#Sgtpepper2023 v3 pic.twitter.com/eZbe70Z6nB

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) January 1, 2024

As he does every year, British artist Chris Barker (@christhebarker) compiled images of the well-known people who died in 2023 into a composition that evokes the iconic cover for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. There sure are a lot of familiar faces in this one. To put names to those familiar faces, he also posted a graphic key and a master list so you can look them up. Once again, he went through multiple versions as more names were added. The objects in the foreground are symbolic of other deaths in 2023, such as the Ken doll for Bill Cunningham, who was the first to give Ken a voice. However, some like the Caramac bar and Lilt drink are products that went away. Those objects are included in the key as well.

Barker has done these compilations every year since 2016. You can see them in a previous post.

If you're determined to change your life, January first is probably a good day to do it, right? There are myriad reasons that New Year's Day is possibly the worst day to initiate big changes. We do it because we've bought into the idea that a new year is new, and will somehow be different from the previous year. But the date is just an agreed-upon starting point for a new calendar. Then we added all this holiday merriment to that date for no real reason other than we like to party. You see where this is going? It's become a cliche that whatever New Year's resolution you make, it will fail hard and fast when that calendar goes into effect. Maybe it would be better to just set a goal for the new year, and assign random dates for smaller goals that will add up to a major change over the year. That being said, Ryan George (previously at Neatorama) gets the point about New Year's resolutions across in a much shorter and funnier fashion.

Long before Joseph Pujol took Europe by storm with a his all-fart stage performance, Roland the Farter made an even better living in 12th-century England. In some ways you could call him a court jester, because he performed for the amusement of the king, but Roland was a specialist. He could fart on command, and apparently did it very well. It's not clear which king Roland served, believed to be Henry II, or possibly Henry I, or maybe even Richard the Lionheart. Whichever king it was, Roland was paid well, with the grant of an estate of around 100 acres called Hemingstone Manor in Suffolk. This grant came with one stipulation: Roland was to perform once every year at the king's Christmas feast, and that performance was to include one jump, one whistle, and one fart.

We also don't know how long Roland worked for his king before such a deal was struck, but it was a sweet pension for so little work. The estate didn't even revert back to the crown upon Roland's death, but rather it passed to Roland's son. Read about Roland the Farter at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

Dancing like no one is watching
byu/UrbanCyclerPT innextfuckinglevel

You've heard the saying "dance like no one is watching." In this case, it's more like "give it everything you've got because everyone is watching!" At a children's recital in November, it didn't matter that you went to see your child, all eyes were on this youngster from Mpumalanga, South Africa. We know that because multiple videos from different angles were posted to the internet immediately. He's a born performer, without a shred of self-consciousness! The song is "Lyfie" by South African singer Bernice West.

Since then, the young man who now goes by the stage name of Klein Kwagga has become quite famous in his home country, and viral worldwide. Bernice West reached out to him, and they've since performed together at the Rugby Sevens in Cape Town. Virality has not affected his exuberance for dance. You can follow Klein Kwagga's further adventures at TikTok.

-via Digg

Cave paintings dated back to 25,000 or so years ago have been found in many French and Spanish caves. A common motif among these paintings are handprints and silhouettes of hands, and a concerning number of them have missing fingers or parts of fingers. One might assume that these hands fell prey to injury, frostbite, or infection, but a new science paper posits that these fingers may have been ritually removed as a religious practice.

Archaeologist Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver says finger removal has been a part of some cultures all around the world for thousands of years. Self-mutilation as a sacrifice to appease a deity takes many forms, and would explain the inordinate number of missing digits among cave painters. This theory has received some pushback, as missing fingers would certainly limit a prehistoric person's ability to manage a harsh environment. Read about the missing fingers and the idea of their deliberate removal at The Guardian.  -via Strange Company

We see plenty of lists of the best movies of 2023, and we are drawn to those because we will want to check out those we haven't seen. On the other end of the spectrum, there are movies we want to avoid seeing at all costs, even by accident. The ten movies of 2023 that came in with the worst scores on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes include exactly one I had even heard of. They are: 

Freelance 7%
Life Upside Down 5%
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 3%
Confidential Informant 0%
Dead Man‘s Hand  0%
The Donor Party 0%
Johnny & Clyde 0%
Mercy 0%
Righteous Thieves 0%
Shrapnel 0%

That's honestly a lot of 0% movies for one year. You can read a description of each of these films and why they are awful at The Mary Sue and see the trailer for each at Mental Floss. If you've seen any of them, we'd love to hear your opinion.

