"I just can't get you out of my head" goes that very familiar Kylie Minogue song and it stays in your head rent-free on repeat. We've all experienced earworms. They're sometimes called brainworms or stuck song syndrome. Sometimes they can be annoying if you don't like the song, and other times, it's just annoying when you hear the song over and over in your head, but you don't even remember where you heard it, or what song it is.

What is it about these earworms and why do we get them? According to music psychologists, the auditory cortex, the part of our brain that perceives tone and auditory imagery, is responsible for why we experience earworms. When we hear a catchy song, the brain latches onto it, and even when we aren't actively hearing the song, it remains inside our heads and replays.

There have been some claims saying that people with ADHD or OCD experience earworms more often, but that's a misconception. It's completely normal for people to have earworms as often as once a week. Studies have shown that people with high openness to experience tend to have more earworms than usual.

Other studies that looked into people with obsessive-compulsive traits found that the types of earworms they experience are more disturbing and may be on the same category as musical obsessions and musical hallucinations, which are completely different from the typical earworms.

So, how do we get rid of the songs stuck in our head? Some suggest to listen to the whole song from start to finish. This allows our brain to complete the loop and find closure. Of course, not everybody finds this method effective. It might even worsen the situation.

Other methods include shifting your brain's attention toward something else, or replacing the song with another song. And if those still don't work, you can try chewing gum. And if these still don't work, we'll just have to accept that it'll be there for a while. It'll go away eventually.

(Image credit: Mark Rohan/Unsplash)

One thing the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had in common, besides both being superstar British bands beginning in the 1960s, is that both bands and their individual members had plenty of iconic album covers we all recognize. In this clever animation by the collective Dog & Rabbit, these album covers employ "2D animated slapstick and anarchy" as they try to wreck, erase, and wipe each other out in the strangest ways. There's quite a bit of dancing involved, too. Which is stronger, the yellow submarine or the lips? Does it really matter when we are entertained by merely watching them move? This video sure did win a lot of awards. -via Nag on the Lake

Longtime Neatorama readers are familiar with PJ McQuade's pop culture Christmas cards and ornaments, featuring characters from Star Wars, Twin Peaks, Jaws, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, and other movies and TV shows. These are guaranteed to make you the coolest card sender in your friend circle, and confuse your grandparents to boot. This year, McQuade is debuting an expanded line of new cards featuring Pedro Pascale, the Jordan Peele movie Us, The Dark Crystal, Predator, Legend, Khan from Star Trek, and a special trio of Alan Rickman's geekiest roles (Galaxy Quest, Harry Potter, and Die Hard). Let's check out the inside of those cards.

These new designs are available not only as Christmas cards, but Christmas tree ornaments, refrigerator magnets, and stickers, too. You can get those items in combo packs and cards in multi-packs and variety packs. Also check out some old favorites and even fandoms you aren't familiar with. Get your order in now at the Etsy store Castle McQuade. And you might as well order your Valentines Day cards, too. 

The Jewish a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama) always has a new parody for each holiday with lyrics that explain the celebration set to popular music. Chanukah/Hanukkah begins on Thursday evening and runs through Friday, December 15th. This year, Six13 used a selection of 13 songs from Taylor Swift's Eras tour to explain various parts of the Chanukah celebration. Coincidentally or not, today Taylor Swift has been named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2023. If you want the name of the Taylor Swift song they are singing, hover over the control bar at the bottom of the video, and it will be displayed. Several of these songs are available on Six13's latest album, Vol. 8: Lights. Happy Chanukah!

There are a few hits that we hear every year whenever this season rolls around the corner, and Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" has been the anthem, so to speak, of the Christmas season. However, this time around, in its 65-year existence, Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time since its release.

What brought this surge of Brenda Lee's song on the list? Apparently, it's the making of the official music video of the song, released a month ago. Another contributing factor to the song's performance was how Billboard changed the way it calculated its charts. From 2018, they have increased the weight of streams, which meant old favorites like this one have garnered a lot more attention.

