I almost titled this "Jaguar Spotted in Arizona," then realized that jaguars are spotted no matter where they are. But seriously, folks, this is special. There have only been eight jaguars identified in the United States in the past 30 years, and only two in the past few years. Those jaguars are named El Jefe and Sombra, and their markings are well documented. Jaguars all have unique markings, and this one is new to the US. You can see all three jaguars in comparison images here. 

Jason Miller runs trail cameras in the wilderness of southern Arizona. The jaguar was captured on video December 20th in a deep canyon in the Huachuca Mountains near the border with Mexico. If you just want to see the jaguar, he or she shows up at 3:30 in this video, but watch the whole thing because you'll see a cougar, bears, a ringtail, and javelinas as well. -via Metafilter

From the end of World War II until his death in 1953, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin spent more time at his private residence, but still ruled with an iron hand. The USSR's movers and shakers lived in fear of Stalin having them shot, but they also dreaded his many parties. You couldn't refuse, obviously, but his get togethers were quite an ordeal. Stalin would invite generals, political officials, and celebrities, and send a car to bring them to his private dacha. Dinner was fabulous, better than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. All who attended were on their best behavior, because they knew Stalin, but that was perilous when you're expected to drink copiously. And Lavrenty Beria, chief of the secret police, kept his eye on everyone to make sure they were drinking. Beria also played humiliating pranks on guests for Stalin's amusement. There were movies shown, too, often stretching the parties into the wee hours of the morning. All were afraid of saying the wrong thing or displeasing Stalin in some way, until they were safe at home. Read about Stalin's life-or-death drinking parties at Le temps d'une bière. -via Strange Company

In poker, it matters what cards you have. But it also matters if you can manipulate your opponent into thinking you have better cards than you do. Or you can remain enigmatic with a "poker face." That's all because you are bound to win some and lose some according to the cards, but how much money everyone bets is even more important, and can be manipulated with skill. Of course, you could always cheat, but that could get you killed. But honestly, winning fairly could get you killed, too, when the stakes are too high. No one is more frustrated than a man who has just lost his family farm, which he wouldn't have wagered if he weren't drunk. There's nothing more dangerous than an armed drunk loser. So practice your poker face, but never play for stakes that will ruin someone's life. This TED-Ed lesson explains how we got poker and why it's so alluring to gamblers. -via Damn Interesting

Everyone wants to know what the future holds for them, and there have been methods for predicting it that involve any number of objects: dice, tea leaves, chicken bones, tarot cards, or molten lead. One method you may not be familiar with is tyromancy, or reading fortunes in cheese. The practice goes back at least to ancient Greece, but reached its height during the Middle Ages. You can imagine a cheesemaker promoting tyromancy in order to sell his wares. Cheese varies so much that tyromancers have divined fortunes from the veins in bleu cheese, the holes in Swiss cheese, the pattern of curds forming, which block of cheese ripens or goes moldy first, and a number of other variations. A tyromancer would look at a piece of cheese and tell you who you'll marry, or how your kids will turn out, or whether your business will succeed. The practice is not dead yet; a tyromancer explains the history of reading cheese and a bit of her recent experience in doing it at Saveur. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Geoffreyrabbit)

Was it really 40 years ago? It seems like yesterday. We'd spent many years thinking of 1984 as the year George Orwell wrote about, and when it came, it was full of dance music. German YouTuber Some random guy took a few recognizable seconds from 180 songs that were hits in 1984 and arranged them all in chronological order. You'll find a list of them here. If you are of a certain age, you'll know almost all of them. If you come across one you don't know, just give it a few seconds and something you remember well will follow it. If you aren't old enough to remember the music of 1984, you'll be surprised that the few songs you recognize are that old.

