Human beings have exerted enormous control over the earth, particularly in modern times. But there's a bit of hubris in thinking that we are mightier than the world beneath our feet. The forces of nature are always showing us who's the boss. In 1929, the authorities in Sugarloaf Key, Florida, thought they would conquer mosquitoes by bringing in bats. How? By building the world's largest bat tower, which they did. They planned to attract 100,000 bats with a special bait made by bat expert Charles Campbell. Their tower was up for one day before a hurricane hit. No, it didn't destroy the tower, which survived for close to a century, but no bats ever lived in it because the bait was washed away.

Read the details of that story and four others concerning the folly of man vs. nature at Cracked. As Chiffon margarine once said, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

(Image credit: Ebyabe)

The trope of the evil scientist is useful for fiction, but it is grounded in real history. Scientists as a whole are just as ethical as the population of people they came from, and that means that some were fine with doing horrible things to experimental subjects they considered lesser than themselves, whether that involved animals, disabled people, subjugated races, or even uninformed volunteers. Some of these experiments turned out to be a bit fraudulent in their findings as well.

A psychological experiment conducted by John B. Watson in 1920 may seem tame compared to those linked above, but it involved an innocent baby, which shocked the scientific world. It was one of the experiments that led to stricter ethical standards in science experiments, and drove home the importance of scientific rigor in claiming results that may or may not stand up over time. There is little direct documentation left of the Little Albert experiment, but Weird History uses what little photographic evidence is left plus plenty of stock footage to tell the tale.

British artist Chris Barker made a poster in the style of the album cover for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band featuring images of notable people who died in 2024. It's a big crowd.

Barker has worked around the clock in the past few days trying to include every celebrity. The image above is version five for 2024, as he updated the collage to include former president Jimmy Carter and a couple of other people who passed on in the last week. By now it should be definitive. Barker said he received more notifications about Carter than anyone else since he's been doing this annual project. You can enlarge the picture at Instagram or Bluesky. The latest key we have is for version four, enlargeable here, and if he gives us an updated key I will edit this post. Note Kobosu, the dog we know from the doge memes, in front. Also Burt the crocodile who starred in the movie Crocodile Dundee. The objects in front are representative of people who aren't recognizable by their pictures.

See Barker's poster from last year here, and those going back to 2016 here.

Putting up Christmas decorations can be exciting, but taking them down and packing them away feels like a chore. It's difficult to switch from an array of festive lights to the bleakness of the rest of the winter. Redditor 1s0m3r posed the question of everyone's traditional schedule in taking Christmas decorations down. The most common answer seems to be after January 6th, which is Orthodox Christmas, Epiphany, Three Kings Day, or the 12th day of Christmas. Coming in second was soon after New Year's Day. Some leave them up much longer because they dread the work, or have another family occasion to celebrate. Some folks just take down the Santa Clauses and leave the tree to be decorated for Mardi Gras or Valentine's Day. And some people just leave all the decorations up until they are good and ready to say goodbye to them, maybe around Easter.  

I prefer the gradual approach. I stashed all the wrapping paper and ribbon first, then Christmas clothing as it's washed. Around New Year's Day I pack the tree ornaments away, but I will leave the tree and lights up until Epiphany, at least. I have so many lights, inside and out, that it will take a week to pack them away, because I don't like to spend all day doing anything. What about you?

In Finland, college students often wear haalarit, or overalls (what we would call coveralls) to university events, parties, and ceremonies. The appearance of each haalarit will tell you a lot about the wearer. The color indicates what discipline they are studying, which will vary by school. The patches worn are from a student's experiences and accomplishments, so being covered with patches is a sign of status. And sometimes you can tell that a student is "taken" if the overalls have a mismatched part, because they swapped with their significant other. The haalarit are a source of pride for students, and a way to boost school spirit. It also makes it easier to see who has the same interests as you do.        

The custom of the haalarit began in the 1950s or '60s when other students began copying the coveralls worn by Civil Engineering students in Sweden. Further digging reveals that these overalls should never be washed. Well, college doesn't last forever. -via Kottke

For many Americans, the only time we drink champagne is at weddings or on New Year's Eve, so we may as well get the most of out it. For advice, we can turn to scientists like chemical physicist Gérard Liger-Belair of the "Effervescence & Champagne" team at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne. He has possibly the best job a physicist can have, studying the bubbles that make champagne special.