With this new formula, songs like Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" has been at the top of the chart every Christmas season since 2019, except this year. It's currently at the second spot with some other holiday songs in the top five joining them like Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bell Rock" and Wham!'s "Last Christmas".

(Video credit: Brenda Lee VEVO/Youtube)

Every language has its own idioms, expressions, and proverbs that sound weird when you translate them directly into English. And Finnish has some hilarious ones, which Suomi Dictionary has posted on Instagram. Sad and Useless grabbed some of the spiciest ones.

I'm pretty sure we have all had a brain fart once in a while, when we're spaced out and we just spew out incoherent things out of our mouth. Some might think it annoying but there are times when it can be charmingly goofy, especially when your friend does it while they're drunk.

Vitutus seems like a very cool word. And what it expresses is quite useful indeed for certain situations, like when you're playing a video game and the RNG screws you over. I have definitely felt vitutus several times in the past week.

This one does make you wonder about Lohja, and I looked it up. Apparently, it's a wonderful place which features a lot of manors and farms, museums and art galleries, as well as dog-friendly destinations. It's also known as Lake City, has been a trading center since the 14th century, has long-standing traditions in horticulture, and its locals have been known as some of the pioneers of Finnish mining and construction. So, I don't know what Lohja did to deserve this expression.

I guess every culture has its own way of saying what they think about people's appearances, although this one seems a bit in-your-face, no pun intended.

Finally, an expression that sounds like a tongue twister in Finnish. I'm not sure how to pronounce it but that's a lot of ee's and tee's there. Plus, I like how it sounds like German humor.

(Images credit: Suomi Dictionary, Sad and Useless; Joakim Honkasalo/Unsplash)

At some point, we were all gullible children. When I was about 4 years old, I was led to believe that my cousin's doll was like the possessed one from the movies (Chucky), and I couldn't use the bathroom for a time because they put it in front of the bathroom door. Cracked lists 28 things that their members misunderstood when they were children. Here are some of my favorites from that list.

This first one is fairly harmless. If someone older tells you something, we as children are susceptible to believe them (see anecdote above). In this person's case, I would say no harm, no foul. One might even think that butterflies and moths are one and the same thing, just by how similar they appear. Like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of thing.

This person shared they used to do one of Goku's moves from Dragon Ball Z. I think that most of us at some point tried to imitate the things that we see on movies or television and thought were cool. The comment was hilarious though, because doing that in the open does look like children performing a ritual, if you can imagine it.

I think everyone can relate to this one about chewing gum. They tell you it will either be left undigested and stay inside forever, or in the case of bubble gum, that it will blow up in your stomach. Still, I think it's quite unhealthy to swallow chewing gum, so we shouldn't do it.

And this one just cracked me up. They do oddly look alike!

(Images credit: Cracked; Artem Kniaz/Unsplash)

It was created by 80s Nostalgia on Threads, which is an Instagram app that somewhat functions like the old Twitter or Tumblr. The game is called "Choose Your Own Threadsventure" and presents to the player an image for a scenario and options to choose from. From there, the player clicks on the link based on the option they chose, and another scenario pops up.

This goes on until the player is able to "solve" the game and get to the finish line. It's a fairly quick and simple game, but there's hope for a more elaborate one as the creator requested for suggestions from other users about the next game to design. Many people seem to have enjoyed the text-based adventure game as the poll resulted in a win for "another text game" to be made.

It has been three weeks since the first game was released and the creator has only started to gather suggestions a day ago, so it might be a while before the next game comes out. But this might actually turn into a really nice project. On another note, 80s Nostalgia is actually a website from the 80s that's still live to this day. -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: 80s Nostalgia/Threads)

It's not really a competition, more like a caveat about the creatures that pose a threat to humans still. We're not including bacteria or viruses here, but there are several on this list that carry those organisms that cause deadly diseases. Stats Panda has conveniently provided us with an infographic summarizing the data from World Atlas.

