We don't deserve dogs. The account We Rate Dogs always rates a dog at more than ten out of ten, and at the end of the year, they take on the gargantuan task of selecting the top ten dogs of the year for us. In this year's list, you'll meet courageous dogs who rose to the occasion as heroes, who proved their undying loyalty to their humans, and who work hard to please us. Rowdy suffered multiple injuries in protecting an autistic child who had wandered off. Coby saved an entire neighborhood by finding a gas leak. And the stories get even more inspiring after those. There's even a dog who performed CPR! While man's best friends are all good dogs, these puppies went above and beyond for their humans, and deserve to be on the top ten list. You might want to grab a hankie before watching this video.  -via Metafilter


 

Tom Nichols once taught a class in the Cold War and American pop culture, for students who were too young to have experienced both at the same time. Many songs, movies, and TV shows carried references to the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union that fly over their heads today. The Twilight Zone is famous for this, but the original Star Trek series, which aired from 1966 to 1968, was rich with Cold War allegories.

The various sci-fi writers who worked on Star Trek were open to all kinds of adventures, but series creator Gene Roddenberry pushed his own ideas constantly. In the series, the United Federation of Planets stood in for first world countries, specifically NATO, and the Klingon Empire represented the second world, the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Despite the Prime Directive, Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise often stepped in to stop wars on various planets or protect a planet from the Klingons. Some episodes mirrored real-world events that have become disconnected over time. Nichols takes us through a few of those episodes and explains the Cold War analogies in an essay that will bring back memories, good or bad. -via Damn Interesting

As he has for the past twelve years, Barry Petchesky has compiled a year-end list of emergency room dramas involving things stuck in people's body orifices. This is as good a time as any to remind you not to stick things in your body holes that aren't designed for that purpose. The items are taken from U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's reports of emergency room visits in 2024. In this year's list, he dropped reporting on what kids stuck up their noses or in their ears, and there aren't even any throat reports. The report is merely on three orifices on the lower end of the human body, so you can consider the whole post NSFW. The objects removed might even induce nightmares. You can ask why and how, but we can assume that 98% of the time, the patient explained they slipped and fell. However, some include notes from the patient that will make you cringe. I even had to look up a couple of words. Read the list at Defector. 

Every year since 2007, DJ Earworm gives us an artful mashup of the most popular pop songs of the previous year. For the year 2024, there's a distinct theme among the 25 biggest hits, and it's more than just a steady dance beat (with a bit of a country twang this time). These songs, or at least the lyrical clips used, all appear to reference regret, blame, and most of all, alcohol. Was it the current zeitgeist that inspired songwriters to go in that direction, or was it the mood of the nation that propelled these kinds of songs to the top? Or was it DJ Earworm's selective editing that brought out that theme?

Many commenters likened this video to the United States of Pop in 2009, titled Blame It On The Pop. Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga all appeared in that video, and are back 15 years later, still making the hits. You can hear all the United States of Pop videos from 2007 to 2024 in this playlist.

Before we go into the new year, everyone is looking back to sum up what 2024 was all about. Here at Neatorama, we focus on bringing you interesting, funny, educational, or distracting things to make your day a little better. In case you missed any of these popular posts, here's your chance to go back and catch up. And it's always a good idea for us to find out what kind of posts you like the most.

1. Project Sundial: the Apocalypse Bomb

2. The Famous Chicago Rat Hole

3. Simon and Garfunkel Like Big Butts

4. The Odd Things Removed from Body Orifices in 2023

5. This Library Lets You Pay Fines with Cat Photos

6. When Sex with Fairies Became Illegal in Sweden

7. XKCD's Do-It-Yourself Ball Machine

8. Public Domain Book Covers That Completely Miss the Point

9. Can You Identify this Mystery Restaurant Contraption?

10. Deciphering English When Spoken with German Grammar and Syntax

Thanks to all of you for viewing, clicking, and sharing our posts. And thanks for being a part of Neatorama!

(Neatoramabot available on a shirt at the NeatoShop)

Oh, he nailed it. We are in that weird time between two holidays that are too close to go back to school, but some people have to pretend to work and others don't, and some are dealing with the Christmas fallout as guests are still hanging around. We all try to act like it's a normal week even though it's not, and until I heard this song, I didn't realize how universal that feeling is.

Is this a weekday or a weekend? Did my Christmas company leave yesterday or the day before? How old are these leftovers? Should I start taking down the decorations? I missed several days of my regular daily activities- will I ever catch up? Is life ever going to be normal again? Brittlestar wrote a little song titled "The Week Between Christmas and New Year's" to put into words how discombobulated we all are feeling at this time, whether we are off work or not.  -via Nag on the Lake

When Americans visit Rome, they are impressed by the beautiful architecture that's old, sturdy, and well-crafted. So this is what the Roman Empire was like! Not exactly. The buildings that make up Rome are several hundred years old, which impresses Americans, but in the history of Rome they aren't all that old. The Eternal City has been in place for more than two thousand years, but it's been destroyed over and over and rose from its ashes to live again. Archaeological digs happen in Rome any time a building is replaced, and underneath there are foundations of the city's previous iterations that were razed and built over.

Roman expansion made for a lot of enemies over time, and many of those enemies managed to take the city and ransack it but good. Rome was taken by the Galls, the Visigoths, the Vandals, Germanic barbarians, the Ostrogoths, Arab raiders, the Normans, and the Holy Roman Empire. That last one seems like a civil war, but it included most of Europe marching against Rome. Read about each of these conflicts, which together show how Rome, as a city, managed to weather the violence and rise again, even as the empire was destroyed.

(Image credit: Karl Bryullov)

Warning: don't watch this video if you haven't eaten recently, because it will make you hungry.

A whole chicken roasted on a rotating spit is a glorious thing. They can cook for a long time without drying out because their juices roll around inside instead of falling out. The cooking method has been around for thousands of years, but these days most people don't have a rotating spit, nor do we have a place to build a fire. You can get a rotisserie oven, but that takes up a lot of kitchen space. Lucky for us, a lot of grocery stores have very large kitchens, and make rotisserie chickens every day, often offered for a lower price than a whole raw chicken. When I worked at a grocery, I had to smell those things as they cooked, and it was heavenly. I often took a $5 rotisserie chicken home, cooked and still hot. For a single person, that's four or five meals. They aren't $5 anymore, but they still sell for less than raw chicken. How do they do that? Weird History Food tells us everything we need to know about rotisserie chicken.

We've seen how customs get switched from one holiday to another over time. In the past, Thanksgiving had trick-or-treaters and Christmas was a time for ghost stories. In the 15th century, the church found the festivities on St. Nicholas Day a bit too rowdy for the Advent season, so they were moved to the New Year holiday. Since December 31st is the feast day of Saint Sylvester, the masked and costumed people who roam from house to house became Silvesterklaus.  

The Silvesterklaus custom is still performed in parts of Switzerland, twice a year, on December 31st and again on January 13th. Why choose between the date on the Gregorian calendar and the date on the Julian calendar when you can do both?



Silvesterklaus, with their elaborate headdresses and enormous bells, come in three flavors: beautiful (human masks and traditional dress), pretty-ugly (human masks with plant costumes), and ugly. They travel in groups of six men, ringing their bells and yodeling in low voices to wish everyone a happy New Year. Tourists can catch Silvesterklaus in the  Appenzell Ausserrhoden region. The custom has been launched in the past few years in New Glarus, Wisconsin, too. You can see the Silvesterklaus there on Saturday, January 11, 2025.

If you had really good genealogy records, your family tree could theoretically be huge, with infinite fractal branches. That doesn't happen because the population of the world doesn't get bigger in the past. But even if it were true, you don't carry genetic information from all your distant ancestors. You always inherit 50% from each parent, but you could carry as little as 0% from one grandparent and as much as 50% from another. Those are extremes, and there's an exception for a genetic male, who always gets the Y chromosome from his father's father. But whatever percentage you get from each grandparent, that slice gets smaller with each subsequent generation. The upshot is that after a few generations, you will have no genetic link at all to some of your forbearers. Which is good, because they may have been more closely related to their spouse than is comfortable to think about. This video from MinuteEarth is barely over three minutes; the rest is an ad.

The Guinness Book of World Records was founded in 1954 in order to settle pub arguments. It's now a huge organization that keeps up with the biggest, fastest, oldest, and most outrageous extremes of all kinds. There are more records than ever, and they can be very specific, so earning one isn't as impossible as it used to be. But it's not all "achievements." There are also records that no one wants to be associated with.

You wouldn't want to be the record holder for the world's most fraudulent election, or the highest recorded blood alcohol level, or the biggest ever loss of personal wealth. There are records that are so dangerous that Guinness won't accept attempts to break them, like the biggest meal ever eaten. The record holder for that one wasn't even trying for the world record, and died because of it anyway. Read the details of five truly regrettable world records at Cracked.

Once upon a time, there were two space programs that did great things because of their Cold War rivalry. Now we have many nations with government-funded space programs, plus private enterprises in the space travel business, and these programs work in partnership with each other to expand our missions to explore (and exploit) inner and outer space. If everything goes as planned, the year 2025 will be a banner year for space exploration.

NASA has several unmanned missions to deliver scientific instruments to the moon. They are also launching infrared detectors to see further into space than ever before. The ESA will explore low earth orbit. Japan is sending probes to the moon, while China will explore asteroids. And several programs are sending probes out into the solar system to explore everything from Mercury to the moons of Jupiter. Read up on what to expect in space exploration next year at the Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: NASA/Firefly Aerospace)

Rays, whether they are manta rays, sting rays, or mobulas, swim in a different way from any other swimming creature because they are shaped like pancakes with faces. What's weird is that parts of their faces are on top, and the rest is on the bottom. But you already knew that, and this video is from Ze Frank, so we also learn about their body teeth, their arrowhead with a stutter, their creepyholes, their waterfall of teeth, and their ampullae of lorenzini. You'll have to watch the video to find out what those are. Different kinds of rays have various weird ways of eating, and some even have superpowers like eletrocution or eating with their fins. He doesn't even get to the flying mobulas. This particular True Facts video is rather clean compared to others in the series, but it's still pretty funny in places. There's a 70-second ad at 5:05.

We know in our heads that the New Year is just a date on the calendar, the first date, actually, and holds no astronomical or religious significance. But we still have many superstitions around that date, most involving food. We know that hog jowl, collard greens, and black-eyed peas bring good luck in the new year, but did you know there are also superstitions about foods that will bring bad luck?

There's an entire list of foods that portend a bad year if eaten on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, and many of them are meat. You shouldn't eat crab or lobster because these creatures move in odd ways. A lobster can walk backwards, and a crab scuttles sideways. Eating them could mean that you can't move forward in the next year. The same justification holds for beef and chicken because of the way those animals move. So you might want to go meatless or stick to pork for the holiday. There are also food superstitions around the color or the state of certain foods, varying by nation. Read up on eight foods to avoid for a prosperous 2025 at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Matt Johnson)

Science fiction addressed our feelings about robots long before we actually had humanoid robots. The word itself came from the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in which mechanical men are exploited for their labor until they rebel. A similar theme lurks under the surface in the 1927 film Metropolis. Both stories made the treatment of robots an analogy for the treatment of laborers because we are bound to sympathize with a robot who looks like a human. But it's not a human, so businesses were keen to appeal to the exploitive side of humanity by offering labor-saving robots to ease our personal burdens. This motive was personified by a robot named Eric that was introduced to audiences in 1928.

Eric wasn't a true robot as we think of them today. His movements were remote-controlled and his voice was pre-recorded, but he seemed human enough to spark sympathy from people he met. For 1928, he was a miracle of a mechanical man. Almost 100 years later, we still haven't perfected humanoid robots, and we haven't truly sorted out our feelings about them either. The working robots we have, from oversized factory arms to Roombas, don't look anything like a person. Read about Eric the Robot and some early ideas about robot labor at Popular Science. -via Damn Interesting