It is particularly tragic when a great many people die from something as simple as a nutritional deficiency because the cause was unknown. Scurvy is the most familiar of these stories, because many sailors died before James Lind discovered that citrus fruit prevents scurvy, even before vitamin C was known. But it's not the only such tale.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many thousands of people in Switzerland, the majority in some places, suffered from goitre (often spelled goiter) and no one knew why. Even worse was the high incidence of birth defects. There was an inordinate percentage of babies born deaf, and even more that suffered from what they called cretinism, featuring severe brain damage as well as other physical abnormalities. Doctors and scientists flocked to Switzerland to study the phenomena, and came up with dozens of theories, but no solution. Over time, the leading theories became a pathogen in the environment or a genetic defect.

We now know that goitre is caused by a deficiency of iodine, which is necessary for thyroid function. In 1914, Swiss physician Heinrich Hunziker identified iodine deficiency as the root of the scourge, but he was shot down by the medical establishment. Everyone knew that iodine was poison! Read a fascinating account of the experiments that proved the theory, and the difficulty of introducing iodine to the Swiss Alps through resistance by medical experts, government officials, and a skeptical public, at the London Review of Books. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Wespi/Eggenberger collection, Institute for the History of Medicine, Univ. of Bern)

Lemon Pig, Lemon Pig, Lemon Pig! 🍋 🐖🪙🥂 pic.twitter.com/kua0CzUnD7

— 🧷Wren 🔜 FurSquared🌻🪵🍄 (@Wren_the_ferret) December 27, 2023

I don't know how I missed it, but a roundup of New Year traditions at Atlas Obscura led me to a post about lemon pigs, which I'd never heard of. A lemon already looks like a cartoon pig's body, and is easily converted with the help of a few cuts and four toothpicks. The eyes can be anything from whole cloves to pushpins to googly eyes.

Happy New Year (via granniepantries) pic.twitter.com/Am7zrKecEk

— 70s Dinner Party (@70s_party) December 31, 2017

The internet went big for lemon pigs as a New Year tradition after a Tweet in 2017 referenced a 1971 book on holiday entertaining. People from all over made their own and posted them as replies, although since it was already December 31st, some of them used oranges, apples, limes, bananas, or peppers. But the idea never went away, and today people are making sure they have a lemon in the house to make a pig for the New Year. You can see more lemon pigs at Instagram.

Our first lemon piglet. The cats absolutely hate it but we love him sm pic.twitter.com/Gx0m7JW8O0

— ami 🫐🐈‍⬛ (@nebulami) December 27, 2023

The lemon pig isn't really an old New Year tradition. It is, rather, a children's activity that goes back at least to 1882. Its inclusion in the 1971 book 401 Party and Holiday Ideas from Alcoa was a stretch anyway, but who cares? People found it fun, and now they make lemon pigs to ring in the New Year. And you can, too! Read more about lemon pigs and how they came about at Atlas Obscura.

What do you do when a volcano begins to erupt on your island? You flee! But what if you are a bird couple and you have four eggs to protect? These avians do their best, but the father is a birdbrain, and the mother turns out to be not all that smart, either. Their antics are funny, but in the short film BOOM, you also get caught up in the danger. The whole island is exploding, and these birds do not seem to be able to fly. Yes, that brings up the question of how they came to be on the island in the first place, but don't spend too much time thinking about it. Will the family survive the eruption? Will any of them? This student film from the French animation school École des Nouvelles Images won quite a few awards around the world before it came to YouTube.

When we think of tarot cards, our first thoughts range from casual fortune telling to tools of the occult. A deck of cards with medieval art showing unfamiliar symbolism that takes lots of study to understand seems just plain weird. It might surprise you to learn that the occult trappings of the tarot deck are a fairly recent phenomena. The tarot deck originated in Europe, perhaps as early as the 14th century, as a regular card game. The cards came in four suits, which were later simplified into hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades to make them easier to use. The original tarot cards were lavishly illustrated and gradually expanded to make the game more difficult.

