1. The United States used to be so badass that we used the Nazi’s own postal service to deliver anti-Hitler propaganda with Operation Cornflakes.

Operation Cornflakes was a World War II Office of Strategic Services PSYOP mission in 1944 and 1945 which involved tricking the German postal service Deutsche Reichspost into inadvertently delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through mail. The operation involved special planes that were instructed to airdrop bags of false, but properly addressed mail in the vicinity of bombed mail trains. When recovering the mail during clean-up of the wreck, the postal service would hopefully confuse the false mail for the real thing and deliver it to the various addresses.

2. Terrified that a waiter will/won’t take/leave your entree/salad? Learn the silent service code.

The silent service code is a way for a diner to “talk” to servers during a meal without saying a word, mainly to tell them that the diner is finished. This will prevent any embarrassing situations where the server would take a meal prematurely. To tell a server you are finished (only a cut of meat is ‘done’), place your napkin to the left of your plate, and place all your utensils together in a “4-o’clock” position on your plate. Utensils crossed on a plate signify that a diner is still eating. If you must leave during the meal, you should place the napkin on your chair to avoid any confusion.

3. If you speak English a ticking clock sounds like “tick tock.” If you speak Korean it sounds like “ddok-ddak ddok-ddak.” These are called “cross-linguistic onomatopoeias.”

Because of the nature of onomatopoeia, there are many cross-linguistic cognates of onomatopoetic sounds. The following is a list of some conventional examples: [including car horns, kissing, pigs, balloons bursting, and water dripping]

4. Thanksgiving is the perfect time to go over your knowledge of Norse mythology. Bone up on some Odin, peruse some Valhalla, and make sure you’re prepared for some Ragnarok.

Norse mythology has its roots in Proto-Norse Iron Age Scandinavian prehistory. It flourishes during the Viking Age and following the Christianization of Scandinavia during the High Middle Ages passed into Scandinavian folklore, some aspects surviving to the modern day. The mythology from the Romanticist Viking revival came to be an influence on modern literature and popular culture.

5. Sometimes it’s comforting to remember that the hedonic treadmill means we can never really be as happy as we want to be. Or maybe “comforting” isn’t the right word….

Brickman and Campbell coined the term “Hedonic Treadmill” in their essay “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” (1971), which appeared in M.H. Apley, ed., Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium, New York: Academic Press, 1971, pp 287–302. The theory has consequences for understanding happiness as both an individual and a societal goal. The concept was modified by Michael Eysenck, a British psychology researcher during the late nineties, to refer to the hedonic treadmill theory which compares the pursuit of happiness to a person on a treadmill, who has to keep working just to stay in the same place. Humans rapidly adapt to their current situation, becoming habituated to the good or the bad. We are more sensitive to our relative status: both that which we recently have and that which we perceive others to enjoy.