These music snippets put me right back into 1984. I was 25 and worked at a pop music radio station in a new state where I knew no one before showing up at work. Most of these songs remind me of a particular person or event of that year. Maybe it will give you that feeling of wallowing in nostalgia, too. -via Metafilter

Sometimes it's hard to wrap our heads around staggering statistics that happen outside of our lifetimes, or in a place far away. The COVID-19 pandemic killed an estimated 27 million people, likely including someone you know. Still, the big three pandemics in history are bigger: the Black Death of the 14th century, when communicable disease was little understood (50 million dead); the Columbian Exchange, when 90% of the New World population was killed off by European diseases they had no immunity for (48 million dead); and the Spanish Flu, which didn't come from Spain but was fueled by international travel connected to World War I (between 50 and 100 million dead). The millions who died in those pandemics were also a bigger percentage of the world population at the time. We are lucky to live in a time when science can respond to these diseases more quickly than ever. Read more about the largest pandemics ever and how these statistics were compiled at Our World in Data. You'll also see a larger, more readable chart there. -via Digg

When the topic of mysterious books comes up, you think of the Voynich Manuscript, which we've covered many times here at Neatorama. But it's far from the only book that utterly confounds readers. It's just the first of ten incomprehensible books included in this video. Have you heard of the Rohonic Codex, or The Urantia Book, or Oera Linda? Some of the books covered in this video from Weird History are clearly nonsense, either the result of mental illness or a joke, but still compelling enough that readers try to figure them out. That can work as a sort of Rorschach test, in which we see what we want to see. Others are possibly fiction misunderstood as nonfiction, or else are only a mystery because we don't know the story behind the book. Who knows? The Voynich Manuscript itself may be the result of an ancient joke or a delusion of some sort, too.  

Redditor springchikun posted a picture of the ring her husband got her for Christmas. It's made of uranium glass! A second picture shows how it glows under a blacklight. Amid the discussion of Green Lantern and the amount of radiation emitted by such a ring, springchikun mentioned she carries a small blacklight on her keychain. Why? "It's because I help run a cemetery and we use invisible black light "stamps" to indicate stones that are in process of restoration or repair." And that's when it got interesting. Commenters wanted to know how springchikun ended up running a cemetery, and she told the story here. Springchikun is a stone and monument restorer. She volunteered her services at different cemeteries each year, but in 2023 found one that was special.

My 2023 season started in May, with a goal of completing 100 stones. By the end of October I had completed over 370. During that time, I heavily researched the cemetery and discovered it was also a ghost town. I found out a number of fascinating things that I shared with the community nearby (where I live). It became something really positive and people were really happy with the work I was doing because I would clean a stone, research the person and tell their story in my local history group, where many of the descendants were able to see their ancestor featured.

The next thing you know, springchikun is on the cemetery's board of directors and is heavily involved with community activities. She explained how she got started doing this, pointed to a bit of her work and tells us how you can go about cleaning a tombstone. You can see more of her restoration work at Imgur.

See, some of the best stories are buried in the comments. The ring is really nice, though.

In 1856, Thomas Hardy was not yet the acclaimed novelist he would later become. Hardy was then a 16-year-old architectural apprentice. That was when he witnessed the hanging of a woman dressed in black, in the rain. That was Elizabeth Martha Brown, convicted of murdering her husband. Many years later, still haunted by the experience, he wrote Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, about an impoverished and abused woman who was also convicted of and executed for murder.

The stories of the fictional Tess Durbeyfield and the historical Elizabeth Martha Brown are not the same, but their lives both illustrate how powerless woman were victimized by men and held to double standards in the Victorian era. You may have already read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, or you may have seen one of the many film and TV adaptations. You can read the real story of Elizabeth Martha Brown, the woman who inspired Hardy to write it at Mental Floss.   

(Image: The 1924 film Tess of the d'Urbervilles)

The annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race began on December 26 and lasts anywhere between a few days and more than a week. This year, the first yacht to cross the finish line was Law Connect, which beat Andoo Comanche by only 51 seconds. However, the overall winner was the Tasmanian boat Alive after factoring in the handicap. None of that seemed to matter, because the warmest accolades went to the Sylph VI, which was the final yacht to reach the end. Because it had a cat.

Oli the cat was the star crew member of the Sylph VI, and when it finally crossed the finish line his fans were there to declare the yacht the winner in the "feline division." One woman gifted Oli a bag of treats and a letter from her own cat. The crew of another yacht provided a personalized cat carrier so that Oli could join participants at the traditional gathering at the pub after the race (disregarding the fact that the winners got there days earlier). Bob Williams, skipper of the Sylph VI, became emotional on seeing a crowd greet the final boat to finish the race.

"I don't know why, I think it's about the cat, actually," he said. "I think it's quite amazing how people have taken a shine to Oli, it's not something I expected. For me, Oli is part of my crew, part of the boat."