So why did the elaborate tarot deck survive after the standard deck of cards we play with today was developed? And how did they become fortune telling cards? That has to do with the beautiful Italian Renaissance artwork on them that no one could bear to throw away, and the medieval symbolism that fewer and fewer people understood over time. Read the origins of the tarot deck and why it became what it is today at The Guardian. -via Metafilter 

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we looked at Neanderthals as hairy, ape-like cave dwellers that were clearly sub-human. We were wrong about a lot of that. They did live in caves, when there was a cave around, but those were pretty good shelters, really. We've since discovered that Neanderthals weren't at all stupid, as a group. They had sophisticated tools and social structures, and were similar enough to modern humans to interbreed with them. These discoveries are based in study and not just on the fact that most of us are part Neanderthal and want to make our ancestors look good. Neatorama readers already know a lot of the revisions in our view of Neanderthals, but do you know how they got their name? Did you know about the red light in the sky they must have witnessed? In this video, Weird History goes over some fascinating facts on what we've learned about Neanderthals.

Christmas and New Year's Day, plus the days surrounding them, are a time of festivity, of work vacations, parties, and often more alcohol than you're used to drinking the rest of the year. While many of the drawbacks of overindulging are well-known, such as falling, hangovers, weight gain, and the inability to look witnesses in the eye the next day, there are other concerns.

Your digestive system depends on about a trillion microbes to work properly. Your gut biome consists of fungi, bacteria, parasites, and viruses that not only aid in digestion, but also affect our immune systems and our personalities. Alcohol is well-known germ killer. Killing off an indiscriminate swath of your gut biome can lead to an imbalance, in which bad bacteria can begin to outnumber the good bacteria that keeps it in check. Alcohol also irritates the lining of the digestive system, which can allow bacteria to enter the rest of the body. There's also the poor, overworked liver and the byproducts of breaking down alcohol it produces. Read the details of how excessive alcohol consumption can affect your gut biome, and what you can do about it, at Inverse.

A few years ago, French TikToker Cyrilschr (who is no longer at that account) played with Orbeez, beads made of sodium polyacrylate, a superabsorbent polymer that soaks up water. The beads can expand to many times their size when exposed to water, so Cyrilschr bought enough Orbeez to fill his bathtub. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and made a fun video. But then what? How do you get rid of them? He thought it would be a simple matter of letting them go down the drain. But they aren't liquid, and they clogged the drains. The follow up TikTok videos told a horror story as he panicked over the growing problem of Orbeez in the sewer. It's both funny and horrifying.

The original videos are narrated in a combination of French and German, and this compilation has been edited down and English captions added, which are NSFW. You'll have to toggle the CC button to turn them on. Boing Boing has the full compilation of videos, but the captions are not available in English.

A 32-year-old Kelsey Hatcher, diagnosed with uterus didelphys, a rare condition characterized by having two uteri, has defied the odds by delivering a set of twins at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) hospital.#Birmingham #Alabama pic.twitter.com/lzKh1qIbQu

— Bnz English (@BnzEnglish) December 27, 2023

Last month we brought you the story of Kelsey Hatcher, who has two uteruses and became pregnant in both. Doctors were concerned about the high-risk pregnancy. The story now has a happy ending, as Hatcher gave birth to two baby girls, Roxi Layla on Tuesday, December 19th, and then Rebel Laken on Wednesday, December 20, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital. Hatcher underwent 20 hours of labor. The first girl was induced and delivered vaginally, and the second was by a cesarian section performed the next day. The infants were born only a few days short of their due date, which was on Christmas. Although the girls are technically twins, fraternal of course, they are unique in that they do not share a birthday, nor did they share a womb. Both babies are healthy. -via Damn Interesting

In 1987, a barge carrying more than 3,000 tons of garbage from New York took over the news as it floated around the Atlantic seaboard looking for a place to offload. No one wanted it. The Mobro 4000 was originally intended to take its cargo to Louisiana for burial, then to Morehead City, North Carolina, to be converted to methane, then plans were hatched to take it to Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, New Jersey, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Belize, but the garbage was rejected everywhere. The boat stayed afloat and loaded for months.

What was the problem? Well, there were mob ties to the garbage transportation operation. There were also questions about the safety of the exact type of waste it carried, as it was rumored to contain medical waste. But it mainly boiled down to "we don't want your garbage." Read about the Mobro 4000 and what eventually happened to it at Amusing Planet.