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It does tend to make a boring interview more interesting. -via Arbroath

Don't you just love weekends? That's when I can come up for air and realize I'm been online so much that the laundry has piled up, the refrigerator is empty, and the kids need a ride to the shopping center. Do I fix all that? Just a little bit, then I get back online thinking I'm going to get ahead on next week's work. Then I find something really fascinating to read, or a game I should try out, or get lost in checking out link after link until I'm embroiled in something totally different from what I started out to find... you know how it goes. We want to contribute to that kind of entertaining time-wastage by bringing you the neatest links ever. And if you've missed any of our features this week, here's some handy links to get you caught up!

We learned the origins of The Hokey Pokey from Eddie Deezen this week.

Jill Harness gave us 10 Awesome Geeky Cooking Hacks you can try out yourself.

Mental_floss magazine brought us Over the Rainbow: The Technicolor Life of the Man Who Created Oz.

LIBRETTO: The Bacterial Opera was a transcript of the operatic performance at the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, courtesy of The Annals of Improbable Research.

Forbidden Island, U.S.A. told us about the Hawaiian island of Niihau, from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

In the What Is It? game this week, the mystery item is is a check protector, it’s a security device that marks the check when it’s paid so it can’t be cashed a second time and also prevents attempts at altering numbers. The first commenter who knew that was cbellamy, who did not select a prize t-shirt. The funniest answer came from Elim, who guessed it to be an antique squid ink extractor. Doesn’t that draw a picture? For that, he wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Thanks to the What Is It? Blog, where you’ll find this and several other mystery items this week, all now revealed.

At NeatoBambino we learned about a teenager who may cure cancer, had a link to the best toys ever for children, saw a new kid's meme, and watched how kids just love internet memes. If you don't have NeatoBambino bookmarked, you'll find a link list of the latest posts in the right sidebar here at the main page.

Also in the sidebar, you can keep up with discussion threads in our most recently-commented-on posts. The post with the most comments this week (besides the contest) was the story of Mythbusters' little accident, followed by the item on the Israeli law against declawing cats.

After you catch up on these posts, you may want to browse through The Best of Neatorama, where we have feature articles going back six years! Now, how much of your time have we wasted? Don't fret, we can save you time as well! Just go to the NeatoShop and find the best Christmas gifts ever, purchased by a click, and delivered to your home!

Can you tell a real news headline from one made up by the satirical website The Onion? It's not as easy as you might think, but that's the challenge of this quiz from mental_floss. You might remember some of these headlines, but you need to remember how true they are. I knew them all, but it's my business to know weird news stories. I want to see how well you do! Link

In response to the earlier item on chicken coops, Neatoramanaut NickDanger3dEye let us know about the 12-sided coop he and his son built.

I got the basic idea for a plywood dodecahedron from a late 60s Popular Science magazine article I read in my youth. The author of that article built it as a meditation space, with a circular hole cut in one panel. Instead, we hinged one panel and put a hook and eye at the top, so we could lock up the chickens overnight, safe from raccoons and other varmints.

One other point, we hung a heat lamp from the top to warm the chickens during the winter. At night, the red light leaks through the vertices.

My son's friends have been unpersuasive in trying to talk us into painting numbers on the side to make it look like a D12.

I would throw my vote to paint it as a die! An octahedral laying box was his next attempt at working his way through all the Platonic solids. Link to Flickr page.

All over the world, cities are cutting budgets, and zoos are often high on the hit list. The result is often abandoned facilities that cost too much to tear down. Thanks to urban explorers who are also photographers, we get to see these formerly fine facilities in their decaying abandoned states. Let's just hope all the animals have a better place to live now. Pictured here is the zoo in Charleroi, Belgium, which was a victim of recessions that affected the entire city. See the rest at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Peter Van den Bossche)

Amy Sheridan sells lovely but subversive embroidered items in her Etsy shop, including Kanye West Tweets, preserved for all time in framed embroidery. Her entire existing inventory sold quickly, and Sheridan issued a message about ordering one.

I'm currently accepting a limited number of orders for tweets (**not for the holidays**) - if it's sold out in the shop, but your life won't be complete without it (**not for the holidays**), send me a message and I would be happy to add you to my queue (**not for the holidays**)... queue is a funny word, isn't it? I mean, that last "ue" is kind of extraneous, isn't it? I guess the first one is, too, since it's pronounced "Q"... anyway, where was I? Oh, right, I'm a middle child and a people pleaser, and I really hate disappointing people, so basically, if you ask nicely, you'll probably end up with one (**not for the holidays**).

Oh, and in case I haven't mentioned it, there is absolutely no way I can guarantee that it will be there for the holidays.

