Oleksiy Mark / Shutterstock.com

Way back when, the Romans had a god named Janus. He was the god of doors and gates and had two faces — one looking forward and one looking back. Julius Caesar thought it would be appropriate for January, Janus’ namesake month, to be the doorway to a new year, and when he created the Julian calendar, he made January 1 the first day of the year (this also put the calendar year in line with the consular year, as new consuls also took office that day).

For Caesar, the Julian calendar was a political tool and weapon. As the Roman armies conquered new lands, the Empire often gave its new subjects some freedom in retaining certain religious and social customs. After the calendar was created, though, it was used in every corner of the Empire, not just for consistency, but to remind all citizens of Roman authority and Caesar’s power.

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As midnight approaches on December 31st, more than a few of us will crack open a bottle or two of champagne to help toast the New Year. With a few choice facts about the bubbly stuff, you can look knowledgeable rather than just tipsy when you drain your flute. Here are a few little nuggets you can share with fellow revelers.

What exactly is champagne?

Strictly speaking, champagne is a sparkling wine that comes from the Champagne region of northeastern France. If it’s a bubbly wine from another region, it’s sparkling wine, not champagne. While many people use the term “champagne” generically for any sparkling wine, the French have maintained their legal right to call their wines champagne for over a century. The Treaty of Madrid, signed in 1891 established this rule, and the Treaty of Versailles reaffirmed it.

The European Union helps protect this exclusivity now, although certain American producers can still generically use “champagne” on their labels if they were using the term before early 2006.

How is champagne made?

Sparkling wines can be made in a variety of ways, but traditional champagne comes to life by a process called the methode Champenoise. Champagne starts its life like any normal wine. The grapes are harvested, pressed, and allowed to undergo a primary fermentation. The acidic results of this process are then blended and bottled with a bit of yeast and sugar so it can undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle. (It’s this secondary fermentation that gives champagne its bubbles.) This new yeast starts doing its work on the sugar, and then dies and becomes what’s known as lees. The bottles are then stored horizontally so the wine can “age on lees” for 15 months or more.

After this aging, winemakers turn the bottles upside down so the lees can settle to the bottom. Once the dead yeast has settled, producers open the bottles to remove the yeast, add a bit of sugar known as dosage to determine the sweetness of the champagne, and slip a cork onto the bottle.

What’s so special about the Champagne region?

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Hacking is not just a crime of the computer age – apparently Morse Code machines can be hacked, too, according to Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz.
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Thanks to James for this two-part link – first, an article about the Ryugyong Hotel, a.k.a. the Hotel of Doom, from Esquire magazine a few years ago. “Apparently, it was such an embarassment to the government that it is air-brushed out of pictures when showing the skyline of Pyongyang.” Secondly, he offers up the San Zhi Pods in Taiwan, another seemingly doomed village.
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Most of us are not trained in color theory, and sometimes finding not just one color but a palette of them can be challenging. But Design Seeds lets you search by the actual color tone, or from one of their many palette collections. Even if you aren’t looking to redecorate, the color combos are just pretty to look at and inspirational on their own!
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Jenny sent in this amazing article and photo series about 19th century baby portraits. How do you get a baby to pose on his or her own? Mother is there … but can you find her?
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This one goes out for everyone who, like me, rushes home to see if something I’ve ordered has arrived (and no, it hasn’t): How does your Amazon package reach you?
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My friend Melody sent in this link which she says simply has, “some cool stuff.” Not just cool but awesome – Awesome Pictures from Around the World. I was going to make one of these the feature picture, but it had stiff competition this week!
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It’s not only the soldiers deployed to war who must face the difficulties of it, but their canine counterparts as well. Check out this article exploring how military dogs get their own form of PTSD, and how some very patient owners are helping them rehabilitate.
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Another puppy tale that is especially heartwarming: a photographer uses her talents to help dogs get adopted.
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How could I end 2011 without a Robot Revolution Update? Here are the 14 Best Inventions Using Biomimicry of the past year.
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More links tomorrow! In the meantime send your submissions to FlossyLinks@gmail.com, or drop me a line on Twitter. Have a fun and safe New Year’s Eve!

Don’t live anywhere near New York City, but still desperate to see something – anything – drop during a countdown to 2012 on New Year’s Eve?

We can help. (Well, we can help some of you. You might have to go on a road trip.) Check out these places that have put their own twists on the rather odd tradition of hoisting a random, giant object up in the air to celebrate the beginning of a new year.

Image credit: Matt Smith/Express-Times /Landov

1. A giant Peep in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Peeps’ parent company, Just Born, calls the eastern Pennsylvania town home. Though Peeps come in shapes to suit every holiday these days, the drop is done with a traditional chick that flashes different colors at midnight.

2. A three-foot tall, thirty-pound wooden flea in Eastover, North Carolina. Yeah, it’s a real head scratcher, unless you know that the town was called Flea Hill until the 1920s. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d let that nickname die.

3. A 350-pound electronic Moon Pie in Mobile, Alabama. (more…)

Every week, I comb the internet to bring you strange news stories that you might not otherwise see, and it’s been quite an experience. Some are surely worth another look as we say goodbye to 2011. Here are 20 stories from The Weird Week in Review that were particularly bizarre, funny, or memorable.

20. February: Burglar Has No Luck

Do you ever have those days where everything goes wrong? That’s what happened to an unnamed 19-year-old burglar in Frankston, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. His plan was to rob a bakery while it was closed for the night.

