We're sliding into the home stretch of Christmastime, and the kids are out of school. Do you have all your decorating, shopping, and baking done yet? No, I don't, either. You remember when you were a kid, and it took forever for Christmas to get here? The older you get, the faster December whizzes by. And the New Year. And years fly pretty fast, too. We hope you are enjoying the holiday season, and hope you have the most wonderful Christmas ever! Get yourself some eggnog or some spiced cider and take a few moments to catch up on the great stuff you may have missed this week at Neatorma.
Jill found us Awesome Examples of Anchorman Fan Art.
John Farrier wrote In 1814, This Massive Warship Cruised Lake Ontario.
We had a guest post from Daven Hiskey at Today I Found Out called Why We Sing Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve.
Eddie Deezen told us about The Biggest-selling Christmas Album of All Time.
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders came from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
The Annals of Improbable Research gave us A Theory of Absolutely Everything.
Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet was from mental_floss magazine.
This week's Puzzlr was about Graduation. Our Conceptis puzzle was Color Link-a-Pix. And our Whodunit this week was Aunt Penny's Brooch. We bring you these puzzles every week, and they are all archived in the sub-blog NeatoPuzzles. But one has a real prize:
The What Is It? game gave us an odd contraption that was an apple parer, corer, and slicer, patent number 122,553. Several people knew that, but we're looking for the funniest answers. Phil and Buster had a good one: "This, to me, looks like a bean extractor. The child is told the end-piece is a fragrant flower. Upon sniffing, the extractor is slowly inserted and rotated to acquire the bean. Once extracted, the child is usually left none the wiser." Once I realized he was talking about the child's nose instead of the ear, it made sense! Then marcintosh also had a great story about a prototype automobile that you need to go here to read. Both win T-shirts from the NeatoShop! See all the answers for this week's What Is It? items at the What Is It? blog.
The post with the most comments this week was This Bunny Loves His Baths, which was largely a discussion of John's pet rabbits. In second place was a 3-way tie between 33% of US Tourists Think That Haggis Is an Animal, He was Only Three Days from Retirement! and The 50 Most Popular Toys From The Last 50 Years.
The comment of the week was David H Szondy's response to John's haggis post.
That sheep's bladder thing isn't a haggis. What you've been eating is the infamous "false" haggis that was invented in 1844 to make up for the shortage of the true haggis after it was almost hunted to extinction in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Burns Night craze. The common or garden variety haggis is, in fact, a shy little globular animal that lives in the highlands and whose planitive, squealling bleats can be heard over the lonely hills as it roams from distillery to distllery to beg a wee dram. It's much prized for its bright tartan pelt, which is used to make bag pipes and its platypus-like beak that was once the basis of the sporran industry.
The most popular post was 50 Kick Ass Funny T-Shirts Every Geek Should Have, followed by The Giant Horse Conch is the Death Star of the Mollusk World. Coming in third was 21 Fascinating Things You Might Not Know About Mary Poppins. It was a good week, as we had a half-dozen other posts that outdid anything from earlier in the month.
The post with the most ♥s was Young Man with Down Syndrome Accepted into College, Reacts Joyfully, with Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet in second place, and third was This Bunny Loves His Baths.
The most emailed post was Christmas Lights for the Lazy followed by The Nativity Cats of Brooklyn.
Keep in mind that the stats I post here are mainly for fun and to let you know what you might want to go see in case you missed it. Stats change, and we know that anything posted on a Friday will never make it in here, even if it becomes a hit later. Still, your ♥s and shares and comments let us know what kind of posts you like best, so we can bring you more of them. We are always looking for feedback!
The social networking post of the week was 50 Kick Ass Funny T-Shirts Every Geek Should Have, which was our top post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. Turducken? No, Thanks. I'll Have the Cthurkey and 50 Geektastic Christmas Gift Ideas also did rather well on Facebook this week.
On our own social networking sites, you will want to check out our special Pinterest board on Christmas. And over at the Neatoramanauts Facebook page, you'll find treats that aren't on the main blog, like this scheme ---> for protecting your Christmas tree from the resident cats.
Usability Tip of the Week: Each post has tags that can help you find more posts on the same subject. At the bottom of an isolated post, see the word salad between the sharing buttons and the related posts. Click on any of those and get a list of other Neatorama posts with the same tag. This time of year, you might be interested in the posts tagged "Year End List" to see how 2013 is shaping up.
In the next four days, I'll probably have plenty of opportunities to wish you a Merry Christmas, but this is still an appropriate place to say it, and a big thank you to everyone who bought a t-shirt or other gift from the NeatoShop, because that helps to ensure that we will be here next year! You can still order Christmas gifts for the USA, if you use Express Mail or USP Next Day Air. Otherwise, you can order something neat and present the recipient a picture of it and then blame us for it arriving late.