Also, in case you're wondering, the tweets are $40 plus shipping (but the price is eleventy bajillion dollars if you ask for one for Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Thanksgiving/Boxing Day)

You can still see pictures of the other Tweets already sold at her shop. Link -via Boing Boing

Lithuanian artist Jolanta Smidtiene designed this 42-foot-tall Christmas tree made of 32,000 plastic beverage bottles. It's displayed in the town square in Kaunas, Lithuania. See more pictures at Laughing Squid. Link

Link to Lithuanian source.

If you don't raise chickens, you probably never thought about chicken coop design. It's a rather specialized branch of architecture. But more and more people are raising chickens in their backyard, and designers are ready with modern prefab coops you can buy and set up in no time at all. Web Ecoist has a rundown of chicken coops, including two that are shaped like eggs! A few notable homemade designs are included as well. The model shown moves along the yard slowly by solar power. Link

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They are actually chocolate Labrador retriever puppies, but I couldn't resist using that headline. -via Arbroath

Wildlife experts thought leopards were locally extinct in Afghanistan, but this one was captured snarling at a camera trap in September. The camera trap, set by the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Afghan central highlands, also caught pictures of lynx, wild cats, wolves, red foxes, stone martens, and even a pair of poachers. See them in a gallery at National Geographic. Link

(Image credit: WCS Afghanistan Program)

The Wyoming Department of Health got word of two sheep ranch employees who were infected with Campylobacter jejuni and suffered from abdominal symptoms. Both eventually recovered, although one was hospitalized for a day. The Center for Disease Control issued a report.

During June, both patients had participated in a multiday event to castrate and dock tails of 1,600 lambs. Both men reported having used their teeth to castrate some of the lambs. Among the 12 persons who participated in the event, the patients are the only two known to have used their teeth to castrate lambs. During the multiday event, a few lambs reportedly had a mild diarrheal illness. Neither patient with laboratory-confirmed illness reported consumption of poultry or unpasteurized dairy products, which are common sources of exposure to C. jejuni (1). The patients resided in separate houses and did not share food or water; none of their contacts became ill.

Ranch owners and workers were advised to use only standard techniques for lamb castration. Link -via Improbable Research

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user EssjayNZ)

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Dodd's Furniture is going where no furniture store has gone before. Where that is, I don't know. Set your savings for stunning! -via The Daily What Geeks

This Cthulhu tree topper is hand-felted by Etsy seller Nifer Fahrion.

Sure, he'll destroy all mankind, but in the mean time you’ll get a whole house-full of fanatical cult of believers ready to do your bidding during the holiday season. By the time they clue into what’s going on, they will already be tormented by visions of this Ancient One.

The closeup pictures at Etsy are even more terrifying. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Dutch athlete Monique van der Vorst became paralyzed from the hip down during a surgical operation when she was 13 years old, and used a wheelchair afterward. She also suffered a spinal cord injury in 2008. Meanwhile, she became a cyclist, using her hands for propulsion, and won two silver medals at the 2008 Paralympics, as well as other athletic honors. Then van der Vorst was involved in another crash last year when she was hit by a bicycle. While recovering, she began to feel tingling in her feet! Months of therapy followed while van der Vorst regained the use of her legs.

Doctors have no explanation for her amazing recovery. Some believe the trauma of her last accident may have jolted her body back into activity.

But the realities of her new-found joy also put an immediate end to a successful athletic career.

"Although walking is the best thing you could do in life, I immediately missed the sport, the people and the challenges," van der Vorst said.

Rehabilitation and physiotherapy with an athletic focus strengthened her and as soon as she sat on a bike she again wanted to give it a try.

But van der Vorst has a new goal. She has signed with a professional cycling team as an able-bodied athlete, and is training to compete in the 2016 Olympics. Link -via Buzzfeed, where you can see more pictures.

(Image credit: Bas Czerwinski/AP)

Everyone wants to come up with the Wii, which means everyone wants to come up with a new video game idea that so out-of-the-box that everyone will want to buy it. Which leads us to some strange and frankly dumb innovations. Like Biotic games, developed by Stanford researchers to teach children about biology.

Biotic games look just like old school video games, only instead of pixels, they are made out of living organisms (paramecia) ... which you control by zapping them with electricity. For example, in the game Enlightenment you guide a bunch of shrimps across a small box in order to light up all the squares:
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What you're watching is a fluid chamber charged up with an electrical field -- a charge that the player can shift from positive to negative by pressing the buttons in a small NES-like controller. The tiny paramecia inside the chamber react to the electricity by fleeing in the direction that you command them to. The chamber is also hooked to a small webcam that transmits the images to a computer in real time, instantly transforming them into video game screens for our perverse amusement.

That one won't be available soon at your local game store. See the rest of seven strange game innovations at Cracked. Link -via Unreality