Mosquitoes are still the deadliest creatures to human beings, with an average of 1 million human deaths caused each year. Of course, with the many diseases that different types of mosquitoes bring, it's no wonder why. Dengue fever is perhaps the most common one where I live, but mosquitoes also bring malaria, which is estimated to cause at least 500,000 deaths each year. There's also Zika, chikungunya, and lymphatic filariasis.

The next on the list, unsurprisingly, are humans. We won't get much into this as we know how humans can be. Then, there are snakes with 50,000 deaths caused per year. Despite the presence of antivenom, snake bits have still caused many fatalities especially in rural areas, whose remote locations prevent them from gaining access to medical facilities.

Number four is quite a surprising one: dogs. Rabies are the main cause. Fifth is a tie between two nasty bugs - the tsetse flies and assassin bugs - and a snail.

Usually, flies don't bite. But the tsetse, which means "fly" in Tswana, a Bantu language of southern Africa, actually bites and causes African trypanosomiasis, or the sleeping sickness disease. And, the assassin bug, which just from the name should send tingles down our spines, causes the Chagas disease or also called American trypanosomiasis. Freshwater snails, on the other hand, carry parasites that cause schistosomiasis.

At the bottom of the list are sharks which kill an average of 10 people per year. -via Digg

(Image credit: Stats Panda/Instagram, Substack)

Since the advent of herbicides in the 1940s, many farmers have opted to use chemicals to ward pests off of their crops. Nowadays, we know the harmful effects of herbicides to our health. But, nobody wants to go back to the labor-intensive and grueling method of hand-weeding because it's too tedious and time-consuming, not to mention, agonizing for farmers to do. There's a new alternative which solves these problems: robots.

Manufacturers from Denmark and the United States have shipped several of their farming droids to fields in Australia to help them removing the weeds around their crops. They are designed to cut off the weeds using knives and wires, with the help of GPS and cameras to direct them where to go.

Qualipac, a farming enterprise with several locations in Queensland, Australia, has recently imported the machines because they wanted to cut down on herbicide use, as well as reducing their spending on weed control. Troy Qualischefski, the owner and director of Qualipac, says these robots will help them do the trick.

Currently, they are testing out two robots: the FarmDroid FD20 from Denmark and the Stout Smart Cultivator from the US. The difference between the two is that the Danish robot is a self-driving robot that weeds and seeds using GPS, while the American one is attached to a tractor and does the weeding through cameras and AI.

You might be thinking, how do these robots distinguish between weeds and crops? Sal Espinoza of Stout answers that by saying that these machines were trained to understand the different varieties of crops they will see on the field. So, even if you were to put a bowl of salad in front of it, it would recognize that as lettuce.

Of course, at the moment, these farmbots will not completely eliminate herbicide use. But, in time, companies like Stout and Hort Innovation hope that these new technologies will reduce the industry's reliance on chemicals to almost zero. -via MetaFilter

(Image credit: Swarm Farm Robotics)

It's common among Christians to include a nativity scene in their Christmas decorations, depicting Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. Many also include the shepherds, the three wise men, and/or an angel, along with camels and livestock. While the basics are there, thesenativity sets aren't the same all over the world. In some Latin American countries, it's not unusual to see devils included in a nativity scene, representing the demons who tried to keep the shepherds from reaching the Christ child. In Scandinavia, various trolls and folklore fairies find their way into the scene, depending on the local lore. Amish nativity scenes are presented without faces, for traditional religious reasons. Read about all these at Atlas Obscura.

Not included in the article (but it should have been) are the caganers of Catalonia in Spain. No one knows how that tradition started.

(Image source: Courtesy The Marian Library, University of Dayton)

This is the image that captured photographer Tara Lilly the title of International Wedding Photographer of the Year for 2023. Mikaela and Mitch got married in the great outdoors of Whistler, British Columbia. A bird called the whiskey jack landed on Mikaela's head just as Mitch was beginning to say his vows. She cried, "I'm Snow White!" and the picture was taken. The serendipitous moment was not planned, but the photo was nevertheless beautifully shot. A good time was had by all.

