Thursday 12/12/24
Celebrate:
Gingerbread House Day
International Sound Check Day
National 12-Hour Fresh Breath Day
National Ambrosia Day
National Ding-a-Ling Day
National Poinsettia Day - a plant native to Mexiconamed after a botanist and the first Minister to Mexico, who sent cuttings of the plant back to his home in Charleston, South Carolina.
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New Year's Eve...staying home and watching the tv???
Ryan Seacrest will return for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest. From Times Square with help from Rita Ora, which will also feature musical performances by various artists — including TLC, Carrie Underwood, Megan Moroney, Sophie Ellis-Baxter, Lenny Kravitz, Tinashe, Thomas Rhett, Teddy Swims, Cody Johnson, Alanis Morissette, with special guest Reneé Rapp, Dasha, DJ Cassidy’s Pass The Mic Live! starring Ja Rule, Fat Joe, Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh, Ernest, HARDY, Kesha, Laufey, Natasha Bedingfield, and T-Pain. Blake Shelton will perform from Las Vegas and Luis Fonsi from Puerto Rico.
Keith Urban will cohost this year’s edition of New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash. The special, which has been running since 2021, will feature performances by various country musicians — including Urban, Kane Brown, and Jelly Roll, among others — from the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park in Nashville, Tennessee, timed to the Central Time Zone midnight strike. Urban will join returning cohost Rachel Smith.
Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen will once again be joining forces to host the cable news network’s New Year’s Eve countdown celebration — and this time, they’ll be allowed to drink adult beverages again after the network put their libations access on hold in 2023.
NBC Usually does a fun recap of the year earlier in the evening.
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Google released its annual "Year in Search" stats . . . and in America in 2024, it was dominated by: The election . . . the Olympics . . . Hurricane Milton . .
The "New York Times" puzzle Connections . . . and the New York Yankees, which lost the World Series.
The Top 10 news topics we googled, in order, were: The election . . . the soccer (football) tournament Copa América . . . the 2024 Summer Olympics . . . Hurricane Milton . . . and the Paralympics.
Project 2025 . . . the Trump assassination attempt . . . U.S. House election results . . . "heat advisory" . . . and Hurricane Helene.
The top "memes and trends" we were trying to figure out were: Demure . . . "Just Give Me My Money" . . . English or Spanish . . . This and Yap . . . 17 Diapers . . . "Hear Me Out" . . . Coquette . . . Roman Empire, which actually started last year . . . Brat . . . and Big Back.
Top Trending searches in Entertainment for 2024.
Celebrity Duos:
1. Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton
2. Justin and Hailey Bieber
3. Vanna White and Ryan Seacrest
4. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez
5. Conjoined twins Abby and Brittany Hensel
Movies:
1. "Inside Out 2"
2. "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"
3. "It Ends with Us"
4. "Saltburn" (which was so 2023)
5. "Dune: Part Two"
Performances:
1. "Raygun full performance." (That would be the Olympic breakdancing excellence of Australian megastar Rachael Gunn.)
2. "Ryan Gosling Oscars." (He sang "I'm Just Ken" from "Barbie".)
3. "Toby Keith last performance."
4. "Miley Cyrus Grammys."
5. "Celine Dion Olympics."
Musicians:
1. Usher
2. Diddy
3. Kendrick Lamar
4. Drake
5. Justin Timberlake
Songs:
1. "Not Like Us", Kendrick Lamar
2. "Meet the Grahams", Kendrick Lamar
3. "Thick of It", KSI
4. "Euphoria", Kendrick Lamar
5. "Fast Car", Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs
Hum to Search: Trending Songs:
1. "Beautiful Things", Benson Boone
2. "Axel F", Crazy Frog
3. "Wellerman", Santiano
4. "Past Lives", Slushii
5. "Too Sweet", Hozier
Games:
1. Connections
2. Strands
3. Infinite Craft
4. Palworld
5. Sprunki
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Who in your life is the hardest to shop for around the holidays? Someone polled 2,000 Americans. Can you guess who got the most votes?
21% said it's their partner or spouse. And they'll devote NINE HOURS of their life trying to find the perfect gift for them this year.
