Today is National Dream Day.

Pretty much all of us dream, and while our dreams can have a lot in common with people in other parts of the world, there can be some big differences between those dreams too.

I got curious about these questions after seeing that Brilliant Maps had published a map of The Most Common Dreams By Country.

It’s based on the most popular Google searches about dreams, so it may skew toward our most visceral dreams, or the ones that concern us the most, or the ones we have the most trouble understanding.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting map: in Western countries like the US, Canada, the UK, Norway and Sweden, the most commonly searched dream was about a person’s teeth falling out.

It’s an anxiety dream that a lot of observers say relates to our concerns about our appearance.

The top-searched dream in dozens of countries was snakes, which are often seen as dreams about a person’s fears or worries.

Some countries had very specific and off-the-beaten-path dreams.

Like in Bhutan, where the most commonly searched dreams were about rainbows, or Armenia, where people dream about grapes (!)

What’s interesting about the map is that the big themes seem to cut across cultures.

People all over the world dream about falling, or being chased, or their exes.

But that doesn’t mean we all have the same dreams about those common concepts.

There was a study in 2023 out of the University of Toronto – Mississauga that tracked dreams from people in different parts of the world.

All of the participants seemed to have dreams about facing threats or challenges.

But the dreams of participants from the US and other Western countries were more focused on the stress those threats and challenges brought out in the dreamers.

Meanwhile, people from foraging communities in Africa reported that their dreams about threats ended with a friend or neighbor helping them to safety.

Which sounds like a recipe for a pretty good night’s sleep.

Another fascinating fact about dreams: a certain percentage of people dream in black and white, like in old movies.

This may be more common in people who grew up watching black and white TV.

Or maybe in people who watch a lot of film noir?

The Most Common Dreams By Country (Brilliant Maps)

Dreams can vary across cultures and environments, UTM anthropologist finds (University of Toronto – Mississauga)

45 Mind-Boggling Facts About Dreams (Healthline)

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Today is National Landline Telephone Day.

Landline phones aren’t as common as they used to be, but that’s just one of the many changes we’ve seen around phones since they started to become common in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Here’s another one of those changes: early on, being a little too well understood on the phone was considered kind of girly.

Now, of course, any big new technology ends up having an effect on the broader culture.

Think of how as television became more and more popular, politicians changed the way they spoke, dressed and acted so they would look better on camera.

The telephone had a similar effect, because our first impression of a person was increasingly based on the sound of their voice.

And the voices that were easiest to understand on those early phones were often women’s voices.

There are a couple of reasons why.

Women were often given voice instruction in school back then, and those practiced voices were more likely to break through the limited sound quality of early phones.

This was also a time when regional accents were very strong, and if you weren’t used to hearing how people in another part of the country talked, those voices would be harder to follow on the phone than those of ladies with the more deliberate speaking style from voice lessons.

But this didn’t sit well with a lot of people of the time.

Their attitude was, this is a man’s world, and here we have an exciting new technology that works better with women?!?

Which means that to use this technology successfully, men have to talk more like women, and how can we have that?!?

There are romance novels in this period where you have male characters who are just bewildered by phones.

They either mumble incoherently into their devices, or they resort to talking in high-pitched feminine voices or, in one story, a guy just goes all-out bonkers and starts climbing telephone poles because he can’t figure out how to do calls.

A research paper found that one solution to this problem back then was… spending more time and effort on policing women’s voices and criticizing the ones that didn’t sound right on the telephone.

Which I’m sure fixed everything for everybody.

If you were looking forward to running in this year’s Pyongyang Marathon, I’m sorry to tell you that this year’s race has been called off.

Travel company and race-cosponsor Koryo Tours says it received a statement from the North Korean athletics association that it had canceled the marathon “due to some reasons.”

Hopefully “some reasons” doesn’t mean, like, ominous reasons.