The young man broke into the shop, in the Melbourne suburb of Frankston, through a skylight and landed in a locked store room.

So he tried stacking up a number of containers on top of each other to try and climb out.

But they toppled over, throwing him to the floor.

Then he tried to climb shelves to get out, and they collapsed under him.

He fell to the floor several times, and ended up with a number of cuts and bruises.

When he discovered the security camera, he tried to cover it, but too late: his various falls were caught on camera. He eventually escaped, but when his face was publicized, he turned himself in.

19. April: Last Two Speakers of Ancient Language Not Talking to Each Other

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by Jennifer Drapkin, Kevin O’Donnell and Ky Henderson

They’re not the most beautiful songs, or the most musically important. In fact, a few could literally drive you nuts. But the following tunes—some as old as Mozart, others as current as Beyoncé—have fundamentally altered the world we live in at some point in the last quarter century. They’ve saved lives, brought glory to America, and gotten teenagers to use deodorant. Somehow, they’ve made a difference. So, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the ultimate power playlist. Let the countdown begin!

25. “The Magic Flute” (Mozart)

Music That Makes Sewage Disappear
For all the chatter about how Mozart makes your kids smarter (false!) or how it helps with the SATs (possibly), the one thing that Mozart definitely seems to do is make sludge-eating microbes digest faster. A sewage treatment plant in Treuenbrietzen, Germany, has experimented with different operas, playing them at high volume through loudspeakers set up around the site. “The Magic Flute” seems to work best. Anton Stucki, the plant’s chief operator, believes the reverberations quicken the pace for breaking down refuse. “We think the secret is in the vibrations of the music, which penetrate everything—including the water, the sewage, and the cells,” he says. “It creates a certain resonance that stimulates the microbes and help them work better.” Stucki doesn’t even like opera; he’s a rock ‘n’ roll fan. But he tolerates Mozart because it makes the microbes more efficient, saving the plant up to $1,250 a month.

24. “867-5309/Jenny” (Tommy Tutone)

The Drunk-Dialing Song
For nearly three decades, this single has been a gift to smashed college kids everywhere. Ever since the song was released in 1982, crank callers have been dialing 867-5309 and asking for “Jenny.” People who are unfortunate enough to be assigned the number can look forward to dozens of prank calls a day, depending on where they live.

A few people have managed to turn the digits to their advantage. In 2004, disc jockey Spencer Potter of Weehawken, N.J., discovered 867-5309 was available in his area code and picked it up, thinking it would be good for business. Almost immediately, Potter was overwhelmed by the volume of calls. So in February 2009, he sold it on eBay to Retro Fitness, a health club that felt the digits fit perfectly with its 1980s-nostalgia theme. In the end, Potter made $186,853.09—a number he could live with.

23. “I Will Always Love You” (Whitney Houston)

The Song That Showed Saddam’s Softer Side
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We’ll wrap up the old year with a “chestnut” teaser for today’s Friday Free-for-all challenge at the mentalfloss.com Brain Game. Good luck:

A lady goes to a hardware store to make a purchase.
“They’re only 40 cents each,” the salesman tells her,
so the woman replies, “Great, I’ll need 250.”

The clerk fills her order and informs the customer
“That’ll be $1.20, plus tax” before ringing her up.

How is this possible?

The 5 Questions quiz will see you next in Twenty Twelve. Have a great new year!

A Salute to the Weird World Records Set in 2011. The biggest Afro, the most piercings, the longest tongue, the longest kiss …wait, those last two are not related.
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The Best Local News Bloopers Of 2011. The news is broadcast live every day, but you screw up once and it’s on YouTube forever.
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The top 8 parenting controversies of 2011. Everyone makes mistakes, but throwing common sense out the window will get you on the news.
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The Most Overlooked Movies of 2011. If you didn’t catch them the first time around, they’ll fit in your Netflix queue.
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Will Ferrel has a Spanish-language comedy coming out in March. The trailer for Casa De Mi Padre indicates it will be a festival of stereotypes.
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I only learned today that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1961 film The Birds was inspired by a real incident. And they’ve only now figured out what caused it.
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The 7 Creepiest Abandoned Brothels on Earth. Urban exploration takes a turn for the world’s oldest profession in this photo gallery.
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Speaking of brothels, a new one in Nevada is going to cater to geek tastes. Dennis Hof has enlisted Heidi Fleiss to help develop the sci-fi-themed Alien Cathouse.
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6 New Year Traditions from Around the World. You might want try one out this weekend!
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Happy New Year, everyone!

December 26th wasn’t just Boxing Day; it also marked the first day of the pan-African holiday celebrating African culture known as Kwanzaa. Founded in the mid-1960s by Maulana Karenga, a black studies professor at Cal State Long Beach, this holiday lasts from the day after Christmas through January 2nd. Each of the 7 days is assigned a principle to be honored: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.

Just as Kwanzaa is a relatively new holiday, American TV is relatively new to trying to capitalize on it. We’ve managed to dig up 7 television attempts to incorporate Kwanzaa into holiday programming.

1. Sesame Street Means Double the Kwanzaa

In Season 34, Sesame Street produced a segment in which a child explained the traditions of Kwanzaa and how his family celebrates:

Later in that same season, Elmo showed off a traditional Kwanzaa dance:

2. Even Rugrats Can Celebrate Kwanzaa

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