Liger-Belair explains the science behind champagne, which is fermented twice to produce the bubbles. The experience of drinking it relies not only on the quality of the underlying wine, but also in the bubbles. People will rate a cheap wine as more expensive if it has bubbles, no matter how they are produced. You'll get more bubbles by pouring champagne down the side of a glass, and instead of a champagne flute, you'll have a nicer sip from a wider glass that won't concentrate the carbon dioxide under your nose. Read more about the science of champagne and how to maximize the pleasure of drinking it at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Hubert Raguet/Equipe Effervescence, Champagne et Applications)

We don't deserve dogs. The account We Rate Dogs always rates a dog at more than ten out of ten, and at the end of the year, they take on the gargantuan task of selecting the top ten dogs of the year for us. In this year's list, you'll meet courageous dogs who rose to the occasion as heroes, who proved their undying loyalty to their humans, and who work hard to please us. Rowdy suffered multiple injuries in protecting an autistic child who had wandered off. Coby saved an entire neighborhood by finding a gas leak. And the stories get even more inspiring after those. There's even a dog who performed CPR! While man's best friends are all good dogs, these puppies went above and beyond for their humans, and deserve to be on the top ten list. You might want to grab a hankie before watching this video.  -via Metafilter


 

Tom Nichols once taught a class in the Cold War and American pop culture, for students who were too young to have experienced both at the same time. Many songs, movies, and TV shows carried references to the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union that fly over their heads today. The Twilight Zone is famous for this, but the original Star Trek series, which aired from 1966 to 1968, was rich with Cold War allegories.

The various sci-fi writers who worked on Star Trek were open to all kinds of adventures, but series creator Gene Roddenberry pushed his own ideas constantly. In the series, the United Federation of Planets stood in for first world countries, specifically NATO, and the Klingon Empire represented the second world, the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Despite the Prime Directive, Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise often stepped in to stop wars on various planets or protect a planet from the Klingons. Some episodes mirrored real-world events that have become disconnected over time. Nichols takes us through a few of those episodes and explains the Cold War analogies in an essay that will bring back memories, good or bad. -via Damn Interesting

As he has for the past twelve years, Barry Petchesky has compiled a year-end list of emergency room dramas involving things stuck in people's body orifices. This is as good a time as any to remind you not to stick things in your body holes that aren't designed for that purpose. The items are taken from U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's reports of emergency room visits in 2024. In this year's list, he dropped reporting on what kids stuck up their noses or in their ears, and there aren't even any throat reports. The report is merely on three orifices on the lower end of the human body, so you can consider the whole post NSFW. The objects removed might even induce nightmares. You can ask why and how, but we can assume that 98% of the time, the patient explained they slipped and fell. However, some include notes from the patient that will make you cringe. I even had to look up a couple of words. Read the list at Defector. 

Every year since 2007, DJ Earworm gives us an artful mashup of the most popular pop songs of the previous year. For the year 2024, there's a distinct theme among the 25 biggest hits, and it's more than just a steady dance beat (with a bit of a country twang this time). These songs, or at least the lyrical clips used, all appear to reference regret, blame, and most of all, alcohol. Was it the current zeitgeist that inspired songwriters to go in that direction, or was it the mood of the nation that propelled these kinds of songs to the top? Or was it DJ Earworm's selective editing that brought out that theme?

Many commenters likened this video to the United States of Pop in 2009, titled Blame It On The Pop. Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga all appeared in that video, and are back 15 years later, still making the hits. You can hear all the United States of Pop videos from 2007 to 2024 in this playlist.

Before we go into the new year, everyone is looking back to sum up what 2024 was all about. Here at Neatorama, we focus on bringing you interesting, funny, educational, or distracting things to make your day a little better. In case you missed any of these popular posts, here's your chance to go back and catch up. And it's always a good idea for us to find out what kind of posts you like the most.