When the Telephone Was Considered Feminine (JSTOR Daily)

N Korea cancels Pyongyang Marathon for ‘some reasons’ (BBC)

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Today in 1959, Mattel brought a new toy to the North American International Toy Fair in New York City.

The Barbie doll has become one of the most popular toys in the world; you can find her in every state in the US and innumerable countries.

But few places have more of a connection to Barbie than my own home state of Wisconsin.

That’s not because she was invented here; Ruth Handler said she came up with the idea for the doll on vacation in Switzerland, after seeing, shall we say, shapely German doll known as Lilli.

And Barbie’s first outfit, a swimsuit, was right at home where Handler lived, southern California.

(That’s also where designer Jack Ryan, who later filed a lawsuit saying he was the actual creator of Barbie, lived and worked.)

But just as the toy has a backstory, so does the Barbie character, whose full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

The day the Barbie doll premiered at the toy fair in New York City became her birthdate.

And she grew up in the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin, named for the preponderance of willow trees in the area.

Depending on which animated Barbie adventures you watch or read, she either lived there until she graduated high school, or the Roberts family moved to Malibu when Barbie was about grade school age.

Either way, she returned from time to time to see her grandparents, and in one of the animated stories, she and her sisters stumbled upon a giant secret.

Apparently the town founders had hidden a treasure somewhere in Willows to be used when the town needed it most… which was right then and there, because the downtown district was in rough shape.

Fortunately the four sisters and their four dog friends solved a mystery involving historic plaques, caves and an underground lake?

And Willows became one of those Midwestern success stories that everyone loves talking about.

One other fact worth noting: Barbie’s had six siblings introduced over the years, including twin siblings Todd and Tutti.

Their dolls first showed up in the 1970s; in the early 90s Mattel released a new Todd doll without a new Tutti doll.

So what the heck happened there? Is she stuck near the underground lake?

Speaking of getting stuck: today in 1965, a story in The News-Star newspaper with the headline “Clumsy Burglars.”

In San Pablo, California, two individuals who were trying to break into a drugstore managed to set off the alarm.

Their luck got worse when the authorities arrived; one of them got stuck in a ventilation shaft, and the other fell off the drugstore’s roof.

Don’t you hate it when you have a day where nothing goes right?

5 things we know about Willows, the fictional Wisconsin city where Barbie was born (Milwaukee Record)

Inept Criminals #3 (Weird Universe)

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Tomorrow is National Cereal Day.

Today, though, we’re spending some quality time with the boxes that house those breakfast staples, especially the ones decades ago that came with playable records.

If you look at American food history, you know that cereal companies have spent decades trying to entice families to purchase their products by tossing in toys, games, puzzles, action figures, and, in one unusual case, a “deed” to a square inch of land in the Yukon.

Music is part of that promotional tradition as well, though the way that songs found their way onto the breakfast table was really something.

Instead of, say, putting a standard vinyl single into the box, the companies would press the music either onto a thin piece of plastic or onto a perforated bit of the cardboard box itself.

Kids could cut out those cardboard circles and put them on a turntable.

And while the earliest cereal box records featured public domain songs or appearances by cartoon characters, manufacturers eventually started working with some big names in pop music.

The Jackson 5, The Monkees and Bobby Sherman all had their songs printed on cereal boxes.

The promotion definitely worked: the New York Times talked with people in 2025 who remember decades earlier begging their parents to buy the cereal boxes with the records on them, even if they didn’t like actual cereal!

The catch? These records were pretty flimsy, and the sound quality was about what you’d expect from a piece of a cardboard box.

So a lot of people treated them as disposable.

But today there are a few diehard fans who are trying to preserve the remaining cereal records and their unusual niche in food and music history.

And now that vinyl has been making a comeback, maybe it’s time to put songs back on cereal boxes.

Each specially marked box of Alpha Bits comes with a new track by Olivia Rodrigo or Bad Bunny?

Today in 1475, the birthday of Michelangelo.

