We sing the same popular Christmas carols all through our lives, with lyrics memorized long ago. It often takes a child to point out that they make no sense. Or no sense to them, at least. The weird grammar used in Christmas songs can sometimes be blamed on the conventions of rhythm and rhyme, but other times, it's because the songs have been handed down to us from a time when the English language was different. For example,

2. Troll the ancient Yuletide carol

Trolling a carol might sound like some obnoxious attempt to undermine it, but it’s actually a great way to get in the holiday spirit. According to the OED, one of the meanings of “troll,” in use since the 16th century, is “to sing in a full, rolling voice; to chant merrily or jovially.” It’s related to the sense of rolling, or passing around, and probably came to be used to mean singing because of rounds, where the melody is passed from one person to the next. The modern, obnoxious sense of troll comes from a much later importation from Scandinavian mythology. People have increasingly been changing this line to “toll the ancient Yuletide carol” (now over 17,000 hits on Google). Don’t let the trolls win! Let’s troll the trolls by dragging this word back to the cheery side!

Linguist Arika Okrent explains five other Christmas lyrics that don't jibe with modern English as we know it at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user anoldent)

This appears to be a comic about a woman shopping for a shirt. However, as you read, you find that the dialogue is strangely poetic. Wouldn't you love to hear two people act this nonsense out? Good luck finding anyone who can read it out loud and not trip over the words. This is a non-obvious tongue twister disguised as a comic. I spent the biggest part of my adult life reading advertising voiceovers, and can see myself having to do this one over and over before getting through it without hesitation. Try it yourself. This comic is from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.

There has been some talk on the internet lately on whether The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie. I say, why not both? The 1993 stop-motion film captured the imagination of children and adults alike, so there's no reason to limit it to just one holiday. If you loved The Nightmare Before Christmas, you'll want to learn more about it.  

4. Tim Burton didn’t get to direct this movie.

He was busy on Batman Forever and Ed Wood so he had to have Henry Selick take over. Apparently he and Burton didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.

3. It was thought to be too dark for Disney.

This is why the film wasn’t released as a Disney film right away but was instead placed on the Touchstone Pictures banner. It was eventually brought back to Disney in 2006.

There's more trivia about The Nightmare Before Christmas at TVOM.

Do you like movies about rock 'n' roll? You probably don't even realize how many you've seen until you watch them all together in this mashup. Master of editing Robert Jones combined 75 bands from Hollywood movies to play the Def Leppard song "Pour Some Sugar on Me." Some are real music stars, like Prince in Purple Rain. Some are actors playing musicians, like Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in The Doors. Some are completely fake bands, like the guys from Spinal Tap. And some are simply movie characters who play rock music.    

(vimeo link)

Not only is this video well done, but it's a lot of fun. -Thanks, Robert!

See more of Robert Jones' work on Neatorama.

Everyone who uses the internet has experienced the disappointment of reaching a 404 error, the page that explains that the page you are looking for it "not found." As internet use grew, so did the popularity of the common error we all made -or at least encountered. The code 404 became shorthand for anything that was missing, from car keys to prison escapees.

Not long after it appeared, the error code began to enjoy, or endure, its share of lore. In the early 2000s, the idea bubbled up that the 404 came from, well, room 404; that this room housed the web’s first servers, at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland); that World Wide Web inventor Tim ­Berners-Lee had his office there; that he frequently could not be found.

“Sigh,” wrote Robert Cailliau, a pioneer, with Berners-Lee, of the hypertext structure that led to the web. When asked for comment on the 404 error, he seemed less than thrilled to be approached with what he called “trivia.” Cailliau was adamant that the mythology is hogwash.

The truth is much more mundane, but we latched onto the magic of the 404 error anyway. An article at Wired explains, although it's more of a love letter to the page that both disappoints and fascinates us. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Gustavo da Cunha Pimenta)

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Medical reports about annoying hip noise
compiled by Bertha Vanatian, Improbable Research staff

Little Hip Squeaks
“Squeaking in Ceramic-on-Ceramic Hips: The Importance of Acetabular Component Orientation,” William L. Walter, William K. Walter, Andrew Ellis, and Bernard A. Zicat, Journal of Arthroplasty, vol. 22, no. 4, June 2007, pp. 496–503. The authors, at Sydney Hip and Knee Surgeons in Sydney, Australia, report:

The original Gotham is a small town in England, a far cry from the large city Batman guards from evildoers. And it's not even pronounced the way we say it. The village of Gotham became the butt of jokes in the 13th century, because the villagers acted like fools. Tom Scott tells us the story behind that reputation, which the modern town fully embraces as part of its history.

(YouTube link)

The leap Gotham took from a village of fools to Batman's home city is also explained, although it doesn't make as much sense as it should. But it's a good story.

How much fun can you have with a toy train set? If you think like a skateboarder and a domino artist, it can get pretty involved. Watch as Thomas the Tank Engine goes off the rails, so to speak.

(YouTube link)

The guys from 5MadMovieMakers made this video. They also do videos of marble runs, Hot Wheels stunts, and stop-motion LEGO scenes, so they have experience designing this kind of thing. -via reddit

You may have seen Takeshi Yamada and his sea-rabbit Seara at Coney Island, where he once lived in his gallery. Yamada created the rabbit with webbed feet from an old coat and artificial animal parts. She is the most famous of the many fabulous taxidermy creatures and other artworks that fill his home.  

