an old quote that I need to repurpose: "It is so howlingly ridiculous, so obviously faked, that one forgets to resent it." I write for Anglotopia, and I figure that, one of these Christmas Seasons, I should probably do an article on "Love Actually." This quote isn't for the entire film, just for one scene: 


A lot of people think Colin’s arc is sexist (a budding passport bro getting what he wants) but I just find it too ridiculous that all he has to do is go to a bar and order a Bud in his Estuary accent, and that’s enough to lock him into a five-way with a bunch of hot chicks.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Buzz Aldrin was the first man to urinate on the moon.

Boru