In 2021, about half a millennium after that birth, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London announced that on a wax sculpture, they had found what appeared to be the artist’s thumbprint.

And, because it’s the 2020s, the thumbprint was found on the figure’s behind.

Cereal Box Records Sound Horrible. They Still Look Incredible. (New York Times)

The Victoria and Albert Museum Says It Has Spotted Michelangelo’s Thumbprint, Preserved in Wax, on One of His Sculptures (Artnet)

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By some accounts, today is National Pickup Truck Day.

One of the world’s most notable trucks is in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.

For the last three decades or so, it’s been hanging five stories up on the side of a building.

The building is the headquarters of Santo Domingo Motors.

The story goes that back in the 1990s, one of the service department workers was heading home in one of the company’s vehicles, a 1992 Chevy Silverado.

It may have been fatigue, or heavy rain, or both, or something else, but the worker lost control of the pickup and crashed.

The next day, he had a sort of George Washington-and-the-cherry tree moment, coming clean about his crash.

The shop says it decided to turn these vehicular lemons into lemonade, by fixing up the wreck, repainting it red, and mounting it on the side of its office building.

On its website, the company says it’s meant as a reminder to put people first, but companies also don’t mind publicity, and the truck has certainly brought this shop plenty.

According to the automotive news site The Drive, the red pickup is not only a sort of mascot for Santo Domingo Motors, it’s become a kind of local landmark.

If you see the truck on the side of the building, you know you’ve arrived in Santo Domingo.

The company does have to take the truck off that wall every few years to clean it, refurbish it and repaint it.

People actually stop and complain, asking how come the truck isn’t on the wall anymore and when is it going to go back up?

The answer is: when the overhaul is done, plus the time it takes for a crane to lift the pickup back into place, and for a crew to secure it high up on the wall.

Last month the Oshawa Generals of the Ontario Hockey League apologized for sending fans a letter asking them to stop being smelly.

The team said it had gotten complaints about unwashed fans bothering other attendees at games, so they wrote to ask, hey, how about a shower before you show up to the arena?

Fans weren’t happy with their team implying that they stunk.

In the apology statement, the team said “hopefully we can wash this one off.”

This 1992 Chevy Pickup Has Been Hanging Off a Building for Over 30 Years (The Drive)

Oshawa Generals apologizing after sending letter asking smelly fans to shower before game (CTV News)

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National Salt Awareness Week begins today in the UK.

We’ll leave it to medical experts to tell you how much salt is right for you and your diet.

Instead, we will build awareness about a broader question: why is it that we keep salt and pepper shakers together at the table?

The answer is, Francois Pierre La Varenne.

He was a chef for King Louis XIV of France, and his cookbook from the 1650s, Le Cuisinier François, greatly shaped French cuisine (and, by extension, food around the world).

One hallmark of La Varenne’s style of cooking was to split meals between sweet and savory, instead of lumping them together.

He also pushed for an order of operations for entrees.

Sugary recipes shut an appetite down, so they had to go after the salty ones, which made an eater want to continue.

In addition to playing down the sweetness, he played down the spice.

His boss, King Louis XIV thought the overly seasoned foods that were often served to the well-off in those times were gross, to the point that, according to Gizmodo, he banned nearly all of them.

One of the exceptions was salt, which accentuated the flavors of the ingredients rather than changing them.

Another was parsley, which every cook knows is about as unobtrusive as an ingredient can be.

And the third was pepper, which did add a little flavor, but not a lot, and it worked especially well with salt.

Over time, salt and pepper just became the standard seasoning duo for this style of cooking, and when eaters wanted to add their own seasoning to the meal instead of just letting the cook do it, they got salt and pepper shakers.

And eventually ketchup and mustard bottles, and sugar bowls, and little packets of jelly and syrup and honey, and butter pats, and so on.

Maybe we won’t tell King Louis XIV about all those.