Yamada lives in his cramped two-bedroom East New York apartment among a prodigious collection of curious creatures of his own making. There, you’ll discover a bizarre menagerie of multi-headed mutants, enormous mythical beasts, pint-sized merchildren, and the remains of several space aliens, as well as stacks upon stacks of canvasses filled with surrealist self-portraits and scenes of mythic warfare.

Yamada and his artwork once lived in Coney Island, in the artist’s former Museum of World Wonders, until Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. After the hurricane caused irreparable damage to Yamada’s gallery and home,he moved further inland along with his artwork, which, without a gallery, has become an assemblage of quiet but peculiar housemates.

Zoë Bernard visited Yamada to talk about his artworks and where they came from. Take a look at some of them, including Seara, a six-eyed goat, and alien skulls at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Viktorsha Uliyanova)

Here's a gallery of submitted macros that may really help someone, somewhere. And they actually get better as they are counted down to number one -take it from an old lady who's had a lot of relationships.  

The best thing about it is that these folks learned a lesson from their mistakes, which is the only good thing about mistakes. And we all make them. Yeah, relationships ruined because you're young and dumb can break your heart, but as you getting better at it, other people you meet should also be getting better at it. Eventually you'll find someone who has learned those lessons, too. See all 25 rookie relationship mistakes at Cracked.

(Image credit: Flickr user Iain Heath)

LEGO artist Iain Heath (also known as Ochre Jelly) built a LEGO recreation of the famous roof scene in Tommy Wiseau's movie The Room. The details are correct right down to the water bottle.

(Image credit: Flickr user Iain Heath)

I didn't build it, it's bullshit, I didn't built it, I did naaaaaat...

Oh yes, he did. But is this Tommy Wiseau playing the part of Johnny in The Room, or is it James Franco doing Wiseau doing Johnny in The Disaster Artist? Heath isn't saying. He titled both Flickr images "The Disaster Artist," but that could mean either one. -Thanks, Iain!

See more posts of Ochre Jelly's LEGO creations.

In 1939, hotshot light heavyweight boxer Tiger Jack Fox was pitted against Melio Bettina for the vacant championship title in his weight class. Fox declared himself ready for the fight, despite mysteriously being stabbed just below his heart by a woman in December of 1938. A bigger roadblock stood in his way: Bettina's manager, Jimmy Grippo, who was also a magician and hypnotist.

“Jimmy Grippo, who manages Melio, is a magician and a hypnotist,” wrote Harry Ferguson of the United Press. “He is planning, it seems, to send his man into the ring in a trance which will make him impervious to a smack on the kisser… Manager Grippo, who never has objected when anyone referred to him as ‘the Svengali of Pugilism,’ intends to make his hypnotism work both ways by putting a hex on Fox. He explains that if he can come face to face with Fox before the gladiators begin gladiating he can send Fox into a trance that will make him helpless against a left to the belly.”  

Grippo's plan worked, and Bettina won the championship. But Fox was the better fighter, and had a long career in the ring after Bettina faded away. So what caused the championship loss? Was it Grippo's hex, or Fox's belief in the magic? Or was it the earlier stabbing that had Fox under a temporary disability that he denied? Read the story of the boxer who lost by a hex at Narratively. -via Digg

The Ewok Adventure never crosses your mind when you think of how many Star Wars movie there are so far, but that's okay. It was a made-for-TV movie broadcast in 1984, and then renamed Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure for home video. None of the Star Wars saga principle characters appeared in this children's movie, but it managed to introduce youngsters to the Star Wars universe and its associated merchandising, which was the entire point. Here's some behind-the-scenes trivia about The Ewok Adventure.

10. The Ewok language is based on Tibetan.

It’s hard to imagine the guttural, chittering language being base on anything but it does have a solid base in the Tibetan tongue.

7. The story takes place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

That would explain why there’s no sign of Imperial or Rebel forces as they go on their quest, they hadn’t arrived yet, or they were in a different region.

Read more about The Ewok Adventure at TVOM.  

Film student Clark Zhu (previously at Neatorama) made a retrospective of the movies we watched in 2017. Contains NSFW language.   

(YouTube link)

It's a artful blend of audio, video, and music in five sections: action, comedy, horror, drama, and epic. Just the last section makes me want to go to the theater to see something or other. Some movies fit into more than one section. You'll find a list of them here. -Thanks, Clark!  

The following is an article from Uncle John's OLD FAITHFUL 30th Anniversary edition.

These guys’ pro sports careers were unexceptional …except for that one big moment of glory.

CHARLIE ROBERTSON

In baseball, a perfect game is when one pitcher works all nine innings, and never allows a batter to reach first base. No hits, no walks, no hit batters, no errors. It’s an incredibly difficult and rare achievement: only 23 perfect games have ever been thrown in the history of Major League Baseball. Several Hall of Famers threw one in their careers, including Cy Young, Catfish Hunter, and Sandy Koufax. And so did Charlie Robertson. He started out with the Chicago White Sox in 1919, got cut from the team, and returned to the Sox three years later. In 1922, in just his fourth overall start as a pitcher, Robertson threw a perfect game against Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers. It was essentially the only highlight of an otherwise brief, forgettable career. Robertson bounced around the big leagues, playing for the St. Louis Browns and the Boston Braves, but retired in 1928. His career record: 49 wins and 80 losses.

DOUG WILLIAMS