“A giant straw goat erected each Christmas in a northern Swedish town has been burned down – yet again. The 13m-high animal in Gavle has been torched 23 times since it was first erected in 1966. It has also been hit by a car and had its legs cut off.”

I overlooked the accompanying story when I bookmarked the illustrations, but it’s worth a read…

“While no one knows for sure when exactly the snowman began smoking a pipe and drinking hard liquor, it may have started as early as 1890, based on a label from a bottle of whiskey from that year.”

As the title suggests, a brief look at how Russia and the rest of the world developed ways of connecting phone calls.