Starting today in New Zealand, the Golden Shears World Shearing And Woolhandling Championship.

When the competition started in the 1960s it was so popular that the military had to do crowd control.

Hopefully this year’s event will be a little calmer.

Why Are Salt and Pepper Paired? (AllRecipes)

Golden Shears World Championships

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Today in 1855 US lawmakers approved $30,000 in funding for a surprising reason: “the purchase of camels and the importation of dromedaries, to be employed for military purposes.”

The idea for the so-called “Camel Corps” experiment came in the days of westward expansion.

The US was trying to annex, buy or take all the land between the states in eastern North America and what is now California, Oregon and Washington state.

Much of the work of holding that land fell to the American military.

Some of its leaders who had spent time in the west and southwest (including then-Secretary of War and future Civil War villain Jefferson Davis) saw dry land and lots of mountains and figured this is all desert land, pretty much uninhabitable.

So they asked, how is it that people who live in hot, dry lands get themselves and their supplies from place to place?

And they thought, what about camels?

Once Congress had approved money for a pilot program, Major H.C. Wayne led a mission to Europe and North Africa to obtain some camels and to get some pro tips on how to handle them.

A year later, he and 34 camels were in the US, testing out how the beasts could handle the terrain and climate.

The tests went well! The animals handled every job they were given, and even some of the military’s biggest camel critics said that they were strong, versatile, durable and good-tempered.

But other critics could not be swayed from their “why not just stick with mules?” stance, while military horses could not stand the camels’ smells or appearances.

There were other challenges: it took time and money to keep importing the camels from outside the country.

And, of course, what came after westward expansion was the Civil War, when the country was dealing with issues more pressing than which pack animal worked best in the southwest.

A few of the camels would go on to carry bags for the Confederate military.

The rest were either sold at auction or set free; a few of the camela made their escapes into the wild West.

Today in 1875, the first indoor game of hockey took place in Montreal.

The game at the Victoria Skating Rink was a landmark on the road to modern ice hockey, but it also annoyed the other people trying to skate at the rink that day.

So the first-ever indoor hockey game… ended with a brawl.

I’m Brady, and it wouldn’t be the last one, would it?

The U.S. Army’s “Camel Corps” Experiment (Army Historical Foundation)

First indoor game ended in melee (ESPN)

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Today in 1965, the premiere of “The Sound of Music.”

Generations of fans around the world have been singing along with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and all those kids.

But those fans can be singing very different songs depending on which language they’re singing in.

This is particularly true with the song known as “Do-Re-Mi.”

It’s where Andrews’ character, Maria the governess, teaches the Von Trapp children about how musical scales work and how to remember each of the notes in the major scale.

Maria sings the syllables in the musical Solfège system – do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do – and gives the kids an easy reference for each one.

The “Do” sound can remind them of a female deer, or a doe, the “Re” sound is like a ray of sunshine, and so on.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

Those Solfège syllables are used across languages, but Maria’s easy references would not be the same in each language.

So a German music student might know “re” as in “do-re-mi,” but not a “ray of golden sun,” which in that language is something like “Sonnenstrahl.”

Which means the German version of the song has a completely different set of references.

“Re” doesn’t refer to sunshine, it points toward the heights of a German forest.

In Japanese, “re” points toward the word for “lemon,” and in Arabic it’s a reference to a spring… not of water, but of music.

And on they go through the different sounds.

Now in some cases the versions in different languages do match up: there’s a French version in which the line about “re” is about golden sunshine.

But others are different.

Maybe my favorite is “Fa,” where the French line is simply that the sound “Fa” is really easy to sing!

Today in 2024, animal lovers in England were calling the local animal rescue office.

They had seen a dog that looked to be completely stuck in the mud at a holiday resort and something needed to be done quickly!

The rescue team mobilized right away, but that dog hadn’t been hopelessly stuck.

In fact it hadn’t been a dog at all, just a statue of a dog.

But good on those people for calling, right?

“The Sound of Music” across three languages (Jabal al-Lughat) 

Animal rescue team race to save ‘dog’ stuck in ditch – only to find it’s a statue (The Express)

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Today is National Strawberry Day.

Here in the US, we use this magnificent fruit to make a whole lot of foods sweeter, tastier and healthier.

That’s also true in Poland, where one of the foods that goes best with strawberries is pasta.

If you think putting fruit on pasta is weird, here’s a question: what is a tomato?

I will grant you that this is unusual cooking in this part of the world, so let’s dig in a little deeper.

How you make this dish is the easy question to answer: while your pasta is cooking, you mix juicy strawberries with some yogurt and maybe some honey or sugar.

When the pasta’s done, pour the sauce on top and enjoy.

Fans will tell you that while pasta is better known as the base of savory recipes, there’s nothing inherently savory about most pastas, and they go just fine in a sweeter dish.

The bigger question is why people in Poland make, and love, this dish.

One reason is that Poland is a big strawberry producer; people there also put them into pierogi and serve those with fresh cream.

I’ve also read that the typical Polish palate may be a little more sugar-friendly than other parts of the world, which would mean a lot of people there would be up for a sweet pasta dish.

The meal’s popularity may also be related to Poland’s history.

During the Cold War, the country had a Communist government, and like people in many other countries in that sphere, people in Poland had to cook and eat what was available, and strawberries were available.

Of course the best way to tell if this is something YOU might like to eat is to give it a try.

Connoisseurs will tell you to wait until early summer, the peak of strawberry season, to put it all together.

But if you really can’t wait, you don’t need to. I won’t tell.

Starting today in Wabasha, Minnesota, it’s the Grumpy Old Men Festival.

This community was the setting for the movie starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Ann-Margret.

So they celebrate by screening the movie and organizing some suitably Midwestern winter activities, like polka parties, outdoor bars and an ice fishing tournament.

I’m Brady, but wouldn’t it be grumpier to complain about the movie?

Strawberry Spaghetti Is The Sweet Polish Pasta You Need To Try (Mashed)

GRUMPY OLD MEN FESTIVAL

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We have a few days left in National Children’s Dental Health Month, so today we’re telling the story of how an incarcerated guy helped make dental history.

He was William Addis, who in the 17th century became the first person to mass produce toothbrushes.

I want to be very clear, he did not invent the toothbrush: there were bristle brushes similar to the ones in use today in 15th Century China, and Europeans knew about bristle brushes before Addis came along.

And, well before all that, people around the world had been cleaning their teeth with toothpicks and what were called “chew sticks.”

But those weren’t the most common tools to clean teeth in Addis’s time and place.

People then were more likely to use a cloth or a sponge with some salt on it to prevent tooth decay.

Addis ended up changing that, and while most of the sources I found don’t go into detail, they all say that, at the time of his big inspiration, he was serving a sentence at Newgate Prison for inciting a riot (!)

Rather than let time keep dragging on in the joint, Addis whittled a piece of bone, and then decided to drill holes that could hold hairs from a boar.

He kept working and reworking his design while in the prison, and then, when his sentence was up he formed his own company to sell his brushes.

They were a hit with wealthy English households and took off from there.

Toothbrushes reached their current form in the 20th Century, when manufacturers started using plastics for the base instead of bone, and nylon bristles replaced the ones made of animal hairs.

To my knowledge, those changes were not thought up by people who had been convicted of inciting riots.

It’s National Pistachio Day, and where better to celebrate than Alamagordo, New Mexico.

The owner of a pistachio ranch, Tim McGinn, wanted to honor his dad, who’d founded the ranch.

So he built, promoted and trademarked the 30 foot tall World’s Largest Pistachio.

And this was decades before Dubai chocolate made everyone a pistachio fan.

Who invented the toothbrush and when was it invented? (Library of Congress via Archive.org)

World’s Largest Pistachio

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