When a TV series is very good, you expect it to be renewed for a second, third, or fifteenth season, and sometimes the quality suffers in later seasons. But there are also series that were perfect despite being short, or more likely because they were short. Andor is so critically acclaimed that it could easily be renewed for several seasons, but the second season will be its last, because it's a prequel and will eventually run into the timeline of the movie it spun off from. The classic 1970s British show Fawlty Towers only had 12 episodes in total, because each episode was so painstakingly constructed that it could take four months to get it ready to air. The Queen's Gambit was a complete story told in seven TV episodes, which we used to call a miniseries. And believe it or not, there have been a couple of great shows that were canceled quickly. All these really shouldn't be compared to each other, but as a list, they serve as a recommendation for something you can binge on without committing too much of your future. Read a list of 21 short-lived but perfect TV series at Cracked. There are video clips.

If you saw a large and sometimes dangerous animal fall through the ice into a freezing lake, would you know what to do? Lucky for this moose, a group of loggers who saw her break through the ice knew exactly what to do. They couldn't lift her, because that would require a crane. Even a relatively small moose will weigh several hundred pounds. But they could encourage her to move in the right direction by cutting the ice just so. Yeah, this brings up the danger of one or more of the men falling through the ice, too, but apparently they knew just how far they could go. If any of them actually got wet, they didn't release any evidence. The marvelous moose maneuver saved the day, and the moose cow walked away with the advice to make and fire a get warmed up. There's no report of whether that happened, but the campfire story she would have brought to such an event would surely impress the other moose.

On the second of February every year, we pretend that a groundhog can tell us what kind of weather we will have for the next six weeks. That's when a groundhog is supposed to come out of hibernation and either walk around or else become frightened by his shadow and scurry back underground. Since finding a wild groundhog in February is not easy (they usually come out of hibernation in March), my mother told me long ago that we can just assume that if February 2 is sunny, he will see his shadow, and if that date is cloudy, the groundhogs will stay out. However, to celebrate the holiday, we have groundhogs in all parts of the country that are kept in captivity just for this forecast.

Groundhogs have no real expertise in weather forecasting, but some happen to be better than others. The folks at NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) decided to rate them. They selected for the ranking 17 prominent groundhogs that have been predicting weather for at least twenty years, although we don't have to take that seriously; we know groundhogs are replaceable, and besides, three of the contenders have been given the taxidermy treatment and are still making predictions. Also in the running was a weather-forecasting tortoise and one statue that is purported to predict weather. They were studied and ranked for their accuracy between the years 2005 and 2024. You can find information about these groundhogs linked in this database. Who is the top weather-predicting groundhog? It isn't Punxsutawney Phil, who was featured in the movie. In fact, Phil came in close to the bottom. Nor was it the statue, which did rather well, considering. See the results of this study at NOAA. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Cephas)

Mammals walk, birds fly, and fish swim. But fish are restricted to swimming where there's water to live in. How did fish ever get to lake high up on mountainsides? Lake Titicaca is 12,507 feet above sea level, and it has many kinds of fish. That lake's water comes from glacial runoff and rain, but where did the fish come from? Even small mountain lakes have fish, and there have even been cases of fish living in lakes that dry up every year.

MinuteEarth gives us three possible scenarios in which fish from far away can end up living in isolated lakes, and the most likely scenario for a random mountain lake is also the most bizarre. Yes, those fish were taken there by another animal, one who is not restricted in its travel. Like Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, life, uh, finds a way. This video is only 2:40; the rest is an ad.

Our earth acts like a living thing, with the seasons, the weather and water cycle, and geothermic activity always moving about. You might get the idea that Mars is a dead planet, but it also has its movements that vary by season, and that includes geysers. These geysers aren't spewing water, though- they are explosions of carbon dioxide, which makes up 95% of the thin Martian atmosphere.