Coming in 85th in the race is no reason for shame, as 18 of the yachts entered did not complete the race. A good time was had by all. -via Metafilter

Once again, Barry Petchesky combed through the database of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission for emergency room visits involving things people got stuck in their orifices and needed medical intervention to remove. His annual list is categorized by orifice, from top to bottom (literally), and sometimes includes the doctor's notes.

"PUT PIECES OF STYROFOAM CUP IN NOSTRIL. HE WAS SEEN YESTERDAY FOR SAME THING"

"MOM TOLD THE KIDS TO CLEAN UP THEIR MONOPOLY GAME PATIENT CAME TO MOM CRYING SAYS SHE SWALLOWED THE SHOE"

"WAS CHEWING ON A BATTERY WHEN HE POSSIBLY SWALLOWED PART OF IT, ALSO WITH A POPCORN KERNEL IN RIGHT EAR"

Eating: you're doing it wrong. The notes for the more embarrassing orifices are even funnier, as you might have guessed. Read the complete list at Defector. You may have to log in with your email, but if you get in and are brave enough, there's a second article titled What Horrible Things Did We Do To Our Penises Last Year? -via Metafilter

See the lists from previous years, too.

Quick, can you name ten truly great science fiction films? You probably could, and the movies you just thought of would no doubt rank pretty high on everyone else's list. But if you were to consider all science fiction movies, including those outside of your lifetime and foreign films, too, would it be so easy to rank them? Have you even seen 150 science fiction movies? It's a pretty broad category, which includes space travel, time travel, speculative fiction, and futuristic technology. The list includes blockbusters, B-movies, kid's movies, silent films, comedies, and animation. Sure, you'll want to argue about the rankings, and that's what gets lists like these a lot of clicks, but it would be better to read about the movies you haven't seen, because you might enjoy them very much. Check out Rolling Stone's list of the 150 greatest science fiction movies of all time. -via Digg

(Illustration by Matthew Cooley)

You've got your new calendar ready; it's time to slot in reminders of the important things, like the meteor howers and eclipses you won't want to miss when they happen in 2024. The Quadrantid meteor shower is going on now, and will peak on Wednesday night and in the wee hours of Thursday morning. This is an annual meteor shower, but this year the shooting stars should be more visible than last year, since the moon won't be outshining it.  

The US will see a total solar eclipse in April and a partial lunar eclipse in September. Then in October, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will make its nearest pass by earth. Then there are the meteor showers: Orionid, Geminid, Perseid, Eta Aquarid, and Lyrids. Don't skip the early ones, because you never know when you'll be disappointed by cloud cover. Read about all these events and how to see them at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio - Michala Garrison, Ernie Wright, Ian Jones, Laurence Schuler)

Among the more peculiar stories of the Titanic disaster is that of Charles Joughin, who was the chief baker on the ship. He left his wife and two children back in Liverpool to sail on the Titanic's doomed maiden voyage. As a crew member, he spent the more than two hours of the Titanic's sinking evacuating passengers and loading them onto lifeboats. Afterward he threw deck chairs into the water to serve as flotation. But every chance he got during the frantic work, he would slip below deck and drink as much whiskey as he could.

When the ship took its final plunge, Joughin was on the edge of the deck, at its topmost part, and slid into the water smoothly, reportedly without getting his hair wet. He spent two hours treading water as those around him succumbed to shock and drowned. Joughin finally reached a lifeboat, but since it was full, all he could do is hold on and stay above the water as best he could until the Carpathian arrived. Joughin is in the history books as the last survivor to leave the Titanic, but how did he survive so long in the frigid waters? Speculation is that his blood-alcohol level was the key. Read the story of Joughin's Titanic survival at McGill.   -Thanks, WTM!

Tom Scott has been doing a weekly video every Monday for ten years now. He's taken us to many places and showed us amazing things we would never learn about otherwise. Tom announced months ago that he was going to stop doing that in 2024, and now the time has come. See, when you make your hobby into a job, then you no longer have a hobby. Ask me how I know. When you achieve your dream job, what can you then dream about? In Tom's ten year anniversary and farewell video, he explains how he's going to do less and be happier. What projects will he come up with for us to follow? Time will tell. There are a lot of links at the YouTube page that give us a hint he will be quite busy even without a weekly video.

The second half of this video is a montage of the wild things he got to do in those ten years, with a surprise stunt woven through it. I guess he finally found the excuse to do it.