The winners in the various category competitions are also stunning, and reflect a real sense of adventure among brides and grooms. One couple are both marine biologists, and had portraits made underwater. Another couple climbed a sheer rock face in formal wear, and still another couple went rappelling at night to capture the stars behind them. And the photographers went along. See the winners in the various categories in this gallery, and click through to see the finalists for those categories.  -via Nag on the Lake

Ulysses S. Grant led the Union Army to victory in the Civil war, and later became president. Grant was raised in an abolitionist family, but wasn't forced to attend church and remained mostly apolitical before the war. That background didn't seem to be at all strained when he married Julia Dent, who was a slave owner like her father before her, in 1848. Since Julia was a 19th-century woman, that meant that U.S. Grant was technically a slave owner. No matter who officially "owned" a household of enslaved people, Grant benefitted from their labor at his father-in-law's farm called White Haven in Missouri, where the family lived. Grant had no particular qualms against the institution of slavery, up until late in the war, when he saw it was a dying institution.  

The people that Julia kept as slaves were under conflicting legal status. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, but it only pertained to enslaved people in the Confederate states. Slave states like Missouri and Kentucky that remained in the Union were not included. Julia was under the impression that they had been freed as well, but kept them with her anyway. The enslaved people were apparently under the impression they were still enslaved. In 1864, Julia's longtime nursemaid, Jules, disappeared while traveling with Julia in Kentucky, and crossed the icy Ohio River into Indiana and freedom. The Grant's slaveholding days were numbered. Read about U.S. Grant, his wife Julia, and the people they enslaved at Smithsonian.

That was the question posed by an anonymous reader to the folks at Grammarphobia. This person noticed how, in old movies (pre-1950s), people used to say that they would be stopping at a hotel, but these days, we would usually say that we will be staying at a hotel. So, he sent in the question.

Apparently, the use of "stopping" has not yet been phased out as the team at Grammarphobia found someone who had actually used the expression quite recently. A British tourist had posted something to that effect on TripAdvisor. It's not grammatically incorrect, just unusual perhaps these days.

According to their research, the usage of both expressions were fairly equal until the 1940s, when "staying" saw more widespread usage. Why that was the case was perhaps out of the scope of the question, but one can only surmise that "stopping" just doesn't have the same feel as "staying" does.

However, there was an article in The New York Times which used "stopping" to mean "staying" but as a pun. It read, "Stopping at the Savoy", which was a reference to Edgar Sampson's "Stompin' at the Savoy". Language is quite fluid, and it changes along with those who use it. Maybe the expression just fell out of use. -via Strange Co

(Image credit: Ishan/Unsplash)

I'm sure everybody has at least watched a video or read an article about tips on getting good sleep, or advice on how to cure insomnia. I read articles which talked about tricks that supposedly helped anyone to sleep anytime anywhere. It's something that the military used, according to those articles. But what exactly does science say about good sleep and how to get it? Well, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder gives us a rundown in the video above.

There are a few myths that we need to bust about getting good sleep or being able to fall asleep. The fact is there's no trick, hack, or shortcut to sleeping. There's no sleeping position, stress point, nerve ending, or whatever that could induce sleeping faster or more effectively. There's just no scientific evidence to support such claims.

Sleeping pills and melatonin might work but they're only temporary. There's still no substitute for natural sleep. The fact of the matter is our lifestyle, habits, and environment are the major contributing factors to whether we get good sleep or not.

Furthermore, although it is often recommended that we get, on average, eight hours of sleep each day, the amount of sleep necessary to function properly is different from person to person, as is the method of getting to sleep.

Perhaps one key advice I took from the video is that, when you find that you can't sleep, toughing it out and staying in bed is not the best way to address it. Getting out of bed might be more beneficial in inducing you to fall asleep. That and more dos and don'ts of good sleep from Back Reaction.

(Video credit: Sabine Hossenfelder/Youtube)