In the Martian winter, the CO₂ freezes to a solid around the poles. When the warmth of the sun returns in spring, the CO₂ closest to the planet's surface sublimates and expands into gas, while the topmost layer is still frozen. The pressure breaks through in weaker spots, creating geysers spewing carbon dioxide at speeds up to 160 km/h! The geysers also contain dark grains of sand from the surface, so they leave distinctive patterns behind that resemble spiders. The pressure can also form tunnels under the frozen CO₂. The surface features are called araneiform terrain or spider terrain. The illustration above is an artist's impression of Martian geysers in action: see real pictures of the terrain left behind along with an explanation of how they happen at Universe Today. -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit:  NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University/Ron Miller)

It may be hard to believe, but these people had a snowball fight in 1897 while being filmed in Lyon, France. The action was captured by the Lumière brothers, pioneers in the new art of motion pictures. It looks as if Hollywood made a period film and the latest technology captured it as if we were right there with them. But don't be fooled. While the snowball fight was in 1897, the one-minute film titled Bataille de neige by the Lumière brothers didn't look like this at all. It was in black-and-white, with high contrast, with the quick stuttering movements typical of the time. Of course, it didn't have music, either. You can see the original here, although there has surely been some deterioration from what audiences in France saw in 1897.

The footage from the Lumière brothers was reprocessed by "a Russian amateur film restorer" in 2020 using artificial intelligence to make it seem more modern. The motion was smoothed out, gaps were filled in, and somewhat later color was added. Yet it's still people from 1897 throwing those snowballs, which makes you wonder how they would feel having a synthetic director "correcting" their movements. And lest you think this is a slice-of-life documentary from 1897, that's not the story, either. These were actors putting on a show for the movies. We can imagine that people in the Victorian era might have had fun like this, but they would have been suspicious of a motion picture camera. -via Mental Floss

Australia's greatest folk hero was Ned Kelly, who was a habitual criminal from a young age, but really made a name for himself in 1878 when he and his brother Dan has a run-in with police that left three officers dead. Kelly spend the next two years on the run, while his exploits impressed the populace and the reward for his capture grew higher and higher.

Kelly considered himself to have been mistreated by police, which many other Australians could relate to. During a bank robbery, he destroyed evidence of mortgages and other debts, which gained more fans. Kelly became a hero to the poor and downtrodden and was admired for striking back against wealthy landowners and corrupt authority figures. The story of Ned Kelly had a particularly dramatic climax when he and his gang endured eleven hours of police gunfire. Officers started to believe Kelly was un-killable, until they saw that the gang had fashioned homemade suits of heavy metal armor that made them resemble robots. That vision of Kelly made him an icon of resistance against authority. Read the story of Ned Kelly at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Chensiyuan)

Coming up Sunday we have the only holiday dedicated to a rodent. Groundhog Day is actually about the weather, which we are more interested in than rodents this time of year, but in the United States, we have designated the groundhog as the animal most likely to forecast the weather for the rest of the winter.

The species Marmota monax goes by many names, but they are mostly called groundhogs these days, especially since that 1993 movie made the creature world famous. Groundhogs have been important in science, but not so much in meteorology. Groundhogs aren't all that great at weather forecasting. However, they have made a name in archaeology, since they are experts at digging, and in medical research, where they shine as research subjects. Savannah Geary of SciShow explains how valuable groundhogs really are. There's a 40-second ad at 3:33. The video actually ends at 8:32, but you'll be glad you continued watching after that. It will eventually make sense, except for that part where she takes a swig of what appears to be pickle juice.

Hachiogi Cemetery is in Hachioji, a municipality on the far west side of Tokyo. Like many public places in Japan, it has a public phone in a glass booth available to anyone who needs it, at the edge of the cemetery on Miyama-dori Avenue. But the Hachioji Cemetery Phone Booth is famous for being haunted.

Those who use the phone booth are said to be surprised by a woman suddenly in the booth with them. Or they pick up the phone and hear a woman moaning sorrowfully. Or they are led to the phone booth by a mysterious child who suddenly appears with the woman. However this apparition manifests itself, one is advised to leave the booth immediately and do not look back. Or else what? That part isn't explained all that well. Maybe we haven't heard from anyone who did look back. Survivor's bias, you know. Read more about this haunted phone booth at the Ghost in My Machine. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Google Street View)

The words we use for body parts may be among the oldest words of all, because our bodies are very important to us, common among us, and have always been with us. Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) tells us about some of those early words for body parts and how they know where they came from. The second part of that sentence is the more interesting part.

See, the spread and evolution of spoken language is like a historic timeline of its own that runs in parallel to the history of the written word or the artifacts of human civilization. If we can make an accurate map and timeline of how language was adapted to different cultures (and we've made a lot of progress), we can fill in many of the blanks in the historical record. "For example, since several languages as disparate as Sanskrit, Greek, and Dutch have similar words for wheel, it stands to reason that the Proto Indo European people had wheeled vehicles." That's mind-blowing, and raises my already-high regard for the study of linguistics even higher. There's way more to the study of languages than just the ancient roots of words.