1. Project Sundial: the Apocalypse Bomb

2. The Famous Chicago Rat Hole

3. Simon and Garfunkel Like Big Butts

4. The Odd Things Removed from Body Orifices in 2023

5. This Library Lets You Pay Fines with Cat Photos

6. When Sex with Fairies Became Illegal in Sweden

7. XKCD's Do-It-Yourself Ball Machine

8. Public Domain Book Covers That Completely Miss the Point

9. Can You Identify this Mystery Restaurant Contraption?

10. Deciphering English When Spoken with German Grammar and Syntax

Thanks to all of you for viewing, clicking, and sharing our posts. And thanks for being a part of Neatorama!

(Neatoramabot available on a shirt at the NeatoShop)

Oh, he nailed it. We are in that weird time between two holidays that are too close to go back to school, but some people have to pretend to work and others don't, and some are dealing with the Christmas fallout as guests are still hanging around. We all try to act like it's a normal week even though it's not, and until I heard this song, I didn't realize how universal that feeling is.

Is this a weekday or a weekend? Did my Christmas company leave yesterday or the day before? How old are these leftovers? Should I start taking down the decorations? I missed several days of my regular daily activities- will I ever catch up? Is life ever going to be normal again? Brittlestar wrote a little song titled "The Week Between Christmas and New Year's" to put into words how discombobulated we all are feeling at this time, whether we are off work or not.  -via Nag on the Lake

When Americans visit Rome, they are impressed by the beautiful architecture that's old, sturdy, and well-crafted. So this is what the Roman Empire was like! Not exactly. The buildings that make up Rome are several hundred years old, which impresses Americans, but in the history of Rome they aren't all that old. The Eternal City has been in place for more than two thousand years, but it's been destroyed over and over and rose from its ashes to live again. Archaeological digs happen in Rome any time a building is replaced, and underneath there are foundations of the city's previous iterations that were razed and built over.

Roman expansion made for a lot of enemies over time, and many of those enemies managed to take the city and ransack it but good. Rome was taken by the Galls, the Visigoths, the Vandals, Germanic barbarians, the Ostrogoths, Arab raiders, the Normans, and the Holy Roman Empire. That last one seems like a civil war, but it included most of Europe marching against Rome. Read about each of these conflicts, which together show how Rome, as a city, managed to weather the violence and rise again, even as the empire was destroyed.

(Image credit: Karl Bryullov)

Warning: don't watch this video if you haven't eaten recently, because it will make you hungry.

A whole chicken roasted on a rotating spit is a glorious thing. They can cook for a long time without drying out because their juices roll around inside instead of falling out. The cooking method has been around for thousands of years, but these days most people don't have a rotating spit, nor do we have a place to build a fire. You can get a rotisserie oven, but that takes up a lot of kitchen space. Lucky for us, a lot of grocery stores have very large kitchens, and make rotisserie chickens every day, often offered for a lower price than a whole raw chicken. When I worked at a grocery, I had to smell those things as they cooked, and it was heavenly. I often took a $5 rotisserie chicken home, cooked and still hot. For a single person, that's four or five meals. They aren't $5 anymore, but they still sell for less than raw chicken. How do they do that? Weird History Food tells us everything we need to know about rotisserie chicken.

We've seen how customs get switched from one holiday to another over time. In the past, Thanksgiving had trick-or-treaters and Christmas was a time for ghost stories. In the 15th century, the church found the festivities on St. Nicholas Day a bit too rowdy for the Advent season, so they were moved to the New Year holiday. Since December 31st is the feast day of Saint Sylvester, the masked and costumed people who roam from house to house became Silvesterklaus.  

The Silvesterklaus custom is still performed in parts of Switzerland, twice a year, on December 31st and again on January 13th. Why choose between the date on the Gregorian calendar and the date on the Julian calendar when you can do both?



Silvesterklaus, with their elaborate headdresses and enormous bells, come in three flavors: beautiful (human masks and traditional dress), pretty-ugly (human masks with plant costumes), and ugly. They travel in groups of six men, ringing their bells and yodeling in low voices to wish everyone a happy New Year. Tourists can catch Silvesterklaus in the  Appenzell Ausserrhoden region. The custom has been launched in the past few years in New Glarus, Wisconsin, too. You can see the Silvesterklaus there on Saturday, January 11, 2025.