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From the guys who brought you the Engineer's Guide to Cats and Christmas Laser Beam Cats, comes instructions for making festive mechanized holiday accessories for your cat. -via Laughing Squid

The Silver Snail featured a family of AT-ATs opening their gifts on Christmas morning in the storefront window. See more pictures at Star Wars: The Old Republic. http://www.swtorstrategies.com/2010/12/at-at-family-xmas.html -via Buzzfeed

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As told by the children of St Paul's Church of New Zealand, in adorable Kiwi accents that defy imitation. It ends with a party!

Earth is a blue planet that has red sunsets. Mars is a red planet with blue sunsets!

From its vantage point on the surface of Mars, NASA's rover Opportunity relayed a spectacular series of images of a blue-hued sunset on the red planet. Scientists then stitched the pictures, taken over a period of 17 minutes, into a 30-second movie simulation.

The bluish glow around the sun is due to the same dust particles that make Mars' sky appear red. The pictures were taken on Nov. 4 and Nov. 5 using three different filters on the rover's panoramic camera.

See the video and other images of and from Mars at Discovery News. Link -via Holy Kaw!

Jim and Dylan live in the Chelsea area of New York City -nowhere near the North Pole. They don't know how so many children got their home address, but for years they've received letters to Santa Claus at their apartment. The number of letters has grown into the hundreds this year. Many of them are from children seeking basic supplies instead of toys.

Hi Santa,
My name is Jennifer and my little sister’s name is Stephanie. I’m 8½ years old and Stephanie is 7 years. Santa our behavior this year have been excellent. You can ask my mom if you want. Please Santa bring me some clothes. I’m 10T and my shoe size is 4 and Stephanie is 8T shoes size 2½. Please make my dreams come true for Christmas.

This year, instead of wondering why they get them, Jim and Dylan are trying to fulfill the children's wishes, with the help of friends, neighbors, and anyone who wants to lend a hand. Tom Mason and Sarah Klein produced a video about the letters. Link

-via Metafilter, where a commenter may have found a clue as to the origin of the address in a 1998 article.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Neatorama! May your holidays be all you hoped they would be. And many thanks for making this site a part of your daily routine! During your breaks from family gathering and activities, we've got plenty of links to keep you amused.

National Geographic shared some awesomely large photographs of The World's Biggest Cave for us to share on the Spotlight Blog.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader gave us the lowdown on the origins of some old familiar candies in Sweet Starts.

From the Annals of Improbable Research, we learned How to Write an Interdisciplinary Research Paper: Planning for Retirement by Solving Time Travel Paradoxes Using Open Book Management in Nearby Disk Galaxies, which might win an award for the longest title of a post yet.

John Farrier brought us 15 Facts You Might Not Know about Stargate SG-1.

New at the Museum of Possibilities: My Awkward Attempts to Design A Hands-free Phone.

From mental_floss magazine, we had Tongue Depressors, or Great Moments in Shutting Your Piehole.

It was a great week for giveaways! On Tuesday, David Israel led a bunch of folks on a hi-tech treasure hunt in New York City and awarded a new Ford Fiesta to this tech-savvy couple.

Monday we had Name That Weird Invention! Congratulations to qwhacker, who called this “The Long Arm of the Law”. Qwhacker wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The second place entry was from cs, who did not specify a t-shirt:

“The future of traffic enforcement – The Self-Service Ticketing Lane Response Vehicle and Revenue Generator. No longer will officers have to be inconvenienced by weather or in danger from other vehicles on the highway. They will be able to work comfortably from the nearest coffee shop and use Facetime to issue tickets while sipping their latte.

The What Is It? game popped up on Thursday. Congratulations to commenter Just a guess came the closest to knowing these are for the ends of bulls horns -supposedly for decorations during a show, but seem also to be a safety factor. Okkent wins for funniest guess when he said, "My wife requested this as her engagement bracelet. The attachment of my jewels was a condition of us getting married." Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!

And you can still play Neato-Puzzle #11.

If you're looking for more distraction over the weekend, remember we have features going back years in the Best of Neatorama, and there's always the Neatohub! Merry Christmas, everyone!

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A video performance by the Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat 5th Grade of Quinhagak, Alaska, with assistance from the entire village. The kids spent ten hours shooting the video, and more time preparing it. The teacher plans a lesson on apostrophe use when school is back in session. -via Metafilter

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Geocaching is a hobby that's really "caching" on! Neatoramanaut E6C and his team launched a balloon from North Carolina last Saturday.

After reaching the max altitude of 101,001 feet up, the balloon burst and Sputnik 2010 drifted back down to earth and landed at Plymouth, NC nearly 124 miles away from the launch site and became the first East Coast Geocache into space AND back and is available for logging right where it landed.

Link -Thanks, Scott!

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The Fine Brothers put together an interactive YouTube experience that offers you five video games with themes pertaining to the year 2010. Choose your game: the BP Oil Spill, Bed Intruder, World Cup, Chilean Miners, or the TV show Lost. Clicking any of them will take you to YouTube to play. -Thanks, Benny & Rafi Fine!

Some albums on this list will not surprise you, but who knew that Roseanne Barr recorded an album of Christmas songs? Or Rue Paul? Or Colonel Sanders? See them all at Buzzfeed. Link

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Workers from the Thames Water company in east London plead with customers not to pour grease down the drain, because it clogs the sewers. That message is sing the tune of "Good King Wenceslas". From the YouTube link:

Thames Water will donate 1p to WaterAid for every hit the film gets on YouTube (up to a maximum of 200,000 views, ending on 31 January 2011) to support the charity's life-saving work to improve access to safe water and sanitation to the world's poorest people.

Link -via Arbroath

I remember when a carton of cigarettes was considered a nice Christmas gift. After all, they were three or four dollars a carton! Flickr has tons of old ads like these that might bring back memories or put you in the holiday spirit or possibly horrify you. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(Image credit: Flickr user clotho98)

Archaeologists find them; linguists try to read them, but even after years of study, some writings are indecipherable. Some are from unknown languages, others were written in code. All are baffling. An example is the Rohonc Codex.

This most peculiar script is written from right to left, and seems to mix up runes, straight and rounded characters in the style of Old Hungarian – but it defies all attempts at translation. This bamboozling manuscript was given to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Count Battyany in 1852, and is is believed to have been written in medieval times. Appearing to be hand-scripted, and illustrated with crude black and white sketches, the writing is simply not decipherable in any way. However, code-breakers have managed to at least ascertain that the language involved consists of 42 letters and over 200 different symbols, some non-alphabetic, as well as other symbols which see only occasional use.

The Rohonc Codex is just one of seven untranslated manuscripts in this list at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer

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NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and Cady Coleman along with Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency send a holiday message from the International Space Station (ISS). -via Metafilter

Great Moments in Shutting Your Piehole

QUIET BREW

The Roman Catholic monks most renowned for their tight lips are the Trappists, a sect that grew out of the Cistercian Order in the 17th century. At the time, monks at the abbey of LaTrappe in Normandy felt that the Cistercians had become too lax in their pursuit of the "desert solitude" needed for a close relationship with God, so they bolted. Today, there are about 175 Trappist monasteries worldwide, populated by about 2,500 monks and 1,800 nuns. Contrary to popular belief, these monastics don't have to take a vow of silence; they're merely encouraged to maintain "an atmosphere of silence" -meaning they can speak when it's functional, when it's part of a "spiritual exchange", or on special social occasions. Trappists aren't completely shut off from the rest of the world, either. In fact, they're well known for making a mean ale. Chimay, a favorite beer brand among moneyed hipsters, is brewed by Trappists in Belgium. (Image credit: Flickr user Michael Verhoef)

LONGEST VOW, JERSEY EDITION

Apparently, phoning Guinness World Records is something monks don't think to do. How do we know this? Because the first person to set the "official" world record for Longest Vow of Silence was a college freshman from Haddonfield, N.J. Yes, Brett Banfe bit his tongue from August 31, 2000 to to September 5, 2001, in order to become a better listener and raise money for the child development program Head Start. You'll be glad to know that he broke his silence in a setting strictly adherent to the monastic impulse -in front of a scrum of TV cameras at the Planet Hollywood restaurant in Times Square. He opened with a nice Shakespeare/Wink Martindale one-two punch: "'To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.' How's everybody doing today?"

SILENCE: NOT ALWAYS GOLDEN

Whether the story is apocryphal or true, it's worth retelling: During a 1956 speech for his campaign of de-Stalinization, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was asked by an unseen audience member why, as an advisor to the dictator, he had never stopped Stalin from committing his atrocities.  Khrushchev immediately lashed out, "Who said that?" The room grew quiet. Khrushchev repeated his query to more silence, waited a beat,. and then said, "Well, now you understand why."

SILENCE: NOT ALWAYS VOLUNTARY

In March 1986, the last place Romual Piecyk wanted to be was on the witness stand. Eighteen month prior, he'd been assaulted by two members of the Gambino mob family, including its boss, John Gotti. Piecyk knew that if he fingered the Teflon Don during testimony, his life -or whatever would've been left of it- wasn't going to be pleasant. (Threatening phone calls and mysteriously broken brakes served as helpful pre-trial hints.) So on the day he was to testify, Piecyk went AWOL. Where'd he turn up? At a Long Island hospital, undergoing elective shoulder surgery. When he was finally forced to take the stand four days later, he clung to ignorance. "To be perfectly honest," he said, "it was so long ago, I don't remember." The next morning, the front page of the New York Daily News screamed, "I FORGOTTI". Poor Piecyk even went beyond silence to later advocate on Gotti's behalf, saying that the media had unjustly painted the mob boss as a "human monster." In a show of deep appreciation, Gotti didn't have Piecyk whacked. And in a show of deep pity, the Queens district attorney's office declined to file perjury charges.

YOUR 4 MINUTES AND 33 SECONDS OF FAME

In 1952, legendary avant-garde composer John Cage wrote "4'33"," the most famous work of music to feature no music at all. The piece is precisely what it sounds like: four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. All you're supposed to hear are the clicks and shuffles that naturally occur within a song's duration. Since it's release, the silent composition has inspired a cover version by Frank Zappa, a tribute by John Lennon & Yoko Ono, and a scene in the film "Pootie Tang." But not until after Cage's death did his music publishing house, Edison Peters, decide to cash in on the royalties. Mike Batt of The Planets credited their 2003 track "A One Minute Silence" to Batt/Cage in what he called "a tongue-in-cheek dig at the John Cage piece." Edition Peters apparently didn't see the humor and sued for copyright infringement, demanding royalties for their late client. Ultimately, they reached a settlement, but future silence artists beware: Batt fought back by getting in on the game. He's now registered several other silent composition times, including four minutes and 32 seconds and four minutes and 34 seconds.

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The article above appeared in the Jan - Feb 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Don't forget to feed your brain, subscribe to the magazine and visit mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog!