Good Reads for New Years Eve

One of our New Year traditions is to kiss someone at midnight. No pressure there, right? A kiss is a great way to start out a new year on a high note, and here’s the science behind it. (via The Intersection)

Ripley’s Says 2010 Was ‘Another Unbelievable Year’ – Believe It or Not! You can believe these weird stories from the past year -they were published by well-regarded news sources.

New Years on TV: 342 Holiday Specials, Episodes, Movies & Marathons. Except for the traditional ball drop, I’ll be spending my holiday with the Criminal Minds marathon! (via The Daily What)

Many blogs listed their best or most popular posts of the year in the past few days. Here’s a list of those lists with a lot of reading material in just a few clicks.

All the other year end lists are listed in this list from Fimoculous: everything from the best movies of 2010 to the strangest pet names of the year.

Forecasts for the year 2011, predicted back in 1931. Some were hilariously off but others were eerily prescient.

9 Major Stories Everyone Got Wrong This Year. News media often delivers the sizzle at the expense of the substance. NSFW text.

Man in a Blizzard (or Idiot with a Tripod) is a short art film about the snowstorm in New York City. It’s got nice music, interesting images, and at least one awesome review.

New York City drops a giant ball in Times Square to ring in a New Year. Other cities drop other things, some strange enough to make us scratch our heads.

6 New Year Traditions from Around the World. This year, why not try eating grapes or burning effigies for a lucky 2011!

Happy Feet New Year!

You think this penguin might be trying to tell us something?

Links for Fun

Video proof that puppies are the greatest Christmas gift ever. I wish I had known this earlier -before I bought my kids a horse.

How few pixels can you use to make a portrait and still recognize the person? Andy Rash calls his extremely low resolution celebrity figures iotacons.

Passive-aggressive notes display your feelings without spelling them out. They can also be works of art (and comedy).

Bad Science in Movies.

The Beauty of Pixar. If you’ve seen any of these movies -or all of them- this mashup will tug at your heartstrings.

The one-man Village People. The art of puppetry is not dead, it’s just rare that you find anyone who is a entertaining as this guy.

This looks like the ceiling fan in my house. However, I think mine moves more air.

A lot of older hearses are sold to private owners who like to show off their ride. See 20 “appropriately” morbid vanity plates spotted on these hearses. (via Bits and Pieces)

12 Tips From The Stupidest Criminals of 2010. Or, what not to do to succeed in crime.

Banana Boat

Stan Freberg has fun with The Banana Boat Song. Animation by Paul Glickman, 1967.

Good Reads

Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours. In an attempt to learn what went wrong, it becomes hard to find anything that went right. (via Metafilter)

6 Animals Humanity Accidentally Made Way Scarier. They’re striking back, and we’re just large vertical pink burritos to them. NSFW text. (via Gorilla Mask)

Remains of modern humans in Israel date back 400,000 years. That’s much older than modern humans found in Africa, which may cause some rethinking on theories of human origins.

Twenty hours of the blizzard in New Jersey is captured in a 38-second time lapse video. There’s a clock in there for proof, but it keeps getting buried!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science. When statistics can be so easily manipulated, should we bother to believe any medical research?

The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in China opens to the public on January 5th. However, the ice sculptures are ready and have had their pictures taken.

The element Lithium is a 50-year-old miracle drug that can protect us from brain damage and mental illness. But the pharmaceutical industry won’t fund more research because the drug is not profitable.

We Love Who They Aren’t: 7 Famous Impostors. Passing yourself off as someone else could land you in prison, but if you are convincing enough, your (fake) life could be the subject of a book or movie!

Cat Disturbed on Trampoline

Lesson learned: a child's trampoline is not the most peaceful place to take a catnap. (via Buzzfeed)

Fun and Funny Links

As ever, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

My Blackberry Is Not Working. Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield lob pun after pun until you think they're done, then comes the punch line.

The point of Japanese games shows is not to win fabulous prizes, but to entertain the audience. In this one, the contestants are going to look ridiculous no matter how good they are.

Ice fishing is a favorite winter activity in Ontario. If there’s no fish, it’s best to find out before you stay out too long.

Newspaper Nonsense. These are the typos and editing faux pas that make the paper worth looking at.

The Worst Movie of All Time?

30 Snowmen Who Need An Intervention.

A swinging sword looks very different from the sword’s point of view!

Good Reads and Informative Links

Dust Ball: The Vacuum Of The Future. Or possibly the greatest cat toy ever invented. Either way, I want one!

A finger bone found in Siberia belonged not to a neanderthal, not to a human, but to a previously unknown close relative of both. DNA analysis shows the Denisovans are different, but interbred with humans.

We thought the Coelacanth was extinct until a fisherman caught one in 1938. A museum curator had it mounted by a taxidermist because there was no other way to preserve such a large specimen. (via Boing Boing)

A teenager takes time out every evening to help a family who needs him. But Rudy says he is receiving more than he is giving. (via Metafilter)

Sometime in 2011, there will be seven billion people on this planet. Can our earth support the nine billion people that the projections predict we’ll have in 2045?

Five Fake Memoirs That Fooled the Literary World. Of course, now everyone says they had their suspicions at the time, if not all the answers.

Four Unusual Treadmills.

Ho Daddy

Bob Denver in the 1964 movie For Those Who Think Young.

Health

By Hayley Morris. (via Everlasting Blort)

Christmas Eve Links

Christmas greetings from the International Space Station. Many good wishes and the secret to a fluffy hairdo.

Allie at Hyperbole and a Half tells about the time she decided to rewrite the story of the Nativity to give it more pizzazz. The production included a flying baby Jesus, two drunk wise men, and Kenny Loggins.

12 Things You Might Not Know About A Christmas Story (even though you’ve seen it 90 times). All of which should enhance your next viewing this weekend.

Rudolph, and Santa’s 27 Other Reindeer. We herd they were planning a trip this weekend.

10 Historically Bad Christmases.

The 6 most offensive and/or psychotic gingerbread houses we could find. (via The Daily What)

The 12 Psychology Studies of Christmas.

25 Examples of Christmas Decoration Abuse.

How Different Age Groups Celebrate Christmas. Since I am always 20 years behind, I fit exactly in the “30-somethings with kids” category, which is “pretty damn awesome”.

The children of St. Paul's Church of New Zealand acted out the Nativity on video. They stuck to the basic story, but their performances (and accents) are more than adorable.

Top 10 Funny Santa Claus Videos.

It takes a special kind of Santa to pose for pictures with stranger's cats. It takes a special cat to not freak out. #6 is the best of these 35 photos.

Santa answers questions from redditors.

Where Candy Canes Come From. Of course, they come from Santa’s workshop at the North Pole, but this post is about the history of candy canes.

Joel Veitch’s Christmas decorations this year are mainly kittens. His latest song is enhanced by turning the sound off.

The Singing Sewermen of east London sing a holiday song to remind people about what goes on down in the sewer. Make life easier for them and don’t put grease down your drains.

To the soldiers deployed this Christmas, thank you. The Brigade has a photo essay on what they are doing far away from their families. (via Gorilla Mask)
ing more than he is giving. (via Metafilter)

Dominic The Italian Christmas Donkey

(via J-Walk Blog)

Jewish Christmas Traditions

Christians view Christmas as a holy celebration. It’s not as sacred as Easter, but it is certainly bigger! Those who don’t view themselves as particularly religious are happy to join in the fun with the not-so-sacred trappings of Christmas: Santa Claus, a tree in the house, lights, and especially gifts. Jews, not so much. To many, the secular parts of Christmas are still symbolic of someone else’s religion. So, what is there to do on Christmas? The traditional activities are explained in this article I posted at mental_floss.

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Fun and Funny Links

Walks of Life is a Cyriak animation made for Showtime. Once you get past the creepiness of finger-figures, notice it tells the tale of evolution.

Double Dreamhands! Part of me wants to try this; another part of me is laughing to hard to stand up straight. (via Breakfast Links)

London’s parkour stuntmen show off their stuff -and how! The action starts about 2.5 minutes in.

Everything I Know About Love I Learned From… The Coen Brothers. These valuable life lessons come wrapped up in total weirdness, so you have to really pay attention to see them.

How to Write an Interdisciplinary Research Paper: Planning for Retirement by Solving Time Travel Paradoxes Using Open Book Management in Nearby Disk Galaxies.

Speaking of near-humans, just for laughs, check out the hairy chin monkey. He’s ready for a kiss!

