so don't complain about getting socks for christmas

The jólakötturinn (Yule Cat) of Icelandic folklore eats kids who don't get clothing for Christmas. And...there's a Bjork song about him (sample lyrics: "From them he took at the same time / all their christmas food / and ate them also themselves / if he could"):

via this post on Ravelry (requires login) and this post

double elephants and birds

A double elephant folio is a book printed on double elephant paper, which measures 40 inches by 26.75 inches. The paper can be up to 50 inches long.

Based on five minutes of intensive internet research, the most famous double elephant folio appears to be Birds of America by John James Audubon, who wanted the birds in his book to appear life-sized. This blogger wonders what the book would have looked like if Audubon had been into insects instead.

I learned this from:
1. The Order of Things: Hierarchies, Structures, and Pecking Orders
2. What is a Double Elephant?
3. Book Sizes

P.S. The largest book on record is Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, which is five by seven feet and weighs 150 pounds. It costs $15,000 to get your own copy, but you can see photos of it at this link.

The Dickin Medal is given to animals who show "conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty" during wartime.  Most of the winners have been pigeons (they carried messages during World War II) or dogs, but there have also been a few horses and one cat.

Able Seacat Simon* of the HMS Amethyst was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal in 1949 for removing a rat infestation and raising the sailors' morale, even after he was injured by a shell blast.

* not to be confused with Simon's Cat

I learned this by following this convoluted path on Wikipedia: Berber cuisine --> Pastilla --> Columbidae --> War pigeon --> Commando (pigeon) --> Dickin Medal --> Simon (cat)

Jesus Christ, let's try the kanji.

You know that thing that happens when your browser uses the wrong character encoding, resulting in a page of unintelligible symbols where there should be Japanese or Arabic or whatever?  There's a word for that: mojibake.

I learned this from the comment thread of a post about egregious errors in a Dan Brown book.

weedy seadragons

There are probably some weird things about weedy seadragons (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus), but the fact that they exist is weird enough for me. They look like someone crossed a seahorse, a kangaroo, a sandpiper, and a pomegranate, painted the offspring, then decided to grow kelp on them. And they dance.

I learned this from Pharyngula. See also: Leafy sea dragon.

head lice

In North America, head lice are adapted to round strands of hair.  African Americans, who tend to have curly hair, are therefore less susceptible to head lice.  (But African head lice are adapted to oval strands of hair, so there are still infestations of head lice there.)

I learned this from UC IPM: Head Lice Management Guidelines.  And now I'm itchy.

Blaschko's lines

This picture shows Blaschko's lines, which result from the migration of cells in an embryo.

Although they are normally invisible, they become visible in some people with skin disorders, as in this photo:

I learned this from Blaschko's Lines on Pharyngula, which has some more pictures and a very clear explanation of how this phenomenon works. The top image is from Dynamics of Cancer by Steven A. Frank; the bottom image is from Wikimedia Commons.