The offer is out there, but it won't be easy. The Indus Valley civilization thrived some 5,300 years ago in what is now northwest India and eastern Pakistan in one of the world's earliest urban settings. After a thousand years or so, the people dispersed and the culture disappeared, along with a written language no one can decipher today, although archaeologists, linguists, and other scholars have tried for around a hundred years. Deciphering the language is difficult, because the remaining examples are short, found on ceramic tiles and seals. No one knows whether the markings represent an alphabet or full words. Or even possibly numbers. 

The government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has made an official offer of a million dollars to any individual or organization who can crack the code and decipher the written language of the Indus Valley civilization. To claim the money, the translation must satisfy the archaeologists who have been working on the project for years. Some people who have already made claims made too many assumptions about the script, which is thought to have more to do with trade and finance than religion or culture. Read about the undeciphered script at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Ismoon)

The most memorable scene in the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally took place in Katz's Delicatessen in Manhattan, when Sally demonstrates that women can fake an orgasm so well that men can't tell. In this ad, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunite more than 35 years later to have lunch at Katz's, and accidentally end up recreating that scene when Ryan adds an obscene amount of Hellman's mayonnaise to her sandwich. The fact that a Jewish deli would not have mayonnaise available on the tables is an extra layer of absurdity. Sydney Sweeney appears to deliver the punch line this time.

As you might have guessed, this is a Super Bowl ad. The game is still ten days away, but in recent years advertisers feel they have invested too much money into their Super Bowl ads to keep them under wraps until kickoff. Get ready for a tsunami of high-priced ads coming in the next few days. -via Metafilter

Anna Odi lives in an apartment in a building that is mostly offices for the museum of Auschwitz in Poland. Her parents lived at the site when she was born in 1956. Both of them were arrested by the Nazis and kept in concentration camps during World War II, and met after liberation. Why would a newly married couple choose to live at Auschwitz? In the aftermath of the war, housing was scarce and the camp and its buildings were available. Mira and Józef Odi were also dedicated to preserving the history of the camp so the world would never forget what went on there. They and other survivors guarded the site and curated its items and documentation for posterity.

When Odi was a child, her parents shielded her from the details of the Holocaust, but as a teenager, she gradually learned what Auschwitz meant, and she joined her parents in working there when she finished school. Read about Odi's life at Auschwitz and her dedication to preserving its history at Notes from Poland.  -Thanks WTM!

(Image credit: Michel Zacharz AKA Grippenn)

We love to hear a good bagpipe song here at Neatorama, so that's why we've posted the music of the Unipiper, the Badpiper, and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers. When you hear a bagpipe, you either think "Turn it up!" or "Run away!" There's no in between. But how does one become a bagpiper?

Apparently it's not as easy as just being Scottish, because Stuart Smillie of Great Big Story is of Scottish descent, although he lives in London now. His boss sent him to Edinburgh to learn how to play the bagpipes, which shouldn't take long, seeing as he's already Scottish, but it turns out that didn't help a bit. Neither did having his own kilt. Smillie contacted Andrew Coulter at Killberry Bagpipes, Edinburgh's last custom bagpipe maker. Did Smillie learn to play the bagpipes that day? That might depend on your definition of "playing," but he did learn a lot about bagpipes, pipers, and the kilts they wear. -via Laughing Squid

Happy Lunar New Year! The Asian festival begins today, and in China, this holiday ushers in the Year of the Snake. In Hong Kong, people will eat plenty of traditional holiday foods, and among them will be the traditional Kjeldsens Danish butter cookies. What? Many families in Hong Kong celebrate the new year with “blue tin cookies,” which everyone knows is the hard-to-pronounce Kjeldsens brand.

Traditions have to start somewhere, and this particular tradition goes back to 1963, or at least that's where the story begins. Within a few years, Kjeldsens butter cookies were available in Hong Kong as the Western tradition of snacking on sweets was about to take off. Kjeldsens cultivated this market, and did extra advertising in Hong Kong around holidays. The familiar blue tin is often kept and reused for sewing supplies, just as Royal Dansk cookie tins (introduced in 1966) are used in the US. Read up on how Kjeldsens Danish cookies became a part of the Lunar New Year at Atlas Obscura.