Kids are next at 14%, followed by moms with 12% of the vote.
The average person will buy 16 presents this year. Around a quarter of those will go to kids. The rest are for people like extended family, friends, coworkers, and pets.
The top gift-giving headaches are budgeting . . . finding the right gift for everyone . . . wrapping them . . . and keeping them all a secret.
The average person will deal with 16 holiday headaches. Others include untangling lights . . . getting through your holiday to-do list . . . and navigating family dynamics.
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How hard would it be to go without your cell phone . . . for at least eight hours . . . while you were awake, bored, with nothing else to do? If that sounds PAINFUL to you, what if you could get paid $1,000 for doing it?
A woman in China recently won the equivalent of $1,380 in U.S. dollars after successfully completing a "public welfare challenge," which tested people's ability to stay away from their phones for eight hours.
It was a small-scale stunt that a local business held to raise awareness for smartphone addiction . . . so it isn't like it was open to EVERYONE in China. But she was the only person who could do it.
It wasn't just being phone-free. You couldn't sleep or nap, and couldn't have any other distractions, like books and movies. You also had to lie flat, and avoid signs of anxiety, which were tracked by a special wristband.
Nope....don't like that...If I had something to distract me it would be ok.
And how do you lie flat for 8 hours and not fall asleep...these people are animals!
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A guy from New York named Chad Caruso is officially a Guinness World Record after skateboarding across the country this year to raise awareness for mental health. He started in Venice Beach and ended in Virginia Beach. It took a total of 57 days, 6 hours, and 56 minutes.
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For 15 years, someone's been putting Christmas lights on a random pine tree on the side of a highway in Montana, and it turns out it's a sweet story. A random trucker started doing it just to make his wife smile.
He was driving his regular Texas-to-Calgary route in 2009, and was on the phone with her when he saw a lonely tree in a field so she joked that he should go dress it up. Not kidding..it's the only tree in a big area.
He tied some ribbons on it that year, but promised he'd do a better job on his next trip. Now he stops every year to add a bunch of lights and ornaments. She doesn't travel, so he sends her the pictures.
No one knew who was doing it until he found a note tied to the tree in 2017 that said, "Thank you. You have no idea how much impact you have in the community."
The couple who left the note added their phone number. So he called them, and they've been helping him decorate it ever since.
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The University of Cincinnati forced a Tennessee middle school to drop their mascot, the Bearcats, due to a dispute over copyright and licensing infringement. The middle school will now be the Musketeers. (they are sitting by the phone to see if the candy company calls)
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Subway is bringing a whopping footlong Oreo cookie dessert to Subway shops in January.
It kind of looks like a cookie sub with cream and cookie crumbles as the filling. (there's no way you could eat one yourself...seriously.)
Commenters online have mixed feelings about the creation.
One user writes, "If they don’t overbake it like the footlong cookie, it could be good."
Another requests a few, saying, "I'll take three please."
One Instagram user points out something that not everyone may think of: The fact that Subway has preached healthy options since day 1, and this will hurt their image:
"There goes the healthy image that they been doing for decades. What next? Fried chicken option for Subway?"
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Ahead of Christmas, a pro-Kremlin activist has pushed for Santa Claus to be branded as a "foreign agent" in Russia, according to the Russian outlet Meduza.
Vitaly Borodin, the leader of the Federal Project on Security and Combating Corruption, sent a letter to Russia's Prosecutor General imploring the iconic Christmas figure be designated a "foreign agent" due to his "popularity in 'unfriendly' countries," which use his image to "undermine traditional Christmas values," Meduza said, citing the letter.
Seems he doesn't have anything to do as he is known for filing police reports against purported enemies of the state, including journalists, singers, songwriters, and even a chocolate manufacturer.
Borodin's concern is not that Santa Claus will overshadow Jesus, but Father Frost, a Russian New Year figure. He is also "outraged by the fact that the American is replacing the image of our traditional Santa Claus, since his recognition is close to 100 percent," according to the Russian outlet Life.
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Today’s Useless Fact of the Day - The main character in the "Wizard of Oz" was originally going to be a boy . . . but L. Frank Baum's niece Dorothy died as he was working on the book and he changed the character to a girl.
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