Yeah, you should be out Christmas shopping today, but it's cold and you'd rather just read great articles and watch videos at Neatorama, right? I know I would. You've put in a long hard week at work, and you deserve some relaxing entertainment and edification. I'll help out by hitting the highlights of what you may have missed this past week at Neatorama.
Jill Harness brought us 14 Fantastic Pieces of Art Based on The Hobbit.
John Farrier collected Great Works of Girls und Panzer Fan Art for us.
He also told us about The Confederate Navy's Crazy Plan to Raid the Great Lakes. He's had a great series of historical geography stories lately -or would you call it geographical history?
Eddie Deezen wrote Frank Sinatra: The Ladies Man, in honor of what would have been the singer's 98th birthday.
The story of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was from mental_floss magazine.
Plain Dressing, about the Amish and other plain groups, came from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us R.T. Grace's Patent Application Proposal.
We also has a Bathroom Reader list posted just last night in Hilarious Warning Labels.
Our weekly Pzzlr was called Rainy Dilemma.
The Conceptis puzzle this week was Hitori Light.
Our Whodunit was the tale of Crazy Kate.
This week's What Is It? game gave us a strange old object that turned out to be a loose coupler for radio reception. It was used as the primary tuning device in an early receiver. No one here knew that, but we had some funny answers to win a t-shirt! One goes to ladybugs, who said, "Want to surprise the person sitting next to you? The kinetic energy from this ambush style Jack-in-the-Box will spring the dowel out from the side and smack them." The other goes to Rubinsky, who had a funny (but long) description of how this was used to train Victorian circus mice -read it here. Congratulations! You'll see the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
We noticed you really like movie trivia lists. So far, we've found several of you, on Die Hard, Home Alone, Christmas Vacation, and even The Wizard of Oz, although it's not specifically a Christmas film. What other Christmas movies would you like to know more about?
The (non-giveaway) post with the most comments was Great Works of Girls und Panzer Fan Art.
This week's most popular post was Plain Dressing. In second place was 13 Weird and Terrible Christmas Ornaments, followed by The Worst Photoshop Fails of 2013.
The most hearted posts were Why We Need the Oxford Comma and Second Grader's Cure for Playground Loneliness: The Buddy Bench, which tied. The most emailed post was I'm Climbing Up the Christmas Tree Neow.
The most-liked post on Facebook this week was French Cafe Charges Extra for Poor Manners, although McDonald's Will Sell Poutine in Its Canadian Restaurants and The Baby Name "Cheese" Increased in Popularity 450% Last Year did exceptionally well, too.
If Tim Burton Animated Doctor Who was our biggest post on both Twitter and Google+, and the most-pinned post on Pinterest was Wonder (Woman) Bread.
We have our own social media sites, too! Join us at the Neatoramanauts Facebook page, where you can discuss the question of the day and see fun stuff that doesn't show up on our main page, like this simple gingerbread house. Even I could pull this one off! Check out our Pinterest boards, too!
Whatever successes we have each week are due in large part to you, our readers. We write, collect, and find the most interesting things we can for you, and when you repost, link, email, or share our stuff on social media, it all helps us to 1. survive and flourish, and 2. know what you like best, so we can bring you more of it. We appreciate your feedback, too! Let us know what you like and how we can do better.
There are always people on your list that are difficult to buy gifts for, because they don't need anything, but you want to show them some love. That's when you go to the NeatoShop and select something different and audacious that you won't find at your local shopping center. Everyone can use a t-shirt, especially one that has a clever twist on the recipient's favorite pastime or pop culture obsession. Right now, you can take advantage of the NeatoShop's last t-shirt sale of the year and get more for your money! Get them something they'll be proud to show off -and support independent internet artists (and Neatorama) at the same time.