Christmas Links #16

How Retail Workers Deal With Nonstop Christmas Music Without Going Nuts:
"I heard ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ 27 times last week — I counted."

Doctor Who HiFive Inventor Coding Kit:
"BBC Learning and Tynker Collaborate on Coding for Kids with a Next-Generation Education Technology Mini-Computer and Coding for Kids Featuring the voice and star of the Thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, the HiFive Inventor is a powerful Internet of Things programmable computer designed to teach kids to code."

With Most Pantomimes Canceled, Another Blow to U.K. Theaters:
"Camp, kid-friendly and hugely popular, the peculiarly British performances usually sell enough tickets to support theaters’ programs throughout the rest of the year."

The 'longest-ever photo exposure' has been found -- inside a drink can:
"A photo tracking the sun's cycles over more than eight years -- believed to be the longest exposure image ever taken -- has been discovered inside a cider can."

Blob Opera:
"Blob Opera is a machine learning experiment by David Li in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture. This experiment pays tribute to and explores the original musical instrument: the voice. Play four opera voices in real time. No singing skills required!"

The New Yorker publishes editor’s note invalidating award-winning feature on Japan:
"An award-winning 2018 New Yorker story now has a whopper of an editor’s note atop it. In “A Theory of Relativity," published in April 2018, staff writer Elif Batuman profiled a Japanese company called Family Romance, which supplies actors who sub in for missing family members. Need to convince your parents that you have a girlfriend? Need to convince your girlfriend that you have parents? Family Romance can help. The story won a National Magazine Award for feature writing from the American Society of Magazine Editors in March 2019. And on Sunday night, it collapsed."

PEACE AND LOVE FOR CHRISTMAS, Lyceum Ballroom, London, 15 Dec 1969:
"John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Supergroup secretly headline the UNICEF fundraising Xmas concert at Lyceum Strand, 15 Dec 1969."

How Hallmark Took Over Cable Television:
"By “leaning into Christmas”—and claiming to avoid politics—the greeting-card company has come to dominate screens across America."

Saddleback Church creates ‘Light of the World’ Christmas drive-thru display:
"Saddleback Church is doing its best to make sure this year’s Christmas isn’t humdrum and dreary by offering lucky reservation holders and some others a huge light display spanning nearly a mile of the church’s main Lake Forest campus."

The Christmas I learned that prosecco is not a personality:
"I thought my friends bought me fizz because I was fun. In fact, it was because they barely knew me any more."