We know that the webcomic xkcd is influential. Yesterday, Black Hat guy entered an imaginative coupon code while ordering online. Think Geek is accepting the code. (via The Daily What)

The Best Viral Videos of 2010: A Retrospective. Even if you aren’t familiar with all of them, Videogum has composed a pleasing mashup that stands up on its own.

The Return of Count Spirochete

A 1973 Navy training film on venereal disease. (via The Daily What)

Informative Links

Cahokia, America’s Forgotten City. Hundreds of years before St. Louis was founded, the area was home to tens of thousands of Native Americans who left no stories behind.

If you didn’t catch the solstice lunar eclipse for one reason or another, we have video. I never knew until now that the earth’s shadow is red.

The new Google Cr-48 notebook doesn’t have the standard Caps Lock key you see on other keyboards. Is this the beginning of the end of Caps Lock? Will anyone miss it? (via Bits and Pieces)

Even the people that work on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition are surprised by the generosity of others. Especially those who have every reason not to feel generous.

Parasitologist Susan Perkins started the blog Parasite of the Day to highlight a different parasite for every day of 2010 -the UN International Year of Biodiversity. As the year comes to a close, she’s posting the 12 Parasites of Christmas. (via The Loom)

The Most Heroic Animals of 2010. Read stories of dogs, cats, horses, dolphins, rabbits, and a cow that might leave you a little verklempt. (via Nag on the Lake)

Ancient Robots & Victorian Androids. Leonardo da Vinci thought about them, and people have been building robots of one kind or another ever since.

Sex in space will eventually lead to pregnancy in space, which raises some far-out concerns. How will microgravity affect human gestation and childbirth? (via Metafilter)

Orphan's Benefit

Mickey Mouse, 1934. Disney remade this in 1941 in color with the newer-style Mickey and Donald, but I like the earlier version better. See a comparison here.

Wearing Light

Designers are working with advanced technology like knitted and woven fiber optics, LEDs, and chemicals to make wearing light simpler. See some examples in this article I posted at mental_floss, and get some ideas about how you can stand out at your News Years Eve party!

Fun and Funny Links

The Dark Side of Christmas.

The Santa Brand Book. Everything by the book, to fulfill the promise of the concept and to maximize profits, the Santa way. (via Metafilter)

The 30 Most Important Cats Of 2010 . They didn’t save the world, but they kept us entertained through the year.

The Gifford Children’s Chorus performs A Christmas Trololo, in honor of one of the year’s biggest internet memes. Bonus: Extraneous weird details are thrown in for good measure. (via The Daily What)

Trollquotes: Or, 32 Ways to Make Geeks Rage. Then watch him/her get mad all over again when they realize what you’ve really done.

When a roller coaster cab became stuck at the top of a hill, the passengers started rocking it back and forth to get going. Of course, that triggered an inspirational YouTube remix.

Christmas Tree Fads and Fashions. These are not your grandmother’s Christmas decorations.

Cats and Your Exercise Routine.

Good Reads and Info

The only total lunar eclipse of 2010 will be visible from all of North America on Monday night/Tuesday morning. The last time we had a lunar eclipse on the winter solstice was nearly 500 years ago.

Billions of dollars and a Hollywood biography doesn’t hurt a bit. Mark Zuckerberg was named TIME’s Person of the Year, while Julian Assange got the most votes in the People’s Choice poll.

The New York Times has a series of interactive maps of the US with which you can study population distribution by race and ethnicity, income, housing (such as mortgage, home value, and rent), and by education. The data comes from the US Census Bureau. (via Metafilter)

Quick, how many dwarf planets can you name? One? Depending on how you define a dwarf planet, there may be around a hundred, half of which have names.

What Everyone Needs to Know About College and Privacy. You don’t have to tell your parents what your grades are, just like they don’t have to pay your tuition.

All Singing! All Dancing! All Failures! 4 Variety Shows that Failed to Find an Audience. When every network had a variety show on every night, only the strongest could survive.

Tim LaFollette is battling ALS (Lou Gehring’s Disease), a disease that took the life of his mother and grandmother. One powerful episode of his web series recaps his first year living with the diagnosis.

Should solitary confinement be considered a form of torture? Studies show that long-term isolation leads to some severe psychological damage.

The Top Ten Prison Gangs. These descriptions will reinforce how prison is a place you never ever want to enter. (via Dangerous Minds)