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.

#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