Did you survive winter storm Hercules and the polar vortex? It seems like all we talked about for several days this week was the bitter cold. Alex, Jill, and Zeon all live in sunny southern California, and John bragged about getting down to a chilly 50º in Texas. Meanwhile, I was stuck at home with bored children due to ice-covered roads and subzero temperatures. I curtained off the kitchen door to save heat, and most of my houseplants back in the solarium died from cold. I'm glad that room is no longer my office! When the road conditions improved, school was further cancelled because of frozen water pipes, so now my kids have been home for three weeks straight. I'm still glad I didn't have to go out and actually drive to work. But we had some good reading besides cold and snow this week. I hope you get a chance to catch up on anything you might have missed.
John Farrier told us about The 10 Best Alternate Histories.
Eddie Deezen wrote Little Buddy: The Life of Bob Denver on what would have been his birthday.
Inflating, Inverting, and Shaking the Strangulated Hernia Patient was from the Annals of Improbable Research.
From Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, we had Don't Believe Everything You Hear.
The story behind The Feminine Mystique came from mental_floss magazine.
We had one poll this week, asking Should Christmas Fall on a Fixed Day of the Week? The majority of readers said it should stay on December 25th, whenever that falls in the week.
Our Whodunit this week was called The Disabled Lookout. The Pzzlr was about Three Coins. Did you figure them out?
In this week's What Is It? game, the object in question was never authoritatively identified, and even the What is It? blog doesn't know what it is. That doesn't keep us from awarding prizes, because we were looking for the funniest guesses! Rubinsky said it was a Peppermint Patty trap. "Down on the farm, those little choco-minty delights would be zipping around all over the place at blazing speed, and the only way to catch one was to use this device." Randall told a story about it:
Remember POGS? This is 'the' pog press. Remember how many of them there was, there were millions, they were everywhere. All of them came from this damn press. This is the only one. I worked the midnight to eight shift, 3.75 an hour. Seventeen months in Minot, North Dakota, pressing pogs. Damn Damn Damn.
So Rubinsky and Randall both win t-shirts from the Neatoshop! See the answers to the other mystery items of the week at the What Is It? blog.
The post with the most comments this week was 9 Rules for Naming Your Baby, with The 10 Best Alternate Histories and Can a Quiz Predict Your Politics? following.
The most popular post from this week was The Worst Possible Online Dating Profile, followed by The 10 Best Alternate Histories in second place, and Before Street Lights, There Were Moonlight Towers was third. Way to go, John!
The post drawing the most hearts was A Random Act of Kindness by a Dairy Queen Employee. Second was Using Sand To Cast A Hexagonal Pewter Stool, and in third place was RIP William Overstreet, A World War II Fighter Ace Who Flew Through the Eiffel Tower.
The most emailed post was Winter Sun and Little Buddy: The Life of Bob Denver. Those were the posts emailed by our handy little button at the bottom of the post. You are certainly welcome to email links out the old-fashioned way if you prefer!
Looking around the Neatorama "empire," it occurs to me that the readers of this blog might not realize how spread out we really are. Of course, we have the subblogs for specialized tastes, which you can access from the menu across the top of this page. Then we have our new sister blog, Homes and Hues, which is like porn for anyone who is into architecture, design, home decorating, or remodeling. Or anyone who just wants to dream about the perfect human nest.
We also have our spots at all the most popular social media sites, too. The Neatoramanauts Facebook page has lots of extra treats. The most popular item this week was <-- this visual pun by Patrick Hastie. And we have a whole bunch of specialized boards at Pinterest so you can find what you're interested in! Follow us on Twitter, too.
And powering all of these sites is the NeatoShop, where you can always find new and exclusive items, and save on our clearance and sale stuff.
We want your input! If you see something neat on the internet that we should post, send it to tips@neatorama. If you have technical problems with the site, write to bugsneatorama.com. If you are an author or publisher and would like to submit a book excerpt for publication, write to alex@neatorama.com. If you have an adorable picture of your pets, send it to jill@neatorama.com. And we love to see your comments under our posts!